Dear Boss,

I would like to let you know that I am reaching a breaking point in my mental health and well-being. I have suffered from pancreatitis the other night at 2 am, vomiting my way out of the pain. This is only one of the physical manifestations of the anxiety and stress that I am experiencing.

I hope people recognize that Southeast Asia is a difficult bureau to manage with 6 active/big markets and several languages that I need to be on top of. I manage different people whom I do not see (except for Kr) and do my best to keep them engaged and keep productivity up despite some of them not having any raises or promotion since joining. This aside from other admin tasks that crop up from time to time.

I am also trying to keep my personal KPIs intact and keep my editing duties as we all are understaffed. On top of this, I am trying to fill the gaps in the coverage especially with Singapore being out of action since December-January and Thailand since 2020. And yet I get hammered for doing my job, like last week when I pushed out that xx story. I did my best, but I still get the blame.

I have managed all these even when I was still deputy since most of the manager’s tasks were already put on my shoulders ever since I assumed that role in 2018.

However, this hiring is already eating into the little breathing room I have. It’s ok to manage the correspondences, tests, and interviews of candidates since I am the manager and I would be the best judge if I can work with this candidate or not. However, my poaching, the trawling on the profiles of “quality” candidates/with pedigree is not workable—it is the job of an HR talent acquisition team, as one HR head of an MNC told me. My role as a manager is to pick and approve which candidate will proceed for testing and interview and the HR talent acquisition team’s role is to acquire the candidates for screening. I do not understand why our HR cannot assist me in this regard since generally HR talent acquisition teams should treat hiring departments (in our case, editorial) as their clients—it is their main job. If they consider Singapore a very important office and that they want top-notch hires, maybe they could lend me some assistance in this regard because I cannot do it alone.

There should be a compromise somewhere here because I cannot spend my evenings doing the candidate search when I am a solo parent and the sole income earner with no child support, who also needs to attend to the needs of my children. We were sick the last two weeks and I couldn’t even bring my children immediately to the doctor to see if they contracted pneumonia or even bring myself to the hospital for my pancreatitis because hospitalization means there would be nobody to manage the team, the edits, and everything else.

I would like to take a sick leave tomorrow just to sort out myself physically first.

Thank you.

CallMeCreation.com

My cats knew something was wrong with me so they kept close.

I finally figured out what was wrong. It’s not the pay, it’s not the changes, it’s not the small irritants that are driving me up the wall. It’s the overwhelming work that I shouldn’t be doing that is driving me insane. The pressure from the top had me paralyzed. I couldn’t perform a simple task like writing in the past few weeks. I am overwhelmed.

On Wed early morning, about 2 am, I woke up with this terrible pain in my upper middle abdomen. The pain was excruciating that I couldn’t breathe. It was radiating to my back. It was the same kind of pain that I felt when my gall bladder was about to get infected due to stones. I remember in 2014 I was having oily diarrhea and vomiting so that same week I had surgery to have my gall bladder removed. The attack was similar to what I felt early Wednesday. But the thing here is, I no longer have any gall bladder. It seems like it’s my pancreas and my symptoms matched with that of acute pancreatitis. I was afraid I was having a heart attack because my dad’s symptoms were the same when he had his major heart attack before I rushed him to the hospital back in 2000.

I wasn’t wearing my smart watch so I couldn’t monitor my heartbeats. I knew it was out of whack and my sweat was cold. I was drenched. The pain lasted for an hour until I vomited bile or something.

Only after that did I feel some relief from pain.

I didn’t know how I would bring myself to the hospital. I thought I was going to die.

Now looking back, this was the same thing that happened to me months before I quit my job with the local media. I tendered my resignation a month after the gall bladder surgery.

Now I realize it’s all stress. It was stress that pushed me out of that job, I guess it’s stress again that will push me out of this job again, if management will not listen to me.

I’m trying to save whatever goodwill I have left for this company and for my colleagues.

But if I can’t beat the system, then probably it’s time for me to go. I did warn them.