Better in 2024: April

It's been a very strange month, with much going on at work and at home and with three seasons' worth of weather. But, for a change, April has felt like it was truly a month long, and I was not terribly surprised to find it the last Monday of the month today. As per usual, it's time for my monthly One Little Word check-in, with thanks to Carolyn for hosting our monthly link-ups.

Earlier in the month, I focused on the very physical side of Better -- namely feeling like my normal self after going through cetirizine withdrawal. I knew to expect the extreme itchiness, but I wasn't truly prepared to feel just generally off or for the anxiety that feeling would cause. Once I realized what was going on, though, I felt less stressed and was able to focus on the slight improvements each day brought. And it was a huge relief to wake up last weekend, having slept enough and woken feeling like myself again.

That wasn't the only lesson I got from Better this month. I don't think I've mentioned it on the blog in any detail, but there's been a lot of upheaval at work in the last several months. Late last summer, HR completed a long project of completely reorganizing all the job classifications at the university so that there would be fewer of them overall and so that there'd be wider applicability of a given job classification across many different areas (given the size of the university, you can imagine what a huge job that is). This is a project that has been in the works for years but one that apparently didn't have enough checks and balances worked into it because when I learned my new job classification, I discovered that -- without any input from my, my supervisor, or anyone I work with directly -- I'd essentially been demoted to a job that required total supervision and only a high school diploma, which was even a step below the job description when I was originally hired 18+ years ago. On top of that, at the end of last month, the head of my unit reorganized the entire office, moving my supervisor and me to a different section of it, and issued a mandate that everyone in the office should be there in person an average of two or three days a week. The job classification issue has been top of mind for me for months, and with the full support of my supervisor, we've been working with the powers that be to have it changed. But the in-person mandate was a complete surprise to me, and not a good one. I am much more productive working at home, when I don't have the distractions of the office around and can start early or work late if I need to because I'm already at my computer and can work it in around whatever I'm doing at the house. There's also the matter of being able to pick Mo up from school in the middle of the afternoon, which I couldn't do if I were in the office. So where does Better come up in all of this? Let's just say that this whole situation has made me feel frustrated, unappreciated, and (quite frankly) used by my employer, and thus I've felt a need to be Better about speaking up for myself. Although the benefits of this job are good, the pay has always been, quite bluntly, crap, and while I generally enjoy my job (because I'm darn good at it), there are always other options out there. I know for a fact that my office would get a lot worse off if I wasn't there to catch and correct the mistakes, and there's some power in that. The future is still murky, but I am feeling better about things after having made my opinions known.

And now, speaking of work, I have a ton of it to get to. Hope your week is off to a good start and it's been a good month for your One Little Word!