Event #5: Self-Chosen Demotion

Throughout Jim’s hospitalization and in-home rehabilitation, I continued to try to keep up in my new role at work.  Once Jim went back to work, things became a bit more manageable, but soon a whole new set of stressors set in.

I was given the opportunity to take Six Sigma training to become a Green Belt.  I felt at the time like I needed to say yes to the offer because everybody who was anybody at the company had Six Sigma training.  I believe the training was to last a month (my memory is a bit foggy), with a full week of all-day, in-class training during the final week.  The expectation was that we would keep up with our regular full-time jobs on top of the training.  One of my colleagues had the good sense to say no to the offer because she could see that the work load would be insane.  I, however, did not have this foresight.

Simultaneously with the Six Sigma training, I was in charge of leading the writing efforts for our department’s part of an NDA submission for an oncology drug.  Things started going crazy then.  It was the final week of Six Sigma training.  I was in the all-day training class when suddenly I was called out to attend an “emergency meeting” with the project manager for the submission.  The sky was falling, apparently.

They kept asking me what my “strategy” was for writing the submission documents.  I had already made a few attempts to explain that the strategy would be that so-and-so would write Document Number 1 and so-and-so would write Document Number 2 (and so on) and that Documents 1 through ∞ would be delivered by such-and-such a date.  Each iteration of my “strategy” was more in depth than the last, with expanded timelines detailing review cycles and identifying reviewers, etc.  Apparently, in their eyes, this did not constitute a “strategy”.  I continued to try to understand what it was they were asking me to give them.  I even went so far as to look up the word “strategy” in Webster’s Dictionary.  In case you are curious, most definitions have to do with the conduct of warfare.  The closest definition I could find relating to accomplishing a goal was, “a careful plan or method; a clever stratagem.”  Now, for the word “stratagem”…its definition, as it relates to anything other than warfare is, “a cleverly contrived trick or scheme for gaining an end; skill or ruses in trickery.”  Aha!!!  No wonder I could not deliver what they wanted.  I do not know how to TRICK anybody!  Was that really what they were asking me for?  I preferred the “careful plan or method,” definition, which was what I thought I had delivered a gazillion times already!

Being the kind of person who wants to please my superiors, I was devastated at being seemingly incapable of performing my job at anything less than a superb level.  The stress of this failure began to weigh heavily on me.  All other challenges I faced in this new role seemed tangible.  They were things to which I could apply logic and eventually overcome.  This “strategy” challenge was intangible.  I could not solve an equation to fix it.  There was no computer program I could master that would allow me to produce what they wanted.  I felt at a loss.  And meanwhile, the feeling of a crisis, as it related to the behavior of my project manager and superiors continued to increase.  A breaking point was approaching.

I was at the same time completely stressed out and spiraling into a depression.  One day, in the midst of this misery, I was sitting at my desk and an email popped up.  The title was simply a person’s name.  Experience told me that emails of this sort almost never contained good news.  The person’s name in this case belonged to one of our vendor partner writers.  I had worked with this person on several projects and had come to feel fond of him.  I considered him a friend.  His voice reminded me of my brother’s voice.  I apprehensively opened the email.  The message said that he had been killed in a traffic accident during his commute home the evening before.  I was stunned. The weight of everything came crashing down on me.  Right there, in the middle of our "integrated work space", I held my face in my hands and wept.  

All of a sudden everything seemed so stupid.  All of the striving.  All of the stress.  All of the late nights to meet deadlines.  The tenuousness of life was made abundantly clear to me that day.  It was then that I realized life is too short to spend most of my time obsessed with empty pursuits that failed to feed my soul.

The next week I told my manager I wanted to step down and return to my previous role.

On July 1, 2017, I was officially reinstated to my previous position.  I had maintained my promotion for all of 10 months.  The sting of failure permeated my being, but I was determined to remember the lesson I had learned about the value of life and the value of tending to my soul.  I would now turn my attention to the pursuit of inner peace and contentment.