6/365 - Know your worth and how I did not know mine

5th of August 2009

The departure was less than 48h away and I was working tirelessly on my CV and applying for jobs.

I was staying away from banking jobs - the recession had kicked in and before resigning from the bank I was involuntarily transitioning from a Client Advisor’s position to being a loan shark. They encouraged people to take mortgages in Swiss Francs and guess what? The CHF went up so much in value against the Romanian RON that their mortgages almost doubled over night!

Know your worth and do not allow anyone to tell you otherwise.

At age 23, the position at the bank had been my fourth job.

My first job was as a waitress immediately after I finished college, for about month at a night club called ‘Vox’, located by the park in my hometown Focsani. It had a garden terrace where people would enjoy their drinks and that portion operated during the day till about 2-3am when the last customer would leave. I managed to log in more than 340 hours in a month! No days off, because they offered a bonus for that.

I said to myself that it was all worth it, because that money would have allowed me to travel to Bucharest and take an admission exam to get into the best School of Economics in the country at the time. I deserved it! I had worked my bum off, I had excellent grades, all my friends were going there, it felt that it was just meant to be. Oh, I could see myself walking down the building’s corridors!

As the deadline approached things were getting harder and harder. When I was putting numbers down it was easy to see that there was not enough money for travel, food, admission tax etc, but even so, I probably could have pulled it off somehow, because I always believed that if “there’s a will, there’s a way”.

This story is a particularly difficult one for me, not because of the extreme exhaustion I was going through or because of the emotional roller coaster I was facing with my family, but because I remember that phone call I got so vividly, even after almost 20 years. Being talked down to, being told that ‘very good students go to that school’, asking me if I was ‘sure that I am good enough to go there’ or if I ‘know how hard the admissions exams were’.

I did not blame her for my decision to give up, I blamed myself for giving her that level of power over me.

A wealthy, distant relative with high social status, that I did not even meet till I turned 18 believed it is worth her time to call a child a destroy her dreams. From that day onwards, the more that people tell me it cannot be done the more I want to do it.

Bring it on!

Do not let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do!

You got this!