Rethink, dammit

I should have kept my mouth shut. I wasn't entirely happy about the inertia plan, but I was prepared to go with it - until my insightful friend came round on Saturday and blew it out of the water like the feeble construct it was. She asked me to consider whether I'd prefer a passive existence of the type I'd uneasily embraced, or something more dynamic. She wanted to know whether I felt I'd be happier engaging with the world I've chosen to work in or effectively opting out; whether I'd like to feel as though I'm making a contribution and controlling the course of my life or allowing events to dictate everything. And what I realised as she shone this bright light of common sense onto the murky nonsense of my plan was that I was the only person likely to suffer as a result of this nonsense. It's my confidence that's in decline, not my employer's; it's me whose experience is stagnating and whose self-belief is evaporating. So clearly it's not good enough to simply roll over and take it.

But the alternative we came up with isn't very appealing either, frankly. Because the cause of this malaise isn't just macro-economic. There's something going on rather closer to home that I can address much more easily: a disempowering relationship with my overbearing boss, whose control freakery has reached such ludicrous levels that I no longer bother trying to 'add value' to the stuff we work on together because it's invariably wrong in her eyes (nothing personal - everyone else is wrong too). It's very easy to simply do what she says, to take the occasional bollocking for falling short, but to make up for this by simply being available whenever she wants me to be, by never complaining, rarely disagreeing and not getting riled when her top blows - which it does regularly.

So there's a conversation to be had; one that involves me being frank about our working relationship and my desire to break out of the pattern we've established so that I'm offering more of the kind of stuff I'm capable of, the company benefits from my engagement, and her workload is eased. It's very obvious, yet even as we were agreeing how obvious it all is, an inner voice was screaming "Don't do it! It's easier not to! You'll only end up with more work, more stress, and probably more bollockings!" It's not going to be that easy to escape from this intertia it seems. And my friend knows this, because yesterday she texted me to say how much she'd enjoyed the evening - and how much she was looking forward to hearing about the conversation I'd promised to have with my boss.