I'm the problem, it's me?

I’m having capital-F Feelings today. The 2am anxiety made an appearance (have to say I haven’t missed it in these 4 months of being jobless). Two things triggered it: reading Kristi Coulter’s excellent memoir of working at Amazon Corporate for 10+ years and finding out a trial task I did for a potential part-time job was not what they were looking for.

A good read, but difficult

Let’s unpack that. First, Coulter’s memoir Exit Interview starts in 2006, so it’s contemporaneous with my career at Microsoft which started in 2002 and ended in Oct 2023 with some breaks in between. She writes extensively about Seattle, but also about internal politics, being a woman in a tech company (sexism, shocking), and the feeling of always being “behind” in your work and never being able to catch up. I am familiar with all of these things. Probably wasn’t a great read just before bed. I can feel my heart racing while I’m reading. I should abandon it as it’s too close for comfort but I feel oddly compelled to finish it too.

Second, I was super excited about a trial to do some marketing technical writing, which would have been a job less than 5 hours a week. Enough to learn something new and stay in the game, but not impact my primary role right now as mom-Uber and homeschool project manager. Unfortunately the piece I turned in was not what they wanted.

Writing is an art, and marketing is something I don’t have a lot of experience with, so it was a possibility that I would “fail” this test. But most frustrating for me is that I don’t know HOW I would have written that piece differently. I understand they needed someone who could hit the ground running (there’s another lovely corporate phrase) and time to learn was not part of the deal. Intellectually I know this job is not a good fit for my skills. But the perfectionist overachiever in me is sad. I worked hard on that draft and felt good about what I submitted. To be worlds apart on the outcome is…rough.

But a great analogy came to me last night as I lay awake. I’ve struggled with body image since I was a teenager. I remember trying on clothes and despairing that the junior sizes never fit right. And thinking that trying a larger size was admitting defeat. One piece of advice I heard from a stylist changed my whole mindset, but only in my early 40s. “It’s not you, it’s the clothes.”

Clothing is mass produced cheaply. It has to fit an infinite number of body shapes in the same size, and it mostly…doesn’t. This isn’t a personal flaw with my body or inability to diet “enough”. It’s that many clothes aren’t made for my shape. And that’s not MY FAULT. After I realized that, I stopped letting CLOTHES make me feel bad about myself. I sought out (too many!) clothes that actually fit me and that I feel good when wearing them.

In this same way, some jobs are going to be a good fit and some aren’t. It doesn’t mean I’m inherently terrible at project management, process improvement, writing, or designing technology. It means *that one job* is not a good fit for me.

And how many times did I come to that conclusion during my career, where the job turned into something that no longer suited me - boring-ass project or heartbreaking feature cuts, new management, stagnant skills or career growth? To be pedantic, at least 8 times, maybe more. That shit happens. Jobs change. We change. It’s not a reflection of our worth.

But that’s where my head goes first - the problem must be me. No it’s not. It’s the job. I’m going to feel my feelings a little, then I’m moving on. But I don’t know if I can finish reading Exit Interview because it actively stresses me out. Have you read it? What did you think?