Journey as pharmacist and guidance

Long Post but wanted some thoughts and potential guidance as well as share my journey as a pharmacist so far.

Graduated in 2021 and looking for some thoughts and career advice. Originally, plan was to do a residency and work clinical. I did a residency prep program through my school and realized residency/inpatient was not for me. I didn't enjoy the inpatient setting and felt it didn't bring me the happiness and satisfaction I thought it would. Basically struggled with the concept of not doing a residency due to future prospects and also giving up on the original plan my entire fourth year, ending in deep depression.

For some background, was extremely involved during school and got honors on all of my rotations except one, rho chi , etc etc. I still applied but ended up withdrawing from the match last minute because I couldn't imagine doing inpatient for the rest of my career. Got licensed quick and through networking/strong rotation performance, I got offered a full time outpatient pharmacist job at a large hospital along with per diem inpatient work at a community hospital (thought I would do inpatient as a pharmacist vs student to make sure that wasn't my path). I started both after getting licensed and felt like I was in a great place. The outpatient pharmacy was new and I helped build it from the ground up and before I left we were considered the go to pharmacy in the area. Long story short, I had a manager that was a micro manager and also felt like was holding me back and not letting me be as involved as I wanted. One of the examples was that he never made me a primary preceptor even though I precepted the students 90% of the time. He would have me even write their evaluations and turn them in under his name. The students would ask me for LOR for residency programs and I would happily write them for them but never asked him, essentially saw me as their primary preceptor. Asked multiple times to be a preceptor but was never marked as one through the colleges of pharmacies in our state. The colleges even reached out to me and asked why I wasn't a preceptor as the students always mentioned me to the colleges. The manager also was not present often times coming and going as he liked. In fact the first year when we were building up the pharmacy, he worked less then 40 hours 90% of the time. Would often leave me alone even when we got busy doing 300+ discharge prescriptions with just 2 technicians. The technicians were pretty toxic and basically only able to do assistant tasks. Anything beyond "is the prescription ready" I had to manage and figure out including insurance issues. I built a rapport with most of our hospitalists and became the person they would rely on to get complicated discharges out the door. Over time, I started to get burned out especially since the manager made me work every weekend for over 3 years even though I asked to rotate but was never given a real answer. (Later found out we were definitely supposed to be rotating weekends per policy) I was passed over for a manager position for another location that we opened up that was relatively close because the manager wanted to take both locations and ensure I would not be able to surpass him. Would often leave me at the busy location and go to the other location without any advanced notice. Would come in and out due to family issues as well but I never had that luxury and always worked my scheduled days and them some. All in all, the actual job was the most amazing job I could have ever had in hindsight but due to said issues I decided to switch paths and got an opportunity to switch over to amb care doing anticoag and diabetes management.

Also, I left the per diem inpatient gig after I got married and had a child so due to starting a family it was difficult to justify working 7 days a week. The amb care position was my way of going back to full time clinical and putting the regret of not doing a residency behind me. Unfortunately I ended up in possibly the worst clinic for this company where the patients were very sick and my feelings of not enjoying the job from inpatient followed me to the amcare setting. Burnout was a big issue here also as I often saw 25-30 patients daily between anticoag and DM management. The job took a big toll on my mental health and I decided I couldn't do it anymore. I was falling into the same deep depression and decided no job was worth the mental torture of dreading your work every single day. I did manage to get my BCPS during this time. Now I'm currently sitting here 5 years after I graduated and unable to go back to my dream job at an outpatient discharge pharmacy where I was the heartbeat of hospital discharges. I was able to offer multiple clinical interventions on a daily basis from helping ER providers to chose the best therapy to streamlining complicated discharges where doctors didn't know how to order certain meds like diabetes supplies.. I had full authorization from essentially all of the attendings to make any therapeutic substitutions, etc. I was able to recommend insulin doses, warfarin doses, therapeutic changes, pain medication dosing, etc on a day to day basis. I became an educator to the medical residents even meeting with them regularly to go over high risk medications and showed them the pharmacy side of discharge operations.

So now I am at a crossroads and don't really know what the future holds. With the current job market, I'm basically looking at going back to retail but as a manager. I have a lot of student loans which I was hoping to stay with a non profit organization and be eligible for PSLF. I can't get past the mistake of leaving my outpatient job which was in hindsight my dream job, everything I imagined when I went to pharmacy school. Asides from that, I would love to get into pharma as an MSL, which I know is a long shot. I have been trying to get in for a couple of years now and have had 3 different opportunities but only got to the final round with 2 out of 3 and was passed on for an internal candidate both times. I am assuming my aspirations for a MSL position are officially gone now that I've left the amb care job and don't plan on going back or re-trying inpatient. My ideal setting would be an outpatient/discharge pharmacy where I can have some resemblance of what I was doing at my previous job but it seems impossible to find a position as they don't really come up in the area that I live. I guess I'm just sharing my story and hoping I could get feedback on what the future looks like if I take a retail manager position (grocery store chain, not CVS or Walgreens FYI) to be able to pay the mortgage, bills, etc for now. Has anyone gone through anything similar and ended up in a different setting that I'm not aware of currently or found their way back to something they actually enjoyed? Secondly, I wanted to just highlight some of my thoughts with my experiences so far:

-The grass is not always greener - every job there will be sacrifices. If you love what you do or can atleast tolerate most aspects of a job and don't feel miserable in your day to day/work doesn't ruin your mental health and outside relationships, it might be worth working under a similar situation with a crappy manager.

-Clinical experience CAN be gained without a residency or experience. I've now done both inpatient and amb care without residency (although inpatient was per diem) but with the current job market, it's getting tougher. Connections are everything.

-Things can change in a heartbeat. 2 years ago, I was living the dream working my dream job with an on call inpatient gig which helped me keep my clinical knowledge up to date and allowed me to cross train within other specialties such as ER and ICU and now I am most likely going back to retail despite extensive experience across the spectrum of pharmacy and board certification.

-Board Certification doesn't really help with job search - in fact, most non clinical jobs (Costco, Kaiser, Refill Center, etc) may even stay away from you and consider you a liability because they will think you're just using them as a fall back and leave whenever the next clinical opportunity comes up.

-The current job market is TOUGH. Even with excellent referrals and recommendations, I am having a hard time getting into anything but retail. (Kaiser, Costco, Refill Authorization Center, Outpatient Discharge Pharmacy, Pharma)

Would love any thoughts or guidance on how to move forward.