Career Post: Being True To Myself... At Work

For a long time, part of my struggle was leaving the house. No, I wasn't agoraphobic. I had no trouble going to the market... okay, sometimes I was too tired. But it wasn't the act of leaving the house. It was schedules. Repetition. I couldn't handle the normal work schedule. Those jobs never suited me. They didn't work out, one way or the other.

It was in undergrad (which I finished online from home) that I started working from home again. I'd dabbled in it before doing customer service jobs and the like, but those weren't really up my alley, either. Instead, I needed to both work from home and be true to myself and my inner goddess. This was going to be hard. As it turned out, it was also well worth it.

I found small, freelance gigs where I could write. I have always been a writer. I love journaling. I was a news reporter and editor for my school paper for three years. I always excelled in writing assignments and English courses. It's my thing, and I chose to embrace it much the way an artist embraces their Etsy shop and so forth. Words are my art.

Of course, writing small pieces about auto parts or psychological disorders was not my dream. But it was a start. People were paying me to write their website content. Sure, the pay wasn't great, and I likely would've made far more starting out of college working in an office somewhere doing the 9-5 grind, but that wasn't going to sit well with my soul.

Those small writing gigs eventually turned into slightly larger ones working on travel pieces and city guides. I love travel and cities. So, that worked out alright, but I still wasn't doing anything that I wanted to brag or boast about. Then I was hired by a company that handles the advertising content for the majority of all addiction and mental health treatment centers in the world. Yeah, that felt like responsibility. But I was ecstatic at the beginning. I was excited to have what I finally deemed to be a real career with a solid and recognized Fortune 500 company - and the pay was far better, too.

I still got to work from home, and I was writing content so fast my fingers ached at the end of the day. It was worth it, or so I thought. As time drug on, I realized many times that my editor would check in with me about certain things I'd written wanting corrections. No big deal, right? Writers make errors, and sometimes it's not necessarily an error, but the company just wants a different take on the content and needs you to alter the meaning behind your work. I tried not to take that personally.

But what I did take personally was how often I was asked to alter things that I wrote with full disclosure. In a nutshell, they didn't want that. They didn't want transparency. They wanted me to paint a perfect picture of their treatment model that encouraged clients who were struggling with illnesses and addiction to come pay for their facility to make them further dependent on drugs while not doing much to treat their illnesses.

I turned my back on this for a long time. I had to earn a living. We'd left our hometown and were living in a house that cost four times as much as the one in our hometown had each month. On top of bills, we were planning on another child, or two, or ten. It would be irresponsible to walk away from a good-paying job just because I was unhappy with it. So what, right? Tons of other people are in the same predicament, and their jobs don't allow them to be home with their kids. What did I have to complain about?

Plenty! I morally, ethically and spiritually disagreed with the very core of what I was being paid to do. I wasn't being true to myself at all! I was earning a living and doing what society expected of me, but at what price? While I was encouraging others with mental illness to put their trust in people who shouldn't be trusted, my mental wellness was falling by the wayside. I was tired every day. I kept struggling with writer's block. The words just wouldn't come to me the way they used to. My editor complained more than once that some of my work wasn't fluid or lacked substance.

That's because I'd checked out. I was done with that job long before I actually left it. Sadly, I never even considered leaving it behind before my partner told me it was okay to do so. He supported me finding another job, even if it meant it didn't pay as well. I look back on that now and wonder why I felt I needed his approval to take charge of my own happiness. I no longer let myself think that way.

So, I did just that. I found a new job, and it has been the biggest blessing in my life next to my family. I started working for BabyGaga almost a year ago, and it has been so transformative for me. I get to speak out about the perils of the birth community — something near and dear to my heart. No one tries to silence me or tells me to rewrite it. I get to share my knowledge of the risks that individuals with MTHFR (like myself and many with PMDD) face when using certain drugs and vaccines. No one tries to silence me. I get to advocate for women who want control over their birth experiences and need the male-dominated medical field to stay the hell out of their way. No one tries to silence me. I also get to write about PMDD, progesterone intolerance, the risks of birth control and much more... and... you guessed it! No one tries to silence me!

I'm allowed to be me y'all! And I get paid to do it. This is what I call being true to myself at work. This is where I belong. I don't get paid as much as I did when I was churning out implied lies for an industry I had no faith in after seeing it up close, but I get so much more from the work that I do. The words flow effortlessly. In two hours, I have a freshly-written 3,000 word article at my fingertips and it's mine, with my name on it. I'm proud of that. I have garnered such a following in birth and women's communities. Parents have sought me out to help them research important decisions for their children. I am filled with so much joy that the money cannot compare. I would've laughed in your face if you'd told me back then that a year later I'd have 33 million people reading my work.

It's a career like this that has helped to give me back my mojo. My drive. The energy I needed to jump back into this blog and keep spreading awareness. I know I would not be where I am today on this journey to overcome PMDD without having switches gears and left my toxic and stressful prior job in the past. I have so many irons in the fire now. So many things I want to do with all of this creative energy. This blog is just one of them. I hope you'll stay tuned for the rest. You can read my work at BabyGaga here.

Love,
Danielle