Finding Happiness at Work

In graduate school, every woman dreams of her first job on the outside. A workplace full of smart, funny, good looking, well dressed co-workers patting each other on the back, pitching in to get projects done. High paying and fast-paced. Happy hour every day at the corner pub. An office with a view of a park and boss that stops by once in a while to thank you for putting in 12-hour days. Kind of like a mix between Thirtysomething and Friends. Nothing, but nothing would prepare me for the sheer agony of my first year out of grad school. Not only did it turn me into a fountain of sadness, but it forced me to analyze the relationship between career and happiness. It took some time (and therapy), but I finally realized I could have both.

I was working in the advertising industry, meaning status-oriented and extremely cutthroat. The pressure to get the “right” job at the “right” agency was high. If for one second I were to accept a job at a second-tier agency or—gasp—client-side, I would have been exiled from my colleagues’ social circles and gossiped about in instant message sessions. So, of course I took a job at a large advertising agency for near poverty-level pay and worked like a slave for a year. And when I say “slave,” I do mean someone that is treated as if they are in debt to their “owner.” I worked every holiday, my birthday, most every weekend, and nights until nine or ten o’clock, with no overtime. At first, I sucked it up and thought to myself, “Don’t be a baby. This is just the proving time. I’m paying my dues and then I’ll get a raise and have to work a few less holidays.” It was sort of fun when everyone was around late at night working, eating take-out, bitching, and moaning together like a support group. We’d always bring in beers and cocktails on the weekend while we were working, and play music loud to keep each other pumped up. So it wasn’t happy hour at the corner pub, and because of the continuous take-out diet, my co-workers weren’t exactly good looking, but it was all right.

However, looks and waistlines weren’t the only things that were suffering. Working tirelessly on producing hundreds of thirty-second commercial scripts that would just end up in the trashcan was wearing away at my creativity and inspiration, and rapidly wearing away at my normally cheery personality. Constantly defending good work with the hopes that maybe, just maybe, it would move into production was getting old. On top of ulcers and premature gray hair, I had creative constipation—working every day on projects and assignments and never producing anything.
 
I became a victim.