Then I worked in D.C. for 8 years under an out-of-control diabetic who was sitting in a supervisory position due to nepotism. Getting screamed at and having my livelihood and well-being threatened daily has repercussions, I guess. Who knew?
I found out some things:
I'm both more tough that I knew and not nearly as tough as I believed.
As opposed to it as I am, suicide IS in fact something I will contemplate if the going gets tough enough.
Removing oneself from a problem is only half the work. Removing the problem from oneself is the rest - and much harder going.
Love -while wonderful and supportive - doesn't conquer all, and it isn't nearly enough on its own to help in truly abusive situations.
Earning a living should not require one's sanity, and yet it often does in our modern world.
"Just change jobs!" I was told. I worked on that. Tried changing departments. That got thwarted by said sup. Tried changing agencies and even sent applications into the private sector.Same deal. I found out when a very nice woman from another agency's HR dept. called me to tell me (unofficially of course) what was going on. My supervisor was saying all the very carefully phrased bullet-points to let prospective employers know that I was utterly unemployable. This woman thought I should know, because she had a friend I worked with who told me about the job -who had told her about me. You see, in order to change jobs my employment had to be verified. LOC had an unofficial policy of having supervisors handle that little task. Yes, they had an HR department that like all agencies in our austerity-era of governmental mismanagement has been gutted to a handful of over-worked bureaucrats who don't dare to blink without someone higher-up's approval for fear of losing their livelihoods in a depression economy. Thus, my supervisor - my tormentor - was the gateway to my escape.
That worked about as well as you'd imagine. She finally drove me to the point where my doctor broke confidentiality and called my life partner's into the office with us and told them quite baldly that the stress was quite literally killing me. My hair had mostly fallen out at that point, and despite sweeping dietary and life-changes at home, nothing was able to keep my blood sugar under control. I'd broken under the strain of supervisory bullying. If I'd been military, they'd have section-eighted my ass. As it was I had one of the fastest retirement processings that many of my fellow employees had heard of (I was told that the only one they knew of in recent history that was faster was a man who was so terminally ill that he died 3 weeks after they rushed it through).
So, here I am. More than one year has passed since I retired and moved far away from that place. My life is awesome now. You'd think that would have fixed things. In some ways, it did. My health is on the mend. My hair is growing back and my blood sugar is better able to be controlled.
Which is why I resent the hell out of days like this. I can't sit on the porch today. Its too open, too scary, too. . .exposed. Inside the house is good. Its quiet. Its safe. I was sitting on the porch in the sunshine with my coffee and started sweating (nervous, not heat) and shaking a little. I went in and . . .it stopped. So, today I'm here. I didn't wake up in a panic. Oddly enough, those are easier to deal with. I wake up panicked that I have to go to work, take a few deep breaths, make a cuppa and by the time I'm done drinking that coffee and lecturing myself on why I'm being a ninny, I'm fine. When I wake up happy and the panic sneaks up, it's different. It is harder to shake when it sneaks up on me like that. I don't really know why.
What I do know is that for an irrational reason, I can't leave my house today. Not even to sit on my screened in porch in the sunshine and listen to the birds. This was not part of me before. It is now. I don't know exactly how to get rid of it. Working on it, but no idea what I'm doing or if anything will work. I refuse to give up and let this rule me. Tomorrow - come hell or high water - I will leave my house and deal with the bullshit no matter what. For today . . .today I'm at home. Home is good, but only for today.
