I left the position at the first job I held after a burnout crisis. This happened due to several factors, the most important being the very toxic culture at the company, but also, my own inability to contextualize the pressure and demands of the position.
On the first day of May (the workers’ holiday) I had been ordered to report to the office after some misdemeanor I can’t remember. I don’t think it was strictly related to my performance but rather, to my general attitude in the company. I was very depressed that morning and considered this a child-like punishment and after I stepped at the office building that day, I decided I wouldn’t be working there anymore. Well, decided is a euphemism. I had no plans, hadn’t seriously thought of a strategy and had no idea what to do next. I just knew I could not stay there any longer.
That I was in distress is easy to say as not many people in Spain leave a job that pays above average without securing another one first. In my country, after an employee is wrongfully terminated, he must be paid 30 days’ salary for each year spent in the company. I’ve been told the burden is on the company to prove the employee’s wrongdoing so, in practice, unless it’s a very clear situation or major offence, firing people in Spain is de facto illegal unless a big compensation is paid.
It’s a common situation where an employee does not want to stay, nor does the company want to keep him, but both are locked in since the compensation is big enough for both sides. Plus, Spain has one of the worst unemployment rates on the EU and finding another position is often challenging for a dismissed employee.
Back to my case, I was giving away a big compensation as I had been working there for 8 years, I was depressed and the future looked grim. I had read about many Americans in such a situation taking a year off and going travelling and soul-searching. My savings wouldn’t allow me to take the whole year off, but at least a couple of months might do me good.
I had a very nice trip and was feeling optimistic by the end of my leisure period. I was riding the last train before arriving back home and reading a book in English. I had decided that from then on, I’d only read in English trying to improve my skills and thus, employability. I was sitting next to a blonde girl who by her looks, had to be a foreigner. She noticed me reading the book and tactfully started a chat. I was glad since it gave me an opportunity to practice English and to be honest, I’d rather do it with a girl.
I can’t remember the conversation but it was pleasant enough until we got to a specific topic; what is really possible for any person to achieve. Not surprisingly, she had a no-compromises American worldview of everything’s possible as long as you apply yourself to the task. Me, however, had a very conservative European (let alone the Spanish case; is even worse) attitude on which a person is limited by his social class, family, country and many other environmental factors. This is to be expected, but we were really struggling to find a middle ground, and that took me by surprise, because I believe I’m good at that. It got to a point where I simplified to reductio ad absurdum and stated that I could not beat Usain Bolt at a 100m race, no matter what, nevermind how much I applied myself to the training. I was tring to find some agreement and work our stances from that on but, to my surprise, she replied that I hadn’t tried so I couldn’t say. I was now really puzzled that we couldn’t even agree on the obvious so I was evaluating possibilities.
I first thought she got upset because she considered the reduction to absurdity a cheap trick and a falacy. Perhaps she thought mine was a defeatist attitude and, despite the obvious argument, she teasing me to check my reaction. Maybe she had the can-do attitude so ingrained that the mere fact of not trying didn’t compute , the same way an MMA fighter does not think on a defeat they all have coming, not to self-sabotage. Or she might have a previous displeasing experience on this topic, but whatever the reason, from then on, the conversation became mundane. By then, we’ve been talking for some hours and my head was spinning from so much English-speaking. I was exhausted and asked her whether we could continue the conversation in Spanish so I could rest, but she flat-out refused.
When our train got to destination, I asked and she gave me her phone number, but in the end didn’t agree to have a date. But to this day I keep wondering what she was thinking about on that Usain Bolt conversation.