In my entire 20s and my entire “career” I have barely shed a tear. I never felt this extreme stress and just constantly wanting to quit. But hey, I asked for this hybrid 9-5 job.

Having used to having my own freedom in deciding a lot of things and even my own schedule, this job requires me to deal with bureaucracy and a lot of steps and tiptoeing around people. I felt like one mistake could cost me being fired. I have only been working for 3 months now, and this is mostly probationary time in many places If you can’t survive it, you won’t survive the next couple of months or even years.

In this place, while I learned a lot of things, for the first time ever, I cried because of how stressful it was. I know this job might not be hard for a lot of people (I guess) but having to constantly awake for 48 hours straight and on alert mode is brutal. I guess this is why people in Wallstreet and such does some type of drug. This consulting job certainly needs some booster of such or honestly, you’ll barely survive.

Your one mistake could cause millions to be lost. That’s what is scary about it, especially when you’re put as the closer to a project.

Thankfully, staying awake for days is sort of my forte. I know, with age my alertness is declining a bit but that helped quite a bit. Still because of how stressful it was, I didn’t get the chance to do anything else than to get fixated on just getting rid of it. Once that big task is out of the picture, I could do another millions of things in my job that have been on my backlog for a while.

Maybe this got me stressed because for a while, I am not used to this extreme level style of work. Afterall, I am new to all this too and has only learned habits of my workmates and colleagues in this job.

I know that some lawyers I came to know do this too. They typically must stay all night to fix cases and such. My job is no different, it’s a mix of everything and law included where you must learn the cases and study all about it. There’s a lot of reading, comparison and finally, binding the documents together to be one and it needs to be done within 48 hours or sometimes less.

Sometimes, I didn’t realize how good my life was in my entire early 20s. I practically had it easier compared to bullshit people go to in this firm. In hindsight, I am looking at my colleagues who had been thrown into the pit of fire or the den of lions then survive. Next time I am back to the main office, I’ll basically just tell them, that they have done such a great job.

I heard some tales; some people didn’t make it and left halfway.

One night, my mom (a.k.my boss too) asked me. “Why do some people left this place a little too early?”

Well… looks like I know the answer to all that.