Saturday, August 13, 2011
Internal sadness – almost a suicidal feeling … internal loneliness.
Am I flawed? It sure feels like it. People hate me!
Do I take things too personally? Why am I so sensitive – so highly sensitive? Why do I feel so sad right now?
I am taking my meds. I’ve not missed a beat. Yet, I still feel down.
Maybe it’s just more disappointment than anything. I don’t know.
Maybe I just need to get back to my much needed counseling sessions. I need to talk, and I really need someone to hear me because really … no one does.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Agitation … irritability … a need to fulfill … loneliness.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Okay, but then dejected … questioning whether I am good at my job. Maybe I am just mediocre at best.
Don’t feel good anymore about my efforts. Haven’t felt good in a long time.
First night to the start of a new assignment and job year. It’s okay, but I feel like I’m hiding behind a glare of sadness.
How much longer? How much longer?
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Completely exhausted … so tired that my body forced me into a nap.
Annoyed that life isn’t all that I wish it could be.
Realization that I don’t really have anybody to turn to … to vent to.
Who’s there for me?
If that’s what love really is .. goodness!!
There’s an underlying sadness … a sinking feeling. But more than anything, I’m just tired.
An Unrecorded Date In August
Demoted on the job!
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then
The above references are some days of my life in August 2011. I was so much younger then … 12 years younger. The memory of the feelings of that time are vague, but I do know what I was going through just from the short excerpts I’ve reread. Usually my journal writing is a lot more detailed because I always typed my thoughts since it was a lot faster to do so.
In this particular month, I had received a journal as a gift and decided to use it to record my feelings while on the job. I remember dealing with an acute sense of sadness that I couldn’t easily get over at the time. I had felt that I had been demoted in regards to my work assignment. So I didn’t feel good about anything at that time at all. Yet, the truth of the matter is that no one at work was communicating with me. I was being given the silent treatment. At the time, I didn’t understand why, and I was somewhat oblivious.
By this point in my career, I was in my 13th year at this jobsite. Yet, overall, I had 18 years of work experience in my profession. Although I may not have out of this world talent in my profession, I prided myself in the work that I did on the job. I was dedicated, and even when I didn’t like many aspects of the work, I showed up strong, and I did my best. With the exception of frivolous workplace drama and the subtilties of bullying that I experienced that were actually growing more aggressive with time, I enjoyed my career.
Yet, it was this particular week that I had learned that my job assignment was no longer the same. Unlike everyone else who found out their job assignments at least two weeks in advance before returning from vacation, I reported to work that Monday still not knowing a thing. No one had bothered to reach out to me via email or any other communication, and when I made it a point to ask anyone who had the ability to tell me, no one responded to me. It was as if I didn’t’ exist.
It was this particular week that I had returned to work to find my work area in disarray and that the long time I’d spent organizing and decluttering my area prior to taking my vacation had all been for nothing. Instead of the neatly put away items I’d placed in storage, I returned to find my area had become a wasteland for thievery and someone with a penchant for destruction of my property.
Someone had sabotaged my entire workspace, stolen some of my belongings along with some valuable property belonging to the employer, and completely destroyed my set organization. Even though I wasn’t even aware of my new job assignment, I already had a feeling of demotion. Nothing felt worse. The pain was instant and deep. I had to reorganize, pack and move things to a new assigned location, and I only had a week to do it.
As if that wasn’t the worst of my troubles for the week, my new assigned location had not even been cleaned or moved out of by the former inhabitant. The former inhabitant was actually a supervisor. They took their sweet time doing anything to assist in clearing out their things so that I could be free to move into the location. I knew that everyone was busy, but so was I.
Although I attempted to work around the mess, I couldn’t get much accomplished and lost a lot of valuable time. I had to remain after work overtime until the custodians ended their shifts so I could get things done. Meanwhile, everyone else left at the normal ending work time, including the supervisor who never removed their things from my newly assigned location.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was undergoing a hidden form of bullying and gaslighting by a group of menacing colleagues. These were some of the same colleagues who later played a part in the plan for my demise when a narcissist I dub The Professional Gaslighting Narcissist poisoned my food. If only I had viable proof back then, maybe this narcissistic vulture and their cronies would have faced harsh consequences, but I was so blind and unaware of what was going on with them.
They were all so good at playing coy with me while gaslighting and stonewalling me at the same time. They were all so great at dismissing me while pretending in front of others to show me great support. I can only call that particular week I’ve showcased from my journal as a week from hell. It sounds like an exaggeration, I know, but you would have had to be there to experience it like I did. There was nothing pleasant about it. Time was a constraint that I didn’t have, and the lack of support and communication from those I needed from to make my week successful as well as do my job effectively were nonexistent.
I couldn’t even gain the comfort I needed when I arrived home from work each day of that time frame because I wanted to die. I was in anguish. I seriously pondered over reasons to continue living. I didn’t understand what was going on even though I felt a cutting divisiveness set against me. When I couldn’t find the tears to cry on the outside, I could feel them flow within me on the inside. I numbed myself to get through the week, and I prayed some serious spiritual warfare prayers to sustain myself for what felt like a horrendous battle.
At the time, I was taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, but I felt worse off than what I felt was normal for even me at the time. I was in my sixth year of beginning to feel better and didn’t feel as if I was any longer in a thick quagmire of depression. I hadn’t taken stock that narcissistic individuals surrounding me caused me to leap back into a dark hole, but I was aware that I was agitated and irritable. I also felt lonely in my struggles.
