sleeping forever
My coworker is a final boss triggering my trauma with my mother. There are so many similarities there, even down to the age.
I have had to be the one to give in to keep the peace, the one dancing around someone’s minefield, the one never allowed to talk about what bothers me or my feelings in general without drawing further abuse to me. I had to take it all, bottle it up, never defend myself, never fight back. Otherwise, I’d be threatened with being kicked out (even as a pre-teen), threats against my possessions, withheld food and more. All at home before I moved out.
And I’ve been experiencing a similar issue for years from this person now, at work. Now it’s not familial ties and the dependence that puts me under pressure to mold myself around their outbursts and bite my tongue - now it’s the professionalism expected at work, and knowing she is the one occasionally substituting during my days off, or is the one that signs off on PTO before the supervisor does. It’s knowing we’ll have to run into each other weekly, still. It’s knowing that if I stoop as low, she’ll go lower, and maybe drag others in, too.
It’s crazy to realize that I think about all that - the effect it would have on the work climate, on my reputation, about what would make the situation better or worse - while she doesn’t give a fuck about any if these things. I write this in my freetime, she probably doesn’t think about me off the clock, either.
She has already done it to a handful of other people, she never faced consequences and never will, and she doesn’t care that she’s being known as a difficult character people are annoyed by. She literally has nothing to lose, especially well-off and 5 years away from retirement. She knows she won’t be fired either way for anything, and I think she’s good at teetering the line of being very unacceptable, but not enough to justify proceedings to remove her, as we are periodically understaffed anyway and would struggle to find a replacement; not due to skills, just due to the number of people even applying and wanting to do the job.
I sadly do have to think about it all outside office hours because I need to plan my future, about my mental health, about my next move. I want to escape her, and that needs a lot more planning and commitment than her temper does.
I can’t work somewhere where the same person is exhausting and harassing everyone and flying completely off the handle twice a year and specifically treating me the worst out of everyone. This can’t repeat every year.
I hate that my mind immediately goes to just wanting to fall asleep and never wake up, or at least not for a long time. A remnant of always immediately thinking of killing myself at the slightest bit of resistance, because of everything else I was already dealing with back then. Similarly to how you can feel numb experiencing traumatic stuff, but after it happens, drop a pen and break down crying.
I’ve healed since then, now I don’t wanna be dead, I want to live. I wanna still exist, I want to have the ability to come back and wake up, and I don’t want anyone to grieve me. But I don’t wanna be conscious. I wanna make it all stop. I don’t want to have to try and think of other ways to make the bullying stop, of other ways to get moved to other teams, other work projects to ask for, to be denied another cross-department transfer, or to keep searching for other jobs online and coming back emptyhanded.
It’s not only exhausting and sad, but it also feels bad to run out of options and feel like an animal backed into a corner. It feels bad knowing I am a great worker, passionate, interested, quick learner, wanting to grow, cherished by (other) coworkers and my superiors, but it all still meaning nothing because the job market is bad and I’m still here because I have no other choice.
Judging the way I work, the qualifications and what I aim for and the praise I get from others, I should never even be in the position to have to continue to go to a place that wastes my talents, wastes my time, and exposes me to extreme mistreatment. But it still happens.
I fool myself constantly, counting up all the good things about the job, remembering all kinds of horror stories online about other workplaces, and thinking “It’s not that bad, you should be grateful” and telling myself it will get worse elsewhere. But whenever I tell others, they say my workplace is crazy and they couldn’t work there, and a nice coworker that started two years ago, who was so grateful and happy for the first year, has been ground to a pulp by now and wants to leave as well. She had to drop out of her parttime studies and is much more sick than she used to be, she says. She looks tired and done. So maybe I’m not crazy, and it really is bad.
It’s because this is my first proper fulltime job, and I’ve been here for 7 years. It’s hard to leave when it’s all you’ve ever known, and have gotten used to the bad and rely on the good.
Please universe, help me. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know the way, and I feel lost. All the roads lead nowhere. I need guidance.