Emoting

I won’t bother to go into all of the details, suffice to say there are a lot. Instead I will bullet point the last month of my life and attempt to capture the gist of why I am now going into work and coping by disassociating and then binging uncontrollably at home.

• Co-worker verbally attacks another co-worker in my presence
• Same co-worker makes a very inappropriate, creepy remark to me on Valentine’s Day (day after verbal attack).
• I stew for a couple of days, what to do, what to do….
• I decide to document the event with HR- I explicitly say I do not want this to turn into WWIII, I just want it on record in case he does it again or does it to someone else.
  HR immediately launches into action, disregarding my request completely.
• I document, I tell the story, once, twice, fifty times.
• People are called into meetings.
• Tension abounds.
• I call in sick, but I’m not physically sick, I’m emotionally sick, anxious with the entire goings on.
  i. I call HR and tell them this is all impacting me negatively.
• Co-worker is fired.
• Friend quits job after 2 hour interrogation. They have read all of her e-mails and pegged her as workplace poison.
• I am next.
• Two days later I am called into HR. My e-mails are brought before me. They have been investigating me. I still don’t know why or how that came about, but I suppose turn about is fair play? Anyway, they zeroed in on snotty e-mails between me and friend wherein we joke at the expense of others.
• Please note: these snotty e-mails were not exactly cutting a wide swath through the company. Five people were targeted with our “workplace poison” including the sexual harasser (only after he sexually harassed me, mind you). The other four breakdown as follows: my manger, a useless pantsload. And two co-workers of my friend that are notoriously irritating and condescending. The final snotty e-mail was a one off, wherein I called a fucking idiot a fucking idiot.
  i. Oh, and the e-mail I sent to my friend explaining that I wasn’t really sick on the day I called in, but feeling like shit with everything and using the day to gather up my emotional strength to make it through the rest of the week in the middle of a sexual harassment investigation, wherein someone else’s job was at stake.
• I was given a letter of reprimand for my crimes, a letter which will stay on my employment record for two years.
  Note to self: Don’t trust anyone.
  

I have been through the wringer and I know where I went wrong (though shall not diss thy co-workers, especially not on company e-mail). But other than doing something 90% of people do I don’t really have much to be sorry about around my own behaviour. I took responsibility for it, I’ll never do it again and I’m genuinely sorry for using the company e-mail inappropriately. But I feel betrayed. Let’s just put it out there. I came to them and asked them to document a situation which I felt I could work with (as long as I knew I had a documented safety net behind me) and instead of listening to me and respecting my wishes they turned a tense situation into a scorched earth situation. (Tally: 1 person fired because of this, 1 person quit and the person who made the sexual harassment allegation {me} reprimanded for inappropriate e-mail use. Nice).

But this isn’t about who did what. This is about how I feel. How I’m coping. Or not coping. Or coping in a way that’s destructive.

To get myself into work and to accomplish anything I have numb myself, so that by the time I get to those elevators all trace of the person I really am, how wronged I feel and how angry I am, are gone. In order to do that I have to sublimate every natural impulse I have, which is to stay home, to yell at them, to send a snotty e-mail to a friend pointing out all their failings as human beings, to say something snide to a friend about how fucked up the place is, but most of all, to leave. All of these impulses, which are essentially healthy, given the situation, have to be shut down. All day long. For eight hours I have to make my face a blank mask that doesn’t betray my despair, my seething rage or my hurt. For eight hours I have to pretend I’m not counting the seconds until I get another call about another job or arrange another interview/writing test. For eight hours I have to pretend I’m happy to be there, that I’m okay with being there and that I accept that they have a right to read e-mails, written during a period of duress, accept the conclusions they have drawn about me and the situation, and meekly accept my punishment. Eight hours of eating shit.

I don’t do well with that, especially since I feel as if I’ve been eating shit for a while now.

But again, this isn’t about them. It’s about me. I have to keep reminding myself of that, I have to stop myself from telling the story. The story isn’t really that important, the Meta story is. The Meta story is the key here. The Meta story is this: I’m in a shitty situation. One in which most people would chew their own toes off to get out of as soon as possible and I am still there, biding my time, playing nice, secretly seething. I don’t actually know if I have any right to feel as wronged as I do, but I feel it and since I feel it shouldn’t I quit, shouldn’t I completely pull up stakes and say fuck you I’m outta here? Is it smart, strategic, to stay until I have another job? And more central even than that is this: why is it that when I am in an untenable situation I not only stay and try to make it work, but I punish myself.

It’s the self-punishment aspect of all of this that scares me. I am doing a lot of this to myself. I have been unhappy there for a while and trying to get out since Octoberish. (hence my snotty e-mails beginning in October according to HR, at least they got the timing right, though the lions share of the reprimand-able e-mails came during the month long investigation period, funny, wouldn’t that be when I was most upset and most needing to vent?). Why did I stay as long as I did and is there a part of me that knew it would have to come to a head like this in order for me to leave?

I’ve never actually cleanly left a job. I’ve never actually left a person or a situation without it being a big thing. (Well, Emma Shram I left without much ado but somehow that doesn’t feel like a sufficient example). I have always held on to things long past their expiry date and stayed and stayed out of a sense of obligation, while also knowing that my seething hatred was crushing me and the other person at the same time. So I bring about these situations where I get to leave with a sense of righteous hatred or I slink away, slapped for my misconduct (coping mechanisms while in a shitty situation). But I never just make a clean break. Let’s look at all my dirty breaks:

• My mother- too much history to sum up in on sentence. Let’s just say it was the mother of nasty break-ups.
• Jen K- never told her straight up that I’d moved on so I avoided her instead.
• Dawn G- never told her how upsetting/hurtful her behaviour was.
• Michelle M- Fired me and broke up on bad terms, similar to this work situation, there were misdeeds all around, all of which could have been avoided if I’d just left sooner.
• V-Day ladies- I would scale a wall with my teeth to avoid running into one of these women. They disrespected me and used me and I hate them for thinking badly of me.
• A K- similar, but not, strange time for me, tainted by M. But I was in the middle of wanting to escape CC and it was a very triggering event for me.
• Tommy’s taxi- lied about starting school to quit there.
• Alan- should have just told him he was a racist pig in the first place and moved on.
  

I don’t want to get into blame the victim thing here, but how much of this would have been prevented if I’d just left? But then common sense cuts in. How exactly could I leave if I didn’t have another job? I mean, that’s stupid. So how can I blame myself for staying? But then again, I could have tried harder to get out as soon as I realized it was getting to that point where I feel taken advantage of and bitter.

(Note to self: When you start to feel taken advantage of and bitter, take drastic measures to get the fuck out of that situation. More on that later.

Alright. I’m trying to get away from the self-destructiveness thing and am going to the gym for a bit. I’ll write more later.