A lot of ifs

*If* my mom didn’t get ill, maybe I wouldn’t have crashed.
*If* I wouldn’t have crashed, maybe I would still be stuck in my HR job.
*If* I would still be stuck in my HR job, maybe I would never have considered going back to teaching.
All this to say that, at this very moment, I’m sooo happy that I lost my job, that I started rethinking my life from scratch, and that I ended up teaching again.
I can honestly say I haven’t felt this good after a day’s work in, let’s say, the last three years. I mean it.
A) I got stuck with the most dysfunctional boss on the planet.
B) I never got thanked or rewarded.
C) As a consequence, my self-confidence was always below zero

An example: even if I managed to recruit the so-called “sheep with five legs” in an overheated job-market, there would still be complaining ‘cause She hated to make time in her planning for contract-negotiations (No, no way she would let me or anybody else do that). Forget “well done”. No, instead She would postpone and postpone making an appointment with foresaid candidate, after which this one would, of course, be of the market by the time She finally called him. Next : an e-mail from the general HR director to ask me why I hadn’t managed to fill in the damn vacancy yet.
I once had the nerve to tell him that it was because She had no time for contract negotiations. Next : full scale war. And guess who the victim was? Right.
This was your daily menu. And I ate it for three years. Now the mere thought of it makes me throw up.

I went into HR to be able to work with people, to help people on their career track. I never had the feeling that I did those things. Maybe only in the beginning when I worked in a temp agency, and got a lot of people their first job – but on a corporate level? Forget it. It was all politics.
Now, I see the difference that I make – instantly, with my own eyes. I get gratitude, loads of it. I get rewarded, not with money, but by seeing that all my efforts are never lost. And my self-confidence? I feel it growing day by day. I’ll never let anyone bring me down like that again. That is...*if* I can keep that promise to myself :-)