Remember the letter-writer who lied to their boss and said they attended a meeting when they really hadn’t (#4 at the link)? Here’s the update.
Thanks so much for publishing my question, and for your commenters’ advice along with your own. I do have an update on this, although ultimately the meeting didn’t matter as much as my overall performance. My boss wanted confirmation that it was being handled, not so much that I had met with the person. But, as I mentioned in the comments, this was part of a larger pattern. My performance had started to slip due to my husband’s layoff, my career transition earlier in the year, the first anniversary of my father’s death, and the holidays in connection with his death more generally end of last year. I had also taken on some work after hours from a friend to make ends meet due to the layoff. It had been a terrible year, and I was suffering from more burnout than I was willing to believe. I hadn’t informed my manager of my mental health struggles up to this point — she knew about my husband’s layoff, but not about anything else — so my mistakes piled up over the month, culminating in a sloppy work product for a bigger project that I pushed through out of anxiety over being potentially late. This further culminated in a teary 1-on-1 with my boss where I finally let her in on what had been going on.
My manager and I were able to begin working towards improving my performance, but some bumps remained. Looking back, I was very concerned with it as reflecting poorly on my work and work ethic, but there was also a training piece to this — I have a fairly complex job that has a lot of very different processes, and in retrospect, I both should have received more training on some processes and asked more for more support when it came to the project I really stumbled on. I had a misplaced feeling that I should have “gotten it” by now (that was thankfully corrected by my manager) and a tendency on the part of my boss to be pretty hands-off that made me hesitant to ask for help. My department is fairly new, so I think it was a learning experience both for me and my boss.
Unsurprisingly, too, a big portion of this was facing up to the mental health piece, and I sought and found a good treatment for my depression, which was massively feeding into my selective attention and overwhelm. But another piece of this was realizing that I maybe didn’t like my job all that much to begin with. This job was a huge pivot for me after spending seven years in the same (toxic) field. My interim solution to the toxicity of my previous work was “take something that you DON’T care about in roughly the same field” … which backfired, sticking me in a job that was basically adjacent to my previous position with a lot of the same problems.
So I ended up quitting my current position for a new job! I am starting a position that’s a little more in line with my competencies and interests, with a not-insignificant pay bump (enough that I don’t feel like I have to take on anything extra while my husband is still job searching, which has helped ease my burnout). It is, thankfully, only tangentially related to my old field. I’m still figuring out how to do something I’m passionate about without becoming fully enmeshed with my job, however, which will be a longer process. I’m learning to not see my mistakes as complete failures, and I’m learning to ask for help more readily with the expectation that help will be offered rather than scorned.
I appreciate all of the thoughtful comments and your advice!
