Depression & Unemployment: a bad combination
I’ve been trying to find the words for this post for literally the last month. Lots of things are still up in the air, but maybe writing this out will help me cope.
A little over a month ago I lost my job. There are so many things that went wrong from very early on after accepting that position and it really never got better. First of all, I took a significant pay cut and even though I was told during my interview that there would be opportunities for overtime, I was denied it when I asked. For 7 months I endured one of the most toxic work environments of my life. This was made harder by the fact that I actually, for the first time ever, truly enjoyed my job. I liked what I was doing, liked the majority of the people that I worked with, and didn’t really dread going in every day. In all honesty, there was only 1 major problem…
My boss.
The woman who hired me liked me… at first. After a few weeks of working there, I started to notice a shift in her behavior. She wasn’t talking to me as much and seemed snippy in her emails. I asked her if there was a problem or if I’d done something, and she never responded. My mid-March, after being there for about a month, I spent every day thinking I was going to get fired. When my 90 day/3 month probationary period was up, I was sick with anxiety that this was it. However, I was told that I was doing a good job. When asked if I had any concerns, I brought them up and was told, “It’s not personal. It’s my job to make sure things are done correctly.” Ok, fair enough. I tried to move past the attitude she was throwing my way.
As the weeks wore on, however, her attitude only got worse. Several more times I asked, “Have a done something? I’d really like to know,” and each and every time I was ignored. She and I even sat down with the head of the department for a mediation of sorts and were both told to meet the other person halfway. It was during this meeting that she finally explained she had been acting the way she was because of “pushback” she received from me. Ok, understandable… I guess. My issue with that was that she, as a manager, should have said something before it snowballed out of control. She, as a manager, should have pulled me aside at the first sign of “pushback” and said, “Hey, let’s talk about this.” Unfortunately, she did not.
After that meeting, I tried to be as perfect as I could but, as I said, she wouldn’t meet me halfway. On the contrary, things only got worse. By August I was now enduring gaslighting as well as being treated as though I wasn’t even in the room. When a person leaves for the day and says goodbye to every single individual person in the room and simply walks right past you as if you don’t exist… that’s personal.
I had long conversations with the a couple of close colleagues who couldn’t understand what her problem was, but they could see that she was treating me differently than everyone else. At one point I even saw a job posting for my job online and knew that things were never going to get better. This all came to a head in the middle of August when I received a scathing text message from her. I was at the office, she was on vacation, and she took it upon herself to berate me for something. After months of abuse from her, I simply lost it. I was thrown into a full-blown screaming, swearing, crying panic attack. Was it professional? No. Should I have gone into the bathroom or excused myself? Yes. However, it was late at night and there were only a few of us there (and I certainly wasn’t in the right state of mind) so I simply let it all out. Every person that I showed that text to in the weeks to follow told me that I shouldn’t have to deal with that kind of abuse.
3 weeks later I was fired.
On the day I was fired I was told that there was “no visible improvement of performance.” Translation? She doesn’t like me and despite my attempts to get on her good side, nothing was ever going to work. After she stepped out of the room, I asked the HR person for more information and was told, very simply, “I reviewed the emails.” Now, anyone who has ever sent any kind of electronic communication, be it email, text message, IM, etc., knows that 1) things can get lost in translation, and 2) it takes at least 2 people to communicate. There are always at least 2 sides of every conversation. So when I was told, “I reviewed the emails,” it didn’t make sense to me because all communication between me and my boss would have gone both ways. Unfortunately, given her higher position and reputation, her side was taken and her emails left out.
I was escorted out of the office and left with nothing but my word. My word against hers. For 7 months I endured increasing verbal abuse, toxicity, and gaslighting all because a grown adult couldn’t take 5 minutes to pull me aside and explain what I had done wrong. For the rest of my life, I will have a mark on my work history of being fired and will have to explain that it wasn’t my fault, but all I have is my word.
To say it’s been rough would be an understatement. Are there things I could/would have done differently had I known what would happen? Absolutely, but that’s easy to say about any situation once you’re on the other side of it. I’m a month removed so saying, “Oh I should have done xyz,” is easy, but it doesn’t change anything. My mental health took a nosedive and I was already in a pretty vulnerable state. Like I said… it’s been rough.
What does the future hold? I have absolutely no idea. I feel as though that’s a common theme of this blog and will probably continue to be so as long as I keep it running. The future is always going to be unwritten and even if we’d like to be able to predict how something is going to go, it never turns out how we picture it in our heads. If you had asked me back in February if I’d be sitting in my apartment jobless in October, I’d have said there’s no way… but here I am.
Everything we go through teaches us something, right? There are lessons even in the shittiest of circumstances. I left the insurance company because it simply wasn’t the work I wanted to be doing. I went to a non-profit that I thought would be good for me and turned out to be not so great after all. A non-profit that doesn’t fundraise or even understand how to treat people properly? Yeah, that was never going to work out. I left there and took the first job offered thinking I’d finally found the perfect fit and ended up in an even more toxic environment. When I look back at the last 3 years it’s easy to see where mistakes were made. Sometimes I wonder if I should have even come to New York at all. But here’s the thing…
Moving to NY is what I needed at the time that it happened. I needed a fresh start after years of chaos. Severing ties with the insurance company was one of the last things that would truly help me move on from my previous life. I started working for them the week before I moved in with my ex. In my mind, they were intrinsically connected. Each decision since then has simply been to get out of the current situation without any thought about what I might be getting myself into. In the end, all I did was just make things worse. As bad as this situations were, though, they showed me the type of environment that I can no longer tolerate.
As we inch closer to my 4 year anniversary of moving to NY, I can’t help but think back to the feelings I had when I was trying to move here. For months it felt like something was calling me to this city, drawing me in. I could never quite put my finger on it and 4 years later I’m still not sure I know what it was… or if I ever even found it. Maybe it’s still out there waiting for me to discover it, but every day that passes by and I find myself in the same situation, I can’t help but wonder where it all went wrong.
I always pride myself on being honest in this blog so I’m not going to sugarcoat anything. My life is hard and it’s very rare when it’s not. I do have things to be grateful for and I’ll never take those for granted, but with each passing day it’s getting harder and harder. I’ve been honest with friends when I’ve said the only thing keeping me going right now is my cat. If it weren’t for Mojo, well… maybe I won’t go that in depth here. Let’s just say that there are more bad days than good ones, more times when I want to give up than keep going. It’s definitely getting more difficult to find those reasons to not give up.
I know I usually end every blog with some kind of positive spin, but it’s hard to find that right now and I don’t want to just serve fake platitudes to appease people. This is my life and most of the time it really sucks. There’s no magic potion to turn back time or knight on horseback to whisk me away from everything. All I can hope is that maybe, someday, things will get better.
- Danielle
