Blog entry

It is a very weird day for me today. a day that i have waited for, yet partially dreaded at the same time. i am starting a new career, and saying goodbye to an old one. while the most of me is estatic, as i should be, a certain part of me is very, very sad.
I have had the opportunity to have a very challenging career. To me, a career is something that you are very skilled at, and have a passion for, not just a job where you show up to just earn a paycheck. The career I am leaving is one that happened to turn from a challenging career into just a job. When the passion and growth left, I found myself not very far behind. The old job was making me a miserable person, part of which was my own fault, as I had relocated to a different part of this company, and was hoping for the chances that i had left to still be the same. But what I found instead was the same company, but a whole different aspect on how it was ran.
"when you are green, you are growing" is one of the slogans that this company uses and one the founder created. And while I know it is a struggle to hold a huge company that has many locations together, I feel that this slogan or saying should ring true.
When i first joined this company, it was a last resort action for myself. i had a young son to support, and wanted something dependable for a job. I did not realize that i would actually become very good at what i did, and quickly became a leader for this business. I enjoyed the quick pace and the continuous learning. I enjoyed the customers and the employees, and all of the unique challenges that arouse on a daily basis. No day was the same. I could let my outside life at home, one that was not so great, yet at work I could be a different person, a person who was driven and could do extremely well.
And now, after a very long time, I find myself going to a new, and what I hope will become, career. Yet I feel so sad that the old company was so poorly managed that they could not utilize someone with my experience. After being a leader for so long, making very important decisions, and getting extremely good results, it was extremely difficult to be told that there was just no place for me. I am in a total state of shock, yet it is the realization of this that made me pursue a job in a different direction.
I guess it just shows that the old adage is true: one you stop learning, you stop living or growing. Even an old pro like me had a lesson to learn. I got a good reminder of exactly who I am and what I will tolerate. I was reminded that I am a person who always likes to be challenged, and if I am not, I am very boring and miserable. And I was reminded that I must be true first and foremost to myself, to thine own self be true, before I can be useful to anyone else.
One thing I learned for sure about myself...I will never be happy with mediocre. While some people can go to a boring job, accomplish pretty much nothing, not take it seriously, yet still be happy with a mundane paycheck, that is not who I am or what i am about at all. And i do not need to work someplace that is too ignorant to appreciate the very best that they have.
I am sure that the old job will not even realize that I am gone. But that is their loss. I sure realize what it is exactly that they are losing.