I recently started a new job that, while being the exact sort of change I needed in my life, was also a massive transition for me personally. It changed everything about my day to day working reality. The culture of my last job was high intensity; this one is laid back. My old job had a strict no work from home policy, while this current one not only allows me to work from home but encourages it. And despite my new job being a desk job, just like my last, they each utilize entirely different skillsets. My last job strictly enforced conformity, while this role encourages creative thinking and innovation. As you can imagine, adjusting to these changes has been challenging at times. Even though I spent my days sitting in front of computer screens, I was ending each work day completely drained for my first couple of months.

Like any time of upheaval, this recent stretch has brought along various feelings. Mostly, there were long stretches of time where I have been happy. I am no longer on edge all of the time, like I was at my last job. My body literally doesn’t feel as heavy as it used to. I am walking around the world without carrying the weight of the toxicity and stress I absorbed in that old office space. Smiling comes more easily, and I will more and more often find myself with a grin across my face for no reason.

But threaded through these moments are happiness are more bittersweet feelings. Sometimes, I will just be hit with sadness. My last job was something I felt sad to have even experienced. It was a deeply toxic culture. The employee turnover rate was rapid. In the short time I was there, about a year and a half, I watched the whole department slowly crumble and rebuild itself. I couldn’t tell which was more dysfunctional, the place I entered or the place I left. Despite all of the changes made in the time I was there, there seemed to be little to nothing to show in the way of improvements. The sadness isn’t there all of the time. This feeling lurks on the edge of things, occasionally pushing itself into the foreground and making itself known more assertively. In these moments it can be difficult to ignore and sometimes I crumble under the weight of it. When I am down, it feels like I might be down forever, but eventually the feeling passes.

Every day, the darkness of my last job feels a little further away. I used to be so stressed all of the time from my previous job that my physical field of vision felt narrow. Since leaving, it is like everything around me is suddenly in high definition. I notice small details around me that I never noticed before. Every day it feels like things around me are becoming sharper, clearer, and more stable. I am excited to continue moving forward into this exciting new chapter of my life, hopefully one filled with more light and less struggle than the past.