Let's get personal

Hello, reader.

With my promise from before, I'm going to try to be more active in this blog. For this post, I'm going to get a little personal, one might even say vulnerable. Which I am planning another post about vulnerability at work. But for this post let's get this started.

I, Marie, have chronic illnesses. I am diabetic, I have major depression and anxiety/panic disorder and I have autoimmune arthritis. With the autoimmune disease, I have many side effects which might be causing the mental illness but all I know is, I'm in pain every day and sad about it. My depression is nowhere as bad as when I was in college but I still deal with it every day. I take so much medication to control everything, I constantly have a stomach ache.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. I have so much to be thankful for and so much going for me. I wanted to set up a background for you, reader. Last thing that is important is I'm exhausted a lot of the time. Partially from the medication and partially from trying to hide everything all the time. I'm not very good at hiding. It seems like every week, my manager is telling me that I need to relax more and stop panicking all the time. So much for trying to seem normal, huh?

At this point in this post, I may have lost some of you but my hope is that some of you reading this can relate. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 322 million live with depression and 6.8 million have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Those statistics are from 2016. I have to wonder if the number is the same or higher now. I won't get political but our country is a little unstable, there are a lot of changes happening and being unsure of your future can make anyone feel hopeless.

So, what happens when you are in constant pain and are always dragging ass? You go to work and do your best. I couldn't be happier with my workplace. They hold a high standard for work/life balance and flexibility. There is a meditation room for when I'm feeling overwhelmed and need to center myself. Or, cry quietly. Sometimes you need to cry. I think they know because there is always a full tissue box in the room.

I haven't always been in a workplace that was conducive to being mentally healthy. I didn't last long there. I could go one about how horrible previous jobs have been but why dwell in the past? Even though I've been through the wringer at some places, I was able to learn more about myself and how I function and succeed.

This post is probably getting a little long and I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this rambling. If you're still here, I thank you. Everyone is different and I don't want to prescribe what others should do. For me, I have strong hindsight when it comes to bad jobs but I was never really good at realizing the toxicity while still there. All jobs come with some stress, a little frustration, for me some anxiety. But there is always a breaking point. How long you stay after the breaking point is what's key. I found my breaking point was when the dread to get to work became constant. I would have nothing to look forward to at work. I found reasons to not go more or to leave early. When I finally left, after the residual negative feelings have passed, I am able to see what I was able to learn. An example, I learned from a previous job is that I don't do well when I'm bored at work. There is only so much I was able to create for myself to do. I can see now, that when I'm busy, work goes by quickly, I feel accomplished and I am inspired to do more.

The takeaway I hope you find is that no matter what situation you're in, wherever you are feeling stuck, there are other opportunities, your next company may be could be what you need. But don't completely throw away you experience. Learn from it. Look deep and see what you might have missed.

Stay grateful, dear reader. Take care.

Informational Interview

I just had the greatest talk with a QA engineer in my company. He's on a different team so he brought a very different perspective to testing as a whole. His team is more of an Agile format as mine is Waterfall. The more I learn about Agile, the more I am in love with the concept. He also directed me to a new blog to read: lisacrispin.com. I look forward to reading her perspective as well. Also, he introduced me to some books that I will have to report back on as I acquire and read them.

Overall, an amazing 30 minute chat. So thankful.

First!

Well, I guess I'm here now. I couldn't find many QA blogs, so, I'm starting my own. I am a college student (second time around) and am trying to work my way into the world of Software Quality Assurance. I am an intern at a large company doing QA work. I am lucky as hell to have this position. I was under the delusion that Development is where I needed to be and QA would be my jumping point. Two months in and I'm in love with QA. We do mostly manual testing but my new project is to research automation software. There is software built into our system but it requires a good amount of specialized xml coding to work. I'm actually looking forward to diving into this project.

I'm not going to claim this to be an interesting read. I just want a place to waste my breath (keystrokes?) on this new venture. Read if you want.

Take care. 😺