Do You Have a Job That You Like?

If there is anyone out there that has a job that they like, I want to hear from you!

What is your job, how did you happen to choose this type of work, and what is your work life like?

I'm Going to an Assertiveness Workshop Tomorrow

Voc Rehab has kindly paid for me to go to an Assertiveness Workshop tomorrow. I need this badly. I hope it helps me.

I need to be more assertive around the dumbasses, doofuses, and bozos of the world. And everybody else, too.

I Still Have Ergophobia & It's Delusional

Although I'm working now (up to 30 hours a week), I still have a wide range of ergophobic symptoms that plague me on a pretty much daily basis.

I used to think that it was mainly people with psychotic disorders that were delusional. Well, I have found that I can sometimes be delusional in various states of depression, anxiety, and phobias.

It's probably a delusion that people don't like me.

It's probably a delusion that I'm not particularly good at my job.

It's probably a delusion that everyone can tell when I'm feeling depressed or anxious.

It's probably a delusion that people are deliberately saying things to hurt my feelings.

It's probably a delusion when I tell myself I'm lucky that anyone would even hire me at all.

Your Job is Not Who You Are

A big problem in our society is the erroneous belief that your paid employment somehow defines who you are.

I think many of us buy into this myth, on a conscious or subconscious level, whether we want to or not.

It is hard for many of us to obtain paid employment that reflects who we are inside. Some of us settle for any job, just to survive. Some of us settle for jobs that partially reflect our interests, or partially use our skills and abilities, because that's as close as we could get to what we wanted. There are a lucky few who feel completely at home in their work. I always longed for that feeling. Mostly I only found it outside of paid employment.

In a bad economy, the problems of job mismatch, underemployment, being "overqualified" and work alienation affect vast numbers of people.

One of the factors contributing to ergophobia is the sense of being in the wrong job, and feeling that this makes our life somehow "wrong," and that we are therefore inadequate.

When I find myself feeling that way, I need to remind myself that there is more to me than what I am doing for a living at any given time. My job is not who I am.

"You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."
 -Tyler Durden in the movie "Fight Club"

Fear of Loss of Self in Work

One of my recurring fears relating to work is being afraid that jobs will cause me to lose my self. Let me try to explain.

What this looks like for me: When I spend a fair amount of effort in any kind of repetitive work-like tasks, such as data entry, accounting, database searches, etc., I often feel that my own thoughts are vanquished, and somehow my self, or my me-ness, or identity, is lost.

I then feel like I don't exist during those periods.

I have a hard time returning to my own thoughts and sense of existence and identity after prolonged periods of external work, particularly if the tasks aren't intrinsically interesting to me. I go blank and feel mentally drained, sometimes physically drained also.

It can feel like losing my life a little at a time. Depression feels similarly to me. There's a sense of mental blankness and feeling less than fully alive. I feel like I am "not present."

I don't understand why this happens. Nor have I heard other people describe feeling this way about their jobs.

It's been happening to me again lately, now that I'm working. The more I work, the more I have these detached feelings of unreality. It's a very weird feeling and it's not one I feel I can fully describe or understand. Perhaps I will tell a therapist about this, or try to research what the hell this is.

I Had an Automatic Positive Thought

In cognitive behavioral therapy, I learned about "Automatic Negative Thoughts" or "ANTs", as in "get rid of the ANTs." Examples of Automatic Negative Thoughts would be "If I go to the party, no one will talk to me, and I'll just want to leave," "No one will want to hire me," etc.

Well, the other day I was on the Internet, and came across some article saying that unemployed people over 50 are unemployable. And, guess what? I immediately thought that was bullshit. (After all, I'm over 50, and I got a job this year.)

I had an Automatic Positive Thought! How cool is that?

Fear of Being Evaluated

One of the major contributing factors to my ergophobia is my fear of being evaluated or judged. This includes not only performance evaluations and testing situations, but virtually any situation in which I feel that another person is assessing me in any way.

I feel very self-conscious when I perceive this to be happening. It also worries me. I often think the other person might have inaccurate ideas about me. Sometimes I also am concerned about the other person's accurate perceptions about me: that there may be things about me that could result in their poor treatment of me.

Sometimes I have a strong desire to just disappear or become invisible.