On My Career Path

Note: This piece was written on October 2, 2024.

It is 3:59pm on a Wednesday. I am more than halfway through the week, and I have a stereotypical countdown in my head of the 91 minutes until I can leave my desk. I ran out of work to do hours ago, but return-to-office policies dictate that I must be in a New York skyscraper Monday through Thursday regardless of whether I’m answering emails or reading shopping articles on The Strategist.

A prickly feeling I’ve had for months finally forms into a conscious thought: I do not like my job. Not just at this company; I do not like the work I do. 

I think I might have felt this way since I started my career seven and a half years ago, in part because I did not intend to be an executive assistant for the rest of my life. Yet, nearly a decade later, here I am, justifying my corporate job by talking about the paycheck and benefits I would not get if I had thrown myself into writing instead. 

But the truth, as always, is in the action: I have hopped between companies at a rate that would make even average millennials cringe, always hoping that the new environment will do the trick and I will suddenly like my day-to-day tasks.

The last time, the “grass is greener” mentality finally bit me. I ended up at a company I truly hated with people I did not respect and who had no respect for me. I was talked down to, ignored, and dismissed, and then berated for not accomplishing tasks that required the involvement of the people who refused to answer my emails. At the time I wanted desperately to go back to the position I had foolishly left, thinking that would fix everything. My inner critic mourned my choice every day, wishing I had been grateful for what I had rather than begging for more. If only I had been content with just enough.

Truthfully, though, I disliked that earlier position too. There were far more positives to it than negatives, but I cannot avoid the fact that I was dissatisfied. It’s why I left in the first place. Going back wouldn’t fix what bothers me, nor would going to yet another new company now, because the problem lies with the job itself.

Being an EA comes with a level of ambiguity that drew me in when I first started on this path. Every position has the usual task list: scheduling meetings, organizing and submitting expense reports, and coordinating travel plans. There’s the possibility of doing personal tasks for an executive, taking minutes in meetings, doing research of various kinds, running and organizing data reports, writing department and company announcements–the list goes on. Each executive is different and trusts their assistant with different tasks. 

It was the potential for writing and research that kept me in the job–that and paying my bills. As soon as I moved to New York I was locked in. The job is not particularly challenging, nor is it time consuming (outside of the normal corporate dictate that I spend nine hours a day at a desk). That, however, is now part of the problem. I’m bored beyond measure, and my brother’s death has made it impossible to overlook the fact that I waste so many hours disassociating through my day. I have so little life, and I have squandered so much of it to a hamster wheel that gets me nowhere. 

This position, and my previous one, have especially gotten under my skin. At my previous position I had panic attacks nearly every day, and I was so burnt out emotionally that I could barely cry. My current executive is nothing like my last, but I still do not feel I am valued. The structure to which I have given my time shows appreciation to people like him while I am the first to go when a company decides to save money. Even now I am employed through an agency so that the company I actually support can avoid giving me the benefits that everyone else doing my level of work receives. In the grand scheme of things the entity says to me, you do not matter.

So what to do? Do I accept my treatment as a part of life because I do not have a math degree that will make billionaires richer? Do I throw myself into a creative endeavor and hope for the best? And if I do and it fails, do I demean myself once again and return to the profession I have declared to be a compete waste of my time?

I’ll let you know when I figure it out.