I haven’t been updating my blog for a year now because I didn’t feel the motivation to do so and because I didn’t have the room to sort out my thoughts and feelings and properly put them into words these past twelve or so months.
A lot of things happened for the past year. Getting transfered to a new place, getting used to the new living and working environment, getting to know and work with new colleagues, experiencing actual work for the first time, making mistakes, and so much more that basically made me a ball of stress that I feel like I’m losing hair, weight, and sleep.
While it’s certainly something I shouldn’t be complaining about (because having work is better than having nothing to do), it certainly wasn’t something I was happy about. I am grateful for such a nice boss, though. He teaches me a lot from A to Z, but not in a way that he’s spoonfeeding me. I was required to think by myself and do tasks that a normal first year wouldn’t be expected to do. I don’t blame him for that, though. You can only treat people the same way you have been treated before. And I think my boss also experienced the same hardships in the past, which reflected on how he taught me stuff: by learning it the hard way and making the skills my own.
So having to adapt to my surroundings made me busy that I didn’t have the capacity to sit down and reflect on my actions. But this year, work has eventually calmed down (we were literally always in an emergency last year), and now I’m kind of bored…? There are still a lot of things for me to learn, but they seem less interesting than they were before. The more I work the more I find that this job is frustrating. And the more I find that people actually don’t expect much from a female foreigner in the Procurement division.
I’m the type who likes when my own hardwork is recognized by my peers. Sometimes people from my workplace would say a positive thing or two about my work, but for some reason I don’t feel like they’re actually valuing me for my performance. They would usually say stuff like how fluent my Japanese is, or how I can understand things quickly, but that’s about it. It’s not like I could understand a lot of things the moment I was taught. I actually asked a lot of people and did my own research. I actually struggled to understand and do lot of stuff, and it took me a lot of time and effort to get things right, but they bundled it up using the word ‘smart’ and it just makes me sad sometimes.
Actually, I don’t know if the things I just typed out in the previous paragraph made any sense (I make zero sense most of the time anyway), but that’s the way I’m feeling right now. I’ve actually started to wonder whether I should continue down this path (in this company, doing procurement) or whether I should try a totally different field somewhere. This thing has constantly been in my mind for a year now, and it only got worse because one of my senpais quit the company last month. I relied on this senpai a lot because he was also a fellow foreigner who has worked long enough in Japan and could understand the struggles of a foreigner. So having to say goodbye to him dealt a great blow to me. We still get in touch from time to time, but now I couldn’t ask for his opinion or help as much. It made me feel like I was totally left alone now.
Despite my thoughts of wanting to leave the company, I actually have zero ideas about what to do after I quit. I don’t have any ambitions in life or any particular thing that I want to try. I used to want to be in Marketing, but that feeling disappeared after I failed to get a job in one. I’m tired, lost, and underwhelmed. I want a break from life.
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