Headaches and Heartaches

Trying to stay positive when you're filled with negative emotions is downright hard to do.

It knocks the wind right out of your sails. It raises you up to the level of your expectations and then it drops you. Hard.

It's being on the top of your game. Good at what you do. Proud of everything you've accomplished. Expecting praise. (At least.) Expecting a good outcome.

It's a conversation from last year. If you want to be the best, you've got to work for it. Show us you want it. Prove yourself. We need more, if you want more.

Words that motivate you to rise to the next tier. To take on more challenges. To extend yourself to the farthest that you can go. To reach for a silver cup. To go for that gold.

It's giving them what they've asked for. What they said they needed to break you through that glass ceiling you've been trying to break through for years.

And it's realizing that all of it. Every word was just an empty blanket. A filler in of time. False motivation. Inaccurate information.

Maybe I'm the fool.

A fool raised with the belief that hard work, commitment and honesty are the backbone of advancement and achievement.

I pushed myself so damn hard last year. To be one of the very best. To prove that I was worth more to the bottom line.

But the bottom line is this. You can take number one. And you can still be handed a pile of shit.

Congratulated and disappointed all at once. Staggering with the wonder of how it all turned out to be not worth the effort that you gave. The hours of overtime. The extra assignments you gave yourself. The job you did to the best level of your ability times two.

I'm disappointed.

Disappointment however has nothing on the disillusionment I'm feeling. The taken for a ride and left off in the middle of nowhere field I've found myself standing in.

And I have to ask myself this question, in a time and place where job security and the need to bring home a paycheck to support my family is of a higher value than my personal satisfaction with my employer.

To stay is to accept at face value the dishonesty of empty words. To allow bad behavior to go unchecked. To go against the moral fiber of everything I was brought up to believe, and the value system I've been putting into place for my daughter ever since she was born.

To leave however is fraught with uncertainty in a time, in an area, in an economy that cannot promise to do any better than what I've got now.

And for a moment. This moment. This three o'clock in the I can't sleep morning moment that is my life, there are absolutely no answers.

Just questions.