Part of my recovery was ditching a job I wasn't great at that didn't pay all that well in a horrible industry working with (mostly) very toxic people. I did it for 15 years at the same company. It wasn't bad for the first 8 years, but in 2010 new owners took over, and it started going downhill from there. Getting sober HAD to involve changing careers.
For the first year of sobriety my job WAS sobriety, and I threw myself into it with meetings, inpatient and outpatient rehab and then individual psychotherapy. This morphed into my full time job became maintaining sobriety and preparing for a career change. I had to get my real estate license and find a spot to hang my hat. I started my sober journey in inpatient rehab and was eligible for disability which got me through the year. I took my real estate licensing exam on my one year sobriety date, and passed on the first attempt. The next two months was spent finding a brokerage, and then training.
I started in earnest yesterday. It's completely new and different, but I think I'm going to really love helping people buy and sell homes and getting paid solely on commission. Corporate America has become not a great place to be for me in the past 10 years. My old job was lashed to a computer for 9 hours a day plus some weekends with an ever increasing workload and not enough time in the day to do it all. It involved excruciating attention to detail which isn't my strong suit either. All for an OK to mediocre salary with no room for groth. I'm an extrovert with a creative streak.
The change is a bit terrifying at the moment, but I can see where as I build competency it'll get really fun really fast. I love people and I love money, sales is a natural fit. I stayed in a horrible job with escalating drinking mostly out of the fear of change, it took a severe alcohol crisis to get me out of it. I regret nothing in my path, it's lead me here to a far better place.
I get the dread Ben. There's a lot of anxiety in early sobriety, don't know how long you've been sober. I took 17 months before actually starting to work again, which may have been too long, but I think the universe says it was the exactly correct amount of time.
I have two questions:
1) Do you like what you do? Does it give you energy? Do you like the people you work with (yeah, that's three, but it's really one big question).
2) What is your sobriety plan? How do you plan on handling the additional stress that return to work will bring? Are you doing meetings, therapy, meditation, something else?
Keep it up. You can do this.