No more 10:15

That's when we meet as a team every Monday morning for the dreaded meeting when we report to the boss the commissioning work we've been doing for the past week.

I hated those meetings. My boss's office has no windows, which is always a problem with the claustrophobic me. With no table to shield me, I would hug myself and tap my feet nervously. Most of all, what made those meetings dreadful was the fact that I never had very much to say. We would all sit in a row, reporting dutifully, one after another. As I waited for my turn and listened to my colleagues rattle off all that they've done, I couldn't help but feel very inadequate. When it's my turn, I would mumble and sometimes stammer my way through, and falter when pressed by my boss for further details because I forgot or didn't think of it in the first place.

No more of that now. I feel relieved, but also very, very tired.

The last time that I resigned from a job was a traumatic experience because I couldn't bear to leave. I was afraid I would cry when I handed in the resignation letter to my former boss, because she was so very nice to me. I told myself that this time it will be a clean-cut, business decision. No emotions at stake here, not when it's been only 8 months. I even boasted to a friend that quitting just gets easier. That's right, easy-peasy. No danger of crying there.

Maybe I was too eager to leave and didn't want to think too hard about the complications. Maybe quitting will never be easy. But I just wasn't prepared for the fallout.

I hope I'll never make a hasty decision about leaving a place. It actually took me weeks to finally decide on leaving. And now, in retrospection, it still seems like the best option but I know it was informed by frustration and impulsiveness, because something in me "snapped" in late January. And as a senior editor counselled, if only I had the patience to wait things out because it was going to get better (That is debatable, though).

I've certainly learned not to take leaving too easily again. The friendships and the connections that I had to cut short, the books and authors whom I had to "abandon", the copious amount of work I had to hand over during the last few days...they just totally drained me...but at least I have 3 weeks to recover.

The same senior editor told me not to regard my short stint as a failure. I wish things had ended in a good way, but at least I've learned many lessons, sometimes from mistakes, during these past few months. As a song goes, "I'll be better when I'm older".