I feel like I’ve made the wrong decision for my career and the consequences may not be the easiest to meander through. I don’t want to talk about the details – I can’t, because, obviously, I’m still working there – but the general perspective I have is that I went from an easy contract to an overly-stressful full-time role. Maybe full-time employment isn’t the route for me? We’ll see over the next few weeks how this goes.

I think it will be better to be fired than quit.

I am enduring a substantial amount of stress, much more than I believe I would normally have as a full-time employee, and especially not as a contractor. I believe a substantial portion of that is because the trainers eagerly want us to start taking phone calls, to the point where they forget that they’re bombarding us with eight hours of information, which wouldn’t be that bad except management needs us to fill out paperwork and do things that we can’t do while in training. Do we work for free to get everything done? How much is too much? At what point will my threadbare stress shine through and I’ll make a mistake about how I communicate? At what point will the stress they’re throwing at us be too much? I have disabilities to maintain, and no amount of money is worth the stress that made me feel that my body was shutting down enough to require half of an Ativan to fix. That wasn’t the stress of normal everyday work. That was the stress evoked by people that, when I said that I was feeling anxious about something to my manager, where there was no response from my manager of empathy, proves to me that this isn’t a great job. It might parade itself as being one, but the people aren’t great, so the job isn’t great.

My old job was great in that the work was so laid back.

I didn’t leave work feeling overwhelmed and uninspired to do anything. Maybe this sensation will calm down once I start taking phone calls? I just wish they would take a chill pill over me. They probably don’t care since they can easily replace me, so there’s no concern over if I can’t survive even the training alone. This reminds me of years ago when I had a similar experience. I couldn’t even make it out of training before quitting that contract. Will it be similar here? If so, how will I bounce back into other work? I can’t return to my previous job since they already hired my replacement. The most I could do is pick up the pieces of where I left this job at and see if I can find other work. Does this mean no work is long-term suitable for me? I don’t need long-term work, since I want my work to be writing, and I feel like I can do it, but short-term, I need the money, and longer-term work would make my bank account more comfortable.

I’ll give it another five days before deciding more seriously.