Me and my latest job application

How the job market makes me feel like an out of practice excessively anxious singleton

I had to write this post while my tummy was still high, in a neutral-glycemic kind of way, on my first home-made hummus which I had in a sandwich of cucumber, soft leafy lettuce, two Linda McCartney sausages, a small teaspoon of Tesco Finest onion chutney, and a slick of full fat mayonnaise.

Ooh man, I made a good one. It will be a future party pleaser.

And while I waited to hear back from a recruiter, as they said they would get back to me, letting me know how I got on as a candidate for a job. The same day I emailed to them a key inclusion of the application process. Also the day they said they’d need it.

So as the paragraph above suggests, I am engaging in the job market again in a way that feels much more substantial and promising. And I have been since the start of February in a way that suggests by my mood swings that I feel part of the world again. And yet, the steps are baby steps in amongst making sure I get enough fibre into my diet and the piano sees me at least twice a week.

You see, as soon as I had sent off the CV Tuesday of two weeks ago, my IBS-like symptoms settled in even though I practice good breathing these days. Psoriasis bloomed on my forehead slowly, right up until Friday, after I had completed the key milestone in the application. And also because, yay it was Friday!

I have hesitated to write this piece, I even have had a previous demo version of it in the draft section of this website for ages, but I didn’t know how to make it readable and without the look of someone who is still stuck in hyper-victim mode or solely berating the system it describes without much of a triumphant moment or light at the end of the tunnel included.

Or whether journalistically-speaking due to my description of the more tangible bygone elements of the story fading would fail to qualify the emotions I felt at the time.

I also eventually don’t want to have to be writing about this stuff anymore.

You see, I was listening to Emma Gannon’s Ctrl Alt Delete Podcast on Acast Sunday morning while I was putting away clean clothes into my wardrobe.

Emma Gannon, who is an English journalist, has the aformentioned podcast where she interviews women and gives us a short straight-to-the-point insight into their creative process or the motivation for their latest project. I tapped play on her episode with Cate Sevilla. I had known the pair for their time working for The Pool, an online women’s feminist magazine started in 2015, which I was sad for when the magazine had collapsed in early 2019 because it was a magazine that presented female journalists who have a slightly less lean-in/Sheryl Sandberg view of feminism and certainly enjoyed Gannon’s work for it at the time.

Cate, who was editor-in-chief of The Pool, was on in this episode to talk about her latest book ‘How to Work Without Losing Your Mind’ which in the intro Emma described as ‘’a guide to those messy, stressful, sometimes really bizzare and odd days when you’re at work and you don’t know how to get through it.’’

When I was listening to the episode, I was imagining this particular Sunday of mine as some sort of last chapter in my first volume in the journey of me overcoming some very large and personal struggles in my career and my engagement with the workplace.

I think my engagement and learnings of how to deal with the workplace is my personal cinematic journey, which will help me have a more fulfilling personal life. We all have those cinematic journies.

Cate also dives into the whole notion of bringing our full self to work. She affirms we are messy and mixed and that when companies say in that clichéd way, ‘We Are a Family’, they don’t actually mean that and only really mean the superficial elements of what it means to bring the full self to work. And she says the system is too big to be really able.

So she suggests: be you-lite! And it is up to us to figure out where that line is.

I bet we all 8 billion people on planet Earth have the potential to write our own handbooks of what we want the workplace to look like, so perhaps to bring the full self to work is not possible. There’s too much scope and a myriad of interactions with actual fellow human beings.

But we also invented electricity. So…

This moment on Sunday came on the back of a very triggering interview I had on Tuesday. In the interview I performed well, throwing back the job advertisement to the two-person interview panel saying that I liked variety in my job, and I promised to deliver so much to the role as my previous experience allowed.

During the interview, it felt like I was a single person who had been out of what is the dating game of the jobs market for a long while. And in the days after it while I was completing the key submission, which was requested during the interview. Old workplace and teamwork triggers reared their ugly heads and I still felt quite ameteur in judging what was a red flag in this particular process, and what was completely OK to be involved in as a job candidate.

