The following is an edited excerpt from Mia Freedman’s memoir Work, Strife, Balance . Which is the inspiration behind the new TV series Strife .

Here's a thing I've learned: the worst job you ever have will teach you important things. You will not know it at the time, though. At the time, you'll be convinced that you’ve indelibly stained your CV and ruined your life. You will feel ashamed and devastated and possibly humiliated. You will probably be angry and resentful and bitter.

However.

It gets better. The sting of it fades. The heat comes out. And you will learn a lot from it in hindsight. Just like having an abysmal relationship helps you to recognise a good one when it comes along, so too a disastrous job will teach you what you do and don’t want in your next job. And the one after that.

It's taken me years to realise this. But the biggest fuck up of my career turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life. Without it, I would have never done what I was forced to do next.

After working happily in the magazine industry since I did work experience at 19 which turned into an editorship at 24 and ended 10 years later as Editor-In-Chief of Cosmo, Cleo and Dolly, I knew it was time for a new chapter. In 2005, I left the building I'd walked into every working day for 15 years, ostensibly to go on maternity leave with my second child. But I knew I was done with mags. A few months later, delirious with sleep-deprivation and naivity, I sleep-walked into the jaws of a career nightmare to take an ambiguous executive role at a big commercial TV network. Over the next seven months, that job would devour my confidence, my reputation and my identity. It sparked a prolonged period of intense anxiety and was the closest I’ve ever come to depression.

Within weeks, I was bringing my work -based anxiety home and infecting my family with it like a toxin as I slunk in the front door on the verge of tears and rattled to my core.

My work life had become a poisonous soup of bad decisions (mine for taking a job that didn't really exist), bad blood (many of the blokes at the network who thought I should go back to magazines, home to my kids or anywhere far away from them) and bad press (humiliating articles about me sourced from people in my new workplace who hated me and general media Schadenfreude that I was plainly falling on my face in a spectacular way).

The worst part was the constant fear. Fear that everyone I worked with detested me. Fear of yet another gossipy media report that made me look stupid and incompetent. Fear that I’d made the worst mistake of my life. Fear that I was trapped because leaving this job would create even more coverage of my disastrous tenure in TV. Fear that my son and my new baby were being impacted by my distress.

Every one of those fears was well-founded. It was the darkest time of my professional life. And I don't think it was an accident or a co-incidence that it was directly after this awful period that I started Mamamia.

Many years later, I can now identify some invaluable lessons that sprang from the ashes of those seven months. It took a combination of time, self-reflection and hindsight but here's where I landed.

4 Essential lessons from the worst jobs for career recovery.

1. Don’t Take A Job That Doesn't Really Exist

After 15 years nestled in the warm bosom of women’s magazines, I’d moved to a new workplace for the first time in my adult life. The TV network was owned by the same media company that had employed me since I was 19. And yet even though my overlords were the same, the role I’d been offered was a new one that had never existed before. A different culture. Different colleagues. The same industry – media – but a different medium.

The new CEO had brought me in to bolster the female representation in the leadership team from zero to one. "I’m sick of sitting around a boardroom table with 20 men trying to work out what women want to watch on television," he told me before I accepted the job.

His philosophy was sound and I admired him for trying but even though neither of us realised it at the time, I was walking into a career black hole: a role that didn’t exist.

This isn’t a problem if you’re taking a job at a start-up because, by definition, no pre-determined roles exist. In the first few years ofMamamiawhen we were in start-up mode, we constantly created new roles in real-time. That's how you grow.

I love start-up culture because it’s all-consuming and you move fast and break things. I have a propensity for doing both. Sometimes I break things and then I move fast, away from the things I just broke, hoping that nobody realises I broke them. But start-up culture is fluid and intense and that suits me.

It's not that new roles can’t be created in established companies. Businesses do evolve, driven in large part by technology or the changing needs of the company. ‘ Social media manager ’ is a relatively new job in big companies, for example.

But be aware that when you walk into a newly created role, you need to carve out a you-shaped holefrom the jobs currently being done by other people.The politics of this can be exceptionally tricky to navigate and I will admit that I did it woefully.

Another red flag: as we worked on my contract, we could not agree on a title. Nothing seemed to fit. I wasn’t a consultant. I didn’t have any direct reports, and I reported directly to the CEO. I should have asked to see an organisational chart. I should have asked for a more detailed job description. I should have asked about KPIs (key performance indicators) and targets. I should have asked what success in this role would look like.

The fact I did none of these things came back to bite me hard because my lack of understanding of what I was being tasked with meant I was blind to all the warning signs that it would be a disaster.

