Greetings from 2022!
How does this new year find you? Are you thriving and growing after a tumultuous 2021? Or, perhaps, you’re feeling stuck in the in the gears of the rapidly changing environment courtesy of the delta and omicron variants of COVID-19?
If anything remains a constant in this unprecedented time, it’s change. It seems every month or two we have new guidance from the CDC and WHO on how to survive COVID-19 and its rapidly emerging variants. It brings with it new policies and behavioral practices, both at home and at work.
Since I last published here on MenPathic, I’ve been having a generally good ride, even if it meant becoming part of the Big resignation this past year.
Since May of 2019, following a move back to the Bay Area from Southern California (where I moved in 2017 for a largely unrewarding but financially beneficial job), I’ve been working for a commercial construction company in San Francisco. My 55-mile commute each way to the office and back was slowly grinding me down when the pandemic hit us like a ton of brinks dropped from a great height. BOOM!
The upside, if there was one in the pre-vaccine COVID-19 era, was that I started working from home (WFH) almost immediately and did so until the day I resigned. After nearly three years with my employer, I didn’t want to resign but I felt I had no choice given my manager’s full-on commitment to ending the WFH flexibility for our team; it wasn’t going to continue as soon as office restrictions were lifted.
That left me, and my MenPathic sensitivities, in a particularly vulnerable position. I’d soon be asked to stop working from my home office and return to the open office setting where the noise, lighting, and the social anxiety of continually feeling like a goldfish in a fishbowl would be a nightmare. It was ridiculous. I was determined to create a solution and keep WFH even it it meant resigning and finding a new job.
After unsuccessfully negotiating with my manager over a period of months—I still can’t believe how short-sighted and narrow his view was—I found a secured a similar position in a new industry that offered me a full-time-remote role and the opportunity to WFH regardless of my geographic location. I resigned during a check-in call with my manager on Microsoft Teams. I emailed him my resignation letter (which clearly staed that his inflexibility in this matter was the sole reason for my departure) and watch as he read it in real time.
I watched as his expression shift from authority to the sudden realization that I’d be departing in 30 days. Not to brag, but with my 17 years of experience in this niche sector, my departure was definitely a loss to the team and to the firm.
That made me part of the Big Resignation, the mass migration of workers that the pandemic brought about when most realized, through our collective WFH status, that the work-life balance we always craved was in fact non-existent or was in supremely sad shape.
I was no longer willing to accept an extrovert’s judgement about what was appropriate for my introverted, MenPathic personality traits. I felt insulted, actually, and though I absolutely hated the idea of no longer interacting with the team members I cherished, I have to make the decision to move on; it was a conscious decision in the direction of more positive mental health, too.
Sometimes we need to put ourselves first
It’s not in a MenPathic’s nature to put himself first instead of others; we live to serve and benefit others, often at the cost of a negative personal impact. But these are no ordinary times and we are no ordinary men.
Our MenPathic superpowers are what sets us apart from our non-MenPathic brothers, and at times they need to become the priority. It’s similar to a flight attendant’s instructions to put on our own oxygen mask first and then assist others in case of cabin depressurization.
As MenPaths, we owe it to ourselves—and those we love—to do the difficult but necessary self-work first so that we can take care of those that mean the most to us.