To sound like Carrie Bradshaw: was I, in moments while I worked on the submission, excessively talking myself out of a worthwhile opportunity that would get me over the line and set me up for a long and prosperous career or was I right to be doubtful of the match of the environment of the workplace to my particular personality and mental health state, hopes, dreams, and natural abilities?

I completely understand that all ships need to be sailing to full potential in order that we run our businesses to good fortune. I would want that too if I ran my own. I still think I could make a good shot at being in a covers band or release of my own capsule line of mix & match themed culotte/palazzo pants and t-shirt combo outfits for all shapes and sizes.

And being at their side of the jobs market, the employer has the perogative to run recruitment campaigns the way they so choose. I am the candidate, I am there to prove myself.

A job’s a job. An independent source of income is an independent source of income.

But as a candidate, I also think you have the right to be able to judge red flags in a recruitment process whether you’re tweny years in a career or 2.

My husband was a great help when he had some downtime during the week while I tried to calmly communicate how I was getting on with it. He took the side of the situation rather than cushioning me in excessive cotton wool and encouraged me to give the application my best shot. Nor was he willing me to reach for the requirements of the prospective employer all the time both during the application and in different situations I predicted for the role if I was hired- as the role got described in real-time by the interviewers away from the carefully crafted job advertisement.

I would like to talk to you openly about the old workplace and teamworking triggers that occured in my life.

Firstly, I made a huge mistake on the job in my favourite factory and had not yet mastered how to own up to my own mistakes. When my two male supervisors came up to me to inquire, my body language was already defensive and defeatist at the same time. I even had a tiny little water works moment which was both sincere and dialed-up at the same time. I concluded my side of the story at the time with something like “I just don’t know what happened” delivered with a sort of a shrinking violet tone of voice.

All that came to me in my head at the time was “you’re still a week-to-week agency worker. Don’t make it look like the fault is with you.” This was my warped response to the situation. It was my warped psychological response to tutors in my journalism masters when I didn’t perform well on key exercises in the semester.

I also remember in my last factory doing something that I usually did in my first month in a new factory. I sped up too fast for what I believed was my natural novice pace to the targets designed for that particular clean room, in my fearful people-pleasing way. I got rave reviews from production coordinators. I also had a chance to celebrate the win with a woman I had started with there that I knew from my very first factory. We had a lovely Go Women moment.

As the last week or so came to pass, my speed plateaued, and I still hadn’t gotten consistent greens on the computer screens very publicly displayed high up on the wall at their matching production cells around the clean-room floor.

I was one of those factory workers who liked the career for the lack of facing customers in performing it’s duties like how I had to when I was a recruitment administrator. And to be able to work with my hands. I now know that this is not enough for the industry as it is today. Perhaps I should just stick to the sewing hobby.

So I just predicted that if I was to succeed in the job and it’s application, that these were some of the demons that I needed to be rid of as soon as possible.

I also had, I think my 4th, weekly therapy session with Let’s Get Talking Galway last Wednesday.

I told my therapist about the interview and my triggers. As the session came to a close I asked her if it looked like I was on any neurodivergent spectrum. She said that nothing was flagging up for her that suggested I was. She said I have a social anxiety around not being able to predict what the management function of a workplace could throw at me.

I also asked about comfort zones at some point. She said to step outside of a comfort zone is very different from person to person, and sometimes, getting out of a comfort zone once a week is enough. I think it was how emotionally exhausted and introverted I felt in the day after my first face-to-face interview in a long time, seeing in my mind, the duties of the role accumulated out by a year ahead of me, and how I wanted to give myself permission to postpone a phonecall that was ahead of me that week.

I don’t think my husband would mind, but myself and himself are very much the agnostic duo of our familial and friendship gangs. As most people say in conversation when they describe agnosticism, I don’t believe in a towering man with a grey beard.

I don’t like giving money or being a Trump-inauguration-attendance-reports-inaccuracy bum-on-a-seat to a registered charity of the Catholic Church that looks like it has plenty of money already. Who has wronged the LGBTQ+ and female members of society.

Nor do I think you can chalk up a beautiful flower to pure science and stay bitter at a church and insult members who are your closest family and friends when you share some church time with them at an anniversary mass or wedding. Save the hushed anti-church pub jokes for the hotel bar after the ceremony. The proseccos are on me!

