Can I be brutally honest? Jan 6th, 2021 Topic: work

Now that the holidays are ending, it’s time for most of us to get back to work.

On the first week of my one year of brutal honesty, I had to be honest in a setting where it’s often extremely difficult. And that is, when facing a client.

As an entrepreneur, money isn’t always there. Salary isn’t always easy to come by, especially if one keeps diverting projects away. But to be honest, I feel a lot better not getting paid for something that I really don’t want to do, instead of having to go through the mental strain of a project that I despise from the very beginning. So as an entrepreneur, it almost feel like a luxury to be able to say no, even though honestly — and economically — I couldn’t afford to.

So there’s this weird balance between economical and mental wellbeing, in which it’s sometimes very hard to evaluate which is more important. They’re actually very much entwined together. Even though money can’t buy happiness, it can buy food, for instance.

But in this case with the client, the whole thing just felt so wrong that I couldn’t do it. And of course at first I was thinking “I can tell the client that I’m busy, or just put my prices so high that they can’t afford it”. But then I remembered that I just made a public promise of being brutally honest for a year, so it’d be extremely dumb to be dishonest at the very first opportunity that arises.

So instead of making up things, I told the client the truth. I told them, that I didn’t want to be involved in this project. I told them the reasons why, which might have stung their pride more than me lying to them that I’m busy. And lying most likely would have only postponed the inevitable, and I would have had to face the same conversation in the future some day anyway.

I felt good. Being honest made me feel good about myself, that I confronted the problem headfirst instead of dodging it some way. The client now knows that I won’t do work just for money, and quite frankly, I now know it better too. So in a weird way, I also gave value to myself with this interaction. My wallet on the other hand…

Honesty is hard, sometimes scary, or even dangerous. That’s why it’s not easy to do it in every occasion. But what has dishonesty done for us that’s better? We’ve most likely just transferred the burden to a later time, or even to someone else completely, when it was ours to carry. And if we’re not carrying the burden, we’re not getting practice for carrying it. And that’s when the weight gets unevenly balanced between people and we all feel burdened.

Some years back, I was working in a grocery store, which has been my only longer term work placement in the past several years. I applied for a job since I was in desperate need for money, because like said, money isn’t always easy to come by. At first I was happy, that I had something that would give me some stability, which I was lacking for a very long time. The contract said that my weeks should be 20 hours, so I knew I could also work on music simultaneously.

The weeks proved to be longer than that. I was often working 30 hours a week, and I soon started to feel exhausted. One morning I got work and went straight to the cashier from the beginning of my shift. For some reason, I was petrified. For the first 3 hours of that shift, I could only do the bare minimum, which was saying ‘hi’ with a very unenthusiastic tone and keep on beeping the items as fast as I could, which was way slower and uncertain than it had been some days previously.

It didn’t take long until I got fired. It was during the 3-month long try-out period that they fired me from the job. When it happened, I was quite shocked and disappointed, since I felt like I was slowly fitting in. I thought I was doing well, that I was an efficient, self-initiative employee.

Somehow in that moment I couldn’t see the facts that I was spending most of my time there in great anxiety, I never took extra shifts outside of what was handed out in the mandatory ones, I had a week or two of sick-leave when I had to go to see a doctor because of panic attacks, while trying to survive with my at the time undiagnosed cluster headaches. Like, I would have probably fired an employee like me too, if I didn’t really know what was going on with them.

For many months to come, I felt miserable for it. I felt like I wasn’t enough for anything, because I wasn’t good enough for something as simple as maintaining a normal job. I was blaming myself for my incompetence. But now looking back to it, I didn’t even like working there. I actually hated it very much. I just needed the job for money, but I got so emotionally invested in stability that I couldn’t stay true to myself that it wasn’t the right thing for me to do in the first place.

What I mentioned in the beginning — ‘I feel a lot better not getting paid for something that I really don’t want to do, instead of having to go through the mental strain of it’ — is something I learned after all this. I’ve paid more closely attention to what I really want to do, and I’m constantly trying to let all the other things have as little effect on my life as possible.

I will probably write more on the topic of money and mental health later on, since the topic feels extremely important, and it would be crucial to hear your opinions too — have you worked in a place that made you feel miserable? Did you put your mental health before your income?

Thank you for reading again. Until next time.