They were right in front of me.

Virtually all the other men (it was only men) in the executive team didn’t want me there and I can understand why. I had no TV experience. What could I offer them? As a change agent (always a fraught position to be in), I’d been tasked with improving the network’s positioning with women externally, internally and on air. It soon became apparent to me that many of my colleagues didn't care about any of those things.

I was impotent – or whatever the female equivalent is. My ovaries were tied. In actual fact, it was my breasts, not my ovaries which were giving me grief. My daughter was still only six months old and breastfeeding her had been a disaster from the start. She thrashed around every time I tried to feed and it wasn’t until years later I realised she had silent reflux. Trying to stop her screams by flipping her from breast to breast every 30 seconds meant they were never emptied, which in turn led to crippling mastitis, an agonising infection inside the breast which also causes debilitating flu-like symptoms. I would collapse with high fevers, chills and uncontrollable shaking within hours of noticing a hot spot or pain in my breast and each time I had to take a 10-day course of antibiotics. It was a rolling chaos inside my body, day after day for months.

By the time I started in my new job, I was up to my 70th day of antibiotics in eight months but I refused to wean my daughter because I’d internalised the zealotry that formula is poison (it's not, stop making women feel like shit) and that I had to keep breastfeeding my baby at any cost.

Eventually, that cost became too high and to this day I’m furious with myself for persisting so long. It was a terrible situation for us both.

Where was I? Oh, this is a chapter about career and I’m telling you about breastfeeding. Welcome to the life of a working mother. It’s all here.

2. Make Sure The Culture Fit Is Right

As a magazine boss myself for the previous decade, I’d been able to determine my own working environment for my team, so I’d never thought much about culture.

Culture is, in fact, everything. If you are fundamentally unaligned with the culture of the company you work for, you can’t succeed. By this I mean you will not be happy. You won’t fit in. You’ll never be able to exhale. Every day will feel like you’re pushing sh*t uphill because you will be. Even if you’re really good at your job.

We’ve had some terrific people come through the door at Mamamia who we couldn’t hire or who didn't stay long because the culture fit wasn’t right. Let me be very clear: I’m not talking about culture in a literal sense. It’s not about your cultural or socio-economic background; it's not about being an extrovert or an introvert or what you wear or who you know. Culture in a workplace is about your attitude and how you work and interact with others. If you don't fit with the culture at a particular job, it doesn't necessarily mean you're not good at what you do or that the workplace is 'toxic'. I've noticed that word become really over-used when someone has a bad experience in a job. I've used it myself and I think it's incorrect. It just means you're not the right fit.

If you like a formal work environment, heavy on process and infrastructure, and feel most comfortable with predictable tasks and working hours, for example, you’re going to struggle at a start-up.

If you like wearing sequins, consider leopard print a neutral and have strong opinions about women, you’re going to struggle as an executive in commercial TV.

And I did.

I once had a sub-editor resign fromCosmobecause her priest told her working at a magazine that published sex information was inappropriate. "Wait, your priest said you have to quit your job?"I repeated incredulously. "Well, yes, and my bible group agrees," she said, nodding. "I’m sorry, I know it’s awkward, but it’s become a real problem for me at church."

"What if you didn’t work on any of the sex stories?" I offered, trying to salvage the situation because replacing good staff is a punish and I was disturbed by the prospect of a priest controlling the career path of a young woman.

She shook her head. "I have to choose between my church and working here. I’m sorry."

Similarly, at Mamamia, we once had a staff member resign because her religious family did not approve of her working for a company that published stories about abortion - even though she never had to write these stories herself.

That, friends, is called a culture clash. It's interesting that religion is the common thread in those two examples but there are dozens more I can think of where it's been far harder to pinpoint a single factor, it's more amorphous than that. Having experienced it both as an employee and as a manager though.....you can feel it pretty quickly.

Recognising this before you accept a job is obviously preferable for everyone but it's not always possible. The best thing to do when you realise the fit isn't right is to exit as gracefully as you can before things become too difficult because what I've learned over the years is that you can't expect an organisation to change their culture to accommodate you.

If a company is large enough, there can be different cultures in different parts of the business. When I was an editor, the company I worked for had dozens of magazines and each one had its own culture which was determined by the editor. The Women’s Weekly was different fromDolly, which was different from Wheels.

When I first became a boss at 24, I was clueless about all of this although I'd worked under both good and bad bosses which had informed the kind of boss I aspired to be. At the time, I hadn't consciously realised I was creating a culture but of course, that’s what you do as a mana