The Lion's Pride Lion's Pride Volume 12 (Spring 2019) | Page 10

some credit, because my mindset was if it gets me a little farther
walking, let’s have fun. Walking was a critical part of feeling normal
and gave me time to think about life.
This brings us to 2017, when I felt great and excited to get back to
work. I wasn’t giving up on life, and my goals were getting healthy,
getting back to work, and regaining quality of life. But what was going
back to work going to look like? I had done Program Management and
Business Analyst positions, but it had been two years since I had
worked. The feeling that I might not fit in started to set in, but I pushed
forward. I told the negative self-talk to shut up and replaced it with
“you’ve got this.” I removed the word “can’t” from my vocabulary and
replaced it with, “How can I get this done?” I felt my mental self-image
as well as my physical self gaining ground. I was starting to feel whole.
Besides networking, a great way to get back into the workforce is to
work on contract through an agency. After several months, I finally
landed a job doing business analyst type work. I felt very alone in an
office with very little contact with my manager. The contract was
supposed to last twelve months but was cut short due to funding. This
meant I only got to work from September 2017 to March of 2018. As it
turned out, the position was a great opportunity to get up to speed on
Power BI and SharePoint, which, in theory, would help me land my next
contract job. There was only one problem; I found a lump in my breast
right after my contract ended. I had a biopsy done.