Untitled

An untitled post once again befalls me.

Where do I see myself in a couple of years? Where work fills my time — and it fills nearly all of it now — I find myself taking an unplanned holiday. The official reason is that I’ve earned it. The real reason is that the work has been taking a mental toll on me, and I needed to step away before I stopped noticing that it was.

Ever since the passing of my immediate superior, the workplace has passed his duties down to me. I should probably be thankful they’re not expecting the full brunt of it — not yet, anyway. Right now it’s mostly the management of the unit: schedules, approvals, the small daily decisions that keep eleven people pointed in roughly the same direction. But who’s to say they won’t demand more in the future? The phrase “interim” has a way of quietly dropping off paperwork.

Almost two months in and I’m already taking a mental break. To be fair, I never once said I’d be better at this than he was. But it had become de facto that I would be his replacement were he to have made it to his retirement five years from now. That was the unspoken arrangement. Nobody asked me if I agreed to it.

Is it fair to say that I’m not entirely thrilled at the prospect of being anybody’s boss? I’ve never once, at any point in my life, set out to order anyone around. But the work culture has me doing exactly this, and it is completely alien to me. To give orders — and what’s worse, the expectation to give orders — is so far outside anything I ever envisioned for myself that I cannot help but laugh at the situation. Here I have eleven people looking up to me for decisions, as though I should have answers ready, as though what I say carries the weight of gospel.

And then there are the personalities. Eleven of them. Some who take direction without question. Some who need to understand the reasoning before they’ll move. Some who have been here longer than I have and see no reason why I should be the one telling them anything. Managing the work is one thing. Managing the people — their friction, their expectations, the unspoken politics of who respects whom — that is something else entirely.

Where do I see myself in the future? Certainly not here. The cultural expectation for me to step up, to fill a role that was never mine, that I never sought — it almost makes me want to drop everything and leave.