But the day I listened to this podcast episode felt spiritual and it felt like because I had begun to be able to finally chat with recruiters about my suitability for a role in the field where finally, Katherine Will Be Doing God’s Work, the universe let me know the book existed and was there for me when I most needed it. It was one of many weights off my shoulder.

More on those weights. I like to think that I have much of the grieving done in not being in the medical device industry anymore, any awkwardness I put my colleagues through, and for all the sad and upsetting moments that happened for me in it. But I need to say the following to illustrate my point.

In the last factory, the clean room I worked in had two night-shift supervisors, and right from the get-go, one of them was broadcast (away from the induction provider’s ears) as a cruel man from the mouths of the rehires of the factory to us newbies. I, luckily, by structure of the recruitment process was placed under supervision of the ‘nicer’ of the two. But as my time in the factory emassed he was the more submissive Meh (Good) Cop to the former’s Utterly Camp Drama Queen Roald Dahl Matilda’s Mrs Trunchbull (Bad) Cop.

In the clean room I was asigned to, the management structure couldn’t seem to organise itself, and too often the two supervisors would need to swap over which overarching umbrella set of product lines they would need to supervise for the forseable future. This felt utterly unstabling to me and I feared the day that I would be supervised by the Bad Cop.

He would pull staff aside but concurrently with a lack of dignity in the way they stood in the room and openly criticize individual staff for being a minute back late to work after break, which in istelf became an ever increasingly strictly timed aspect of our day. He would also loom and hover over production operators for more minutes than was necessary and watch them complete their work if they had fallen behind on targets or suddenly made too many mistakes.

Insert a Sienfeld-esque joke about capitalism and some slap bass here!

And as time wore on, the Good Cop would slowly open up his more cutting side in giving critique to us when all ships were not sailing well at all times. It felt to me that in management board room meetings away from us, the Good Cop submitted to the suggestions of new management techniques that the Bad Cop might have said in these rooms.

They were high targets with work that was increasingly intricate the more skills you had developed as deemed by your trainer. Some who would also mimic too closely the culture mapped out by the supervisors. I had trained people in the past quite well, both as a computer tutor to the over 50s and in a previous operator role.

It felt like you had to already be a seasoned gym bunny to work well in this factory.

The whole thing felt like being in a gaslighting relationship where first, the open 24 hours Starbucks kiosk and the tick-boxing anti-conflict workshops told you this was a professional place. But where all the anti-conflict work of the relationship lay at the foot of the employee and the management cohort would increase their demands daily and weekly.

The Citizen’s Information website provides a definition of bullying in the workplace as repeated inappropriate behaviour that undermines your right to dignity at work.

They list forms of bullying as:

• Social exclusion and isolation
• Verbal abuse and insults
• Being treated less favourably than colleagues in similar roles
• Belittling a person’s opinion
• Spreading malicious rumours, gossip or innuendo
• Intrusion — pestering, spying or stalking
• Intimidation and aggressive interactions
• Excessive monitoring of work
• Withholding information needed for the person to perform their job properly
• Repeatedly manipulating a person’s job contents and targets
• Blaming a person for things beyond their control
• Use of aggressive or obscene language
• Other menacing behaviour

I wonder if I am right in saying I spot my triggers as the role got described in real-time by the interviewers and previous work moments in the list above. Genuinely.

This piece I write does not yet include the solutions in how we change the architecture of management structures in workplaces that I crave, but it certainly illustrates the demons I hope not to be stuck in a rut with when I engage in my new potential workplace.

My therapist says she is helping me in our next session this Wednesday to tackle my me-to-management conversations and my workplace over-thinking in a much more constructive manner. Finally, I am dealing with my hypersensitivity in the workplace.

So while the working world might not yet be the eutopia we all need to satisfy our gestalt and other positive mental states- whatever that looks like from person to person- here’s hoping the book is as good as it sounds. I reckon I will invest a little into Cate Sevilla’s book with the money I do have as soon as I finish typing this.

In one job application in a lifetime of job applications I will be making until the day I retire, I feel so lucky that I listened in to a podcast at what felt like another significant and pivotal time in my life.