Coming Up for Air

I quit my job last month.

One of them, anyway.  And started a new one.

The overwhelming atmosphere of the coronavirus pandemic for me, thus far, has been that I have to keep working.  I have to work just a little bit more.  Because if I don't work enough, people that are under my care will die.  At least that's what I think I was feeling when I look back.  When I was in it, I didn't really feel anything.

This job I quit has always been a little more than I bargained for.  I was never able to fully get on top of things, and always spent more time there than I had budgeted.  Then they had a COVID-19 outbreak and it felt like every minute that I wasn't working was time I wasn't spending getting calories and fluid into people who were too sick and weak to do it themselves. The worst (but maybe best) thing was that I wasn't able to actually be there because of provincial public health rules, so I felt like I was just guessing a lot of the time. I lost touch with a lot of things and people during those months.

Then this windfall job fell in my lap.  I had applied for it months ago and not heard anything so I wrote it off.  Even after I was interviewed over the phone, I had no inkling as to whether I had got the job or not.  Anyway, it's mine now, and I left my time-suck position with some degree of relief and a significant amount of guilty feelings.  But then, I had to train my replacement, orientate at the new job full time on weekdays, and somehow complete my other contract obligatons on evenings and weekends (which, thankfully, the privelege of working remotely allowed me to do).  It was like running a marathon only to realize at the finish line that there's a pack of wolves behind you and safety is another 3 miles away.

The new job: it is not a dream job.  No guaranteed hours and a pretty big cut to my hourly wage.  But it has potential to grow into more.  And right now it comes with something I've felt like I haven't had in months...maybe even years.  Time.  

For the first time in I-don't-know-how-long I don't feel like every day is a race to cram in as many things as possible and hope I don't miss anything or have to delay anything important because there were too many important things.  It feels like I've been holding my breath for a year and I'm finally breathing again.