My only outside solace in dealing with narcissistic behavior on the job was talking to a narcissist outside of the job with whom I didn’t having a working relationship. At the time, however, that just didn’t mesh for me. I was having a difficult time dealing with outside narcissists too. I didn’t want to talk to any of them about my problems. They’d only add to them. Strangely, this was something I was coming to realize about these personalities … that they only added to my stress.
Other than the PGN, there were three other narcissists I balanced relationships with in my life – The Identity Thief, The Most Wonderful Narc of Them All, and Mr. Charm! Yes, they are all narcissists – not just narcissistic in nature. They are narcissists to the core, and they were all in my life at the same time during this hellish period of darkness. I only managed to gain some light by not being around them. So, no, they were not people I wanted to talk to about any of my problems, especially when they contributed to them.
So, as you can see, I really had no one to talk to which is the reason I took my journal to work to jot my thoughts down when I had a break to do so. It was a form of release, albeit a small one, but I could release myself in some way and move forward with my work. As the week drudged on and into the next week, I was completely worn down and broken. By the end of that week, I remember crying silent tears as I stood in one area of my new work area still having a great deal of work to do that would take away my ability to relax over the weekend.
Everyone I had asked for assistance had turned me away with the exception of one person. Despite some being busy with their own work, four people promised to help me because of the predicament I was in that was no fault of my own. Only one of the four helped, and that was the main flying monkey to the PGN. The two supervisors (including the one who still had items in the location that I needed to inhabit) and the PGN all promised their help to but never delivered. I worked to get everything done alone.
In fact, the PGN came into my office, saw my distress and stood glaring at me through glassy, hate-filled eyes with a half-smirk on their face. They still didn’t help me. Nor did they seem to recall the helped they had already promised to give me. Then later, the PGN reported to the main supervisor that I seemed poised to resign my position if the damage that had placed me several days behind schedule was not rectified even though I’d never voiced any complaints to them or anyone else.
When I remember the PGN’s glare, it suddenly occurred to me in that moment how they had lied about helping me. They had literally never lifted a finger to help me at all and had no intentions of doing so. They had actually been non-existent during my entire ordeal for that entire week. It was only after I was left alone at work past the normal working hours to finish things up had the PGN emerged to show their face, smirk and then leave. They seemingly took pleasure in my predicament.
If I recall correctly, I stopped speaking to the PGN for a while because I became so busy with my work that I just tuned them out. I wasn’t punishing them with the silent treatment like they had done to meme, I was taking a break from their drama. There had come a tiny realization to me that maybe the PGN was more of an enemy to me than a colleague and friend, but I was too busy to worry about it. I also worked a part time job. So I was just unavailable to even care at the time.
I recall how this changed the trajectory for me because I had given myself two weeks to remain on the job provided that God’s will was to change things for me. I didn’t give God an ultimatum, but I did plead with Him to enable me to successfully and effectively complete my job assignment as a sign that I was to stay. I had long felt that God had led me to the position. So I wanted to complete it. If it was over, then it was over.
Needless to say, those days in August during my life were a struggle. I struggled to live. I struggled to want to show up for work during that time. I felt a sense of demotion because even the supervisors had failed to inform me of my new job assignment. I literally had to figure it out by a process of elimination. I basically assigned myself the job for the year without any comments from the supervisors.
No one said a word even after I emailed the supervisors about my not knowing my assignment. The lack of response to me was very telling. Nonetheless, I documented everything and prepared myself in case I needed a lawyer. Fortunately, I had enough foresight and experience to know that contacting human resources about this situation would not work in my favor. I had been down such a road before when I was being stalked and harassed by a colleague years before. It was my documentation of proof that my supervisors at that time had done nothing to help protect me against a stalker that helped to change workplace policy.
So in this case, I just continued gathering documentation regarding the subtle micro-aggressions and narcissistic behaviors enacted against me by this mob of colleagues. I figured with enough documentation, I could work against this group to change policy again. Unfortunately, this never materialized because workplace bullying is hard to prove and can include a vast array of situations. Some workers find it difficult to understand, particularly if they don’t experience it. Plus, calling attention to it meant uprooting everything and everyone since bullying was a practice that nearly everyone was participant in some way or turned their heads away from.
For the most part, those days in my life from a portion of my journal is indeed a blast from a very difficult past that I am still working to reckon with because of the emotional damage it caused me. There’s that feeling of rejection I need to work through regarding the sadness I felt at being bullied in a way that was unrecognizable to anyone else on the surface (except by the ones who knew they were bullying me). Not being able to prove what had occurred to me was even more bothersome because such abuses as gaslighting and stonewalling are types of emotional abuses not easily seen or identified by others.
So, I walked out one day at a time and often one moment at a time by sharing bits and pieces of myself regarding my thoughts and feelings in my journal. I needed to make it through despite the difficulties I faced each day. I didn’t have anyone else really. I thought I had God, and for the most part, I believed He was a listening ear. I believe I gained guidance and strength enough to stand. But as far as an actual person to stand by and support me, there was no one. Everyone around me were all narcissistic in nature and playing into the plan of one person.
I am so glad I finally wised up and left that workplace environment. It’s just too bad I have to learn from too many lifelong experiences before I actually did so. Better late than never, however. Yet, now, I can see just how miserable my life was surrounded by the wrong people. They didn’t care about me at all, but that is the idea of work. We work with colleagues. We shouldn’t get the idea that they should care. That’s actually asking a bit too much. I wish it weren’t that way, but it just is in so many cases of people’s lives.
My Voice Unchained 