This past week has been a whirlwind of the unexpected. I started a new job at Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc., something I never anticipated I ever do. I’ve avoided anything to do with factory work over the last three years as I’ve fought my battle with anxiety because for a quite a bit of time in there any kind of physical exertion had been enough to trigger a panic attack. As a result I developed a significant agoraphobic reaction to anything physically taxing.
But this last year I’ve worked hard to try to get my weight down — with limited success. My psychiatrist changed my meds around a bit to try to smooth out the extremes of my anxiety. And it helped. But the most significant change in meds took place in October, and so over the course of the winter I was never really able to test the limits of my physical capability to see what would and would not trigger a panic attack.
This past week I found out.
As I’ve said, I’d been resistant to picking up any kind of factory work. But a very dear friend who works at SIA suggested I at least apply and try it out and try to make some connections within the company to land some kind of job that I would love with the hope that the joy I’d get from that job would overcome any anxiety I might face. And with my financial situation becoming increasingly more desperate, I did finally decide to step out on faith and take the risk.
And the first week “on the job,” the trainers really put us through our paces. The first two days were relatively easy — plenty of orientation, instruction, and information about the company and its goals. But from there, they started to push us, and push us hard. Every day we cycled through a series of simulation projects, some of them very physically demanding. We spent a lot of time learning how to stretch properly, learning best ergonomic practices for working the production floor, and exercising to start conditioning our bodies for the intense work pace we’ll be facing in the days and weeks to come.
We also sat under the lectureship of various safety department trainers throughout the week plus one department head who was actively recruiting candidates to work In-Process Control (the quality control check stations once the full assembled vehicles roll off the assembly line). I ended up being one of ten people that made it onto that list on the first day of training, but there were no guarantees as to where I would get assigned. So all week, I had my mental fingers crossed.
You see, IPC is an area that probably has the most potential for upward mobility and the potential to become a direct-hire to Subaru much sooner than the average. And God was good. At the end of the week when we received our job assignments, I was thrilled to find myself assigned to IPC, which I begin training for on Tuesday.
The exciting part of all this is that this is very much not the path I had expected to trod this year. When 2019 started I set some pretty lofty goals for both myself and for my business. Many of those goals are still in place, particularly the personal goals, but my professional path has shifted. And this is most certainly not a bad thing. I found out this past week that my physical and mental limitations have expanded beyond where they were even just a year ago, that I do, in fact, have the mental willpower to push myself through physical discomfort and get any number of tasks done. This is huge to my journey toward better mental and physical health. And the wild thing is, after the rigors of this last week, now I very much want to spend regular time in a gym, exercising and lifting weights to build up and maintain a level of fitness I haven’t had in years. And that’s something I never thought I’d ever say.
But so much has changed this last week, both in terms of my outlook and my journey forward. Every step forward reveals new and surprising things I didn’t know about myself, and I find that exciting! There are new and bigger things ahead, I know, many of which weren’t even on my radar. But they’re going to lead me to a better place, and I have the faith and trust that this has all been under God’s guiding hand all along.
