A taste of employee life - why being honest to yourself can positively trigger you

Cherishing... luck?

I honestly enjoyed my internship period, especially the first six months. However, already back at the end of 2018, I was starting liking the idea of having my own business.

For the first time in my life, I was seriously thinking that I could do something good. What gave me this confidence? Well… a good amount of disorganization, seeing people very well paid with skills I considered even lower than mine, people making gross mistakes without basically any consequence.

Definitely getting decent pay was crucial and very empowering.

That's why I felt so bad when a student of mine told me she gets 540€ a month for an internship in an engineering firm in Milan. I find it shameful, unfair… I can't find the words to express my disgust.

And this made me think: "What if I didn't leave? What if I had a similar path? How would I have felt psychologically?". Horrible.

A taste of language schools too

As I anticipated in the previous article, I also joined the classes of the Alliance Française in Brussels. Of course, I couldn't afford the fees myself.

It was a different experience for me because I had never taken language classes besides school. The sessions last 2.5 hours twice a week.

The first weeks it wasn't that bad, but with time, whenever the work was a bit more tiring (because I was simply actually doing something or because I was bored to death)… well, you could feel it during the class and especially afterward, with such an awful headache at 9 pm when you still have to reach home and have dinner, too.

I had a great teacher, nothing to say about her. What pissed me off was having to talk to the other people who were more tired or lazy than me - because in my opinion, it was also a matter of making an effort to learn, it wasn't just a matter of not having time to study.

Yes, indeed. Let's repeat it, but slowly.

It was not just a matter of lack of time.

We'll go back to this soon.

Summer 2019: something is cracking

By the end of my internship, I was quite struggling to find a job.

I managed to land an interview thanks to a very "bold" answer I gave someone on LinkedIn who then became my director. I was asked for an appointment for an interview first and then for my CV. At that moment I realized I probably did everything wrong at "selling myself".

It was a great satisfaction. I left for Italy for a weekend before starting since I had no days off whatsoever, everything seemed to finally go well…

Even during the interview, I was thinking "Yeah, ok, this feels fine, but maybe for 4-5 years, not more…", but I just wanted to keep my life in Brussels at any cost.

I went back for a weekend with my family. Got back to Brussels. And when I was enjoying the thrill of my first week of work the health conditions of my grandma escalated.

I remember I had visited her during that weekend and I felt it may have been the last time, but I didn't expect it so fast. She passed away on the Friday of my first week in the new office.

It was a very uncomfortable situation because my direct boss was really great, but in any case, I was not close to anybody, so right the very first week I had to go back again to Italy for the funeral, two weekends in a row.

When I got back, comprehensibly, they asked me for the death certificate so that my day off was not counted as a holiday or so. That's the rules of company life and I find it legit for them to have them, but I didn't like feeling their effect on me. On my private life. I was uncomfortable asking my family for this document.

Over that same month, I also skyrocketed my followers on the Instagram page I had as a successor of that great Facebook group I talked to you about in my previous article. I passed from 800 to 9400 followers in three days thanks to a lady who had become an influencer in the meantime and who shared my story with her audience.

How did she know me?

Because she was a member of That Facebook Group I had in 2013.

It was amazing. It felt like I had still something to do with teaching Italian or dealing with Iranians, but I had just signed a permanent contract with pretty good conditions too.

I think somehow I started unconsciously thinking again about the words one of the smartest guys I've met told me as soon as I had graduated:

"You have to work with your online community".

I couldn't believe him or better, I had a very high consideration of whatever he said, but I couldn't see it applied to my life. He foresaw everything 4 years ahead :)

A limbo

Everything was OK, but not great. I was happy to have a job, to have a good salary, to have kept my Brussels life, to have nice colleagues... but I was not that enthusiastic.

In particular, I felt very pitiful for my boss, who is a great person and who I wish all the best in his career. We were very close to each other because we started more or less at the same time in that place, we discovered everything together. I had understood that he worked a lot at night, but he had clearly told me several times that since I didn't have his responsibility and his salary, I was not supposed to do the same. It was very kind of him. Very fair, indeed.

He told me about his two small kids, that he was working after putting them to sleep and one day I just asked him: "Why are you here?". I meant, in a consultancy. Consultancies tend to have a quite stressful environment, high turnover, and young workers who can stay until late in case of need without many problems.

I thought that consultancies were not a suitable place for someone with a family.

He asked me: "What do you mean?".

I said: "Well, a consultancy... why here when you have a family and small kids waiting for you after a workday?".

He told me he genuinely enjoyed that kind of work, but actually, there was more to that and I would discover it almost two full years later.