Gaslighting at Work

On this day  16, December, 2024 at 17:16

I JUST posted a photo of the gift I received from my job in recogition of 5 years of service. No one interacted with the post.

This isn't a shocker to me though. I've been getting gas lit at work pretty heavily since I got back to work following my last accident.

On the day before my birthday, I had ordered myself the latest and greatest mobile device that money could buy, in my eyes at least, a Galaxy Fold 5. On my way to the Best Buy to pick up the phone I got in the accident that would break my back for the second time of 2023. I was less than a mile away from my home. It was at least a week before I fully came to.

The medical staff had decided to lower my pain meds to see how I would tolerate the broken sacrum. In case you don't have a medical degree, that's the bone/bones that connect your pelvis to your spine. When I came to there were two people from physical therapy, who informed me that they were here to help me to sit up. Nothing big, just raise the back of the bed ever so slightly.

Suddenly, it was like suddenly the world had become overexposed by a camera flash as everything turned white and I heard my body scream the most heart wrenching sound I can recall myself ever making. It felt like they had dipped me in boiling oil from the waist down except the pain was everywhere, it was everything.

 In that moment, I felt that this pain was all I would ever know again, and with that in mind you won't need to wonder why I asked my surgeon for a DNR before she operated on my back. I said with a completely straight face to my doctor, "If anything goes wrong, I just want you to let me go!" and she proceeded to laugh at my "joke."

Back at the hospital with my sadistic "physical therapists. "in hindsight, I know that they were doing their jobs but I couldn't comprehend that in the moment. After a few seconds of the most visceral call for help my body could muster, nurses came rushing in from the hallway. Someone goes, "It's alright, he's with PT." And I'm not  entirely sure if this actually happened of something that  came to me in a morphine dream, but I remember quite briskly saying "no, it is not all right. Help me now! Help me please! These people are trying to kill me." At which point a nurse appears with a syringe filled with relief, and a warm cozy blanket, and a mother's love,  and I suppose a bit of morphine. We shall return to this subject soon.

I can recall coming back around just a few more times prior to the surgery.

One memory, seared permanently to my memory is when I was taken for an X-Ray. I was still pretty high from the morphine and only half conscious. The x-ray tech was alone but I didn't mind. When we got to the room to do the x-ray, the tech goes to move me from my gurney to the x-ray bed. Alone. I was still in La La Land when reality slapped me harder than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth. Looking back on this incident, it seemed careless and reckless, at the very least, to have this one man trying to transfer me between these two beds; at most, in hindsight, it felt intentional. Who approved this? I was so traumatized from that experience that when it came time for me to be transferred again for my MRI, I started to cry as we were getting closer to the bed that I was to be transferred to. I was so afraid that when the time came for the transfer, I grasped the tech's arm and I stared with tears in my eyes and I pleaded with him for my life, as though he were my executioner. That is how traumatized I was from that first experience. He had had someone to help him already but I could tell that my terror of something that would be mundane or even innocuous to the next person, had moved him. He got two more people to help and they moved me as gingerly as the could placing me down slowly onto the MRI table. I thanked, him vociferously, with tears still in my eyes. As I reminisce on this,  I wonder if I should be talking to a mal-practice attorney.

I'm not completely sure when I became this unwelcomed person on my team. If I am honest with myself, though, I'm not surprised by this. Part of true growth is the ability to take a deep and searching self-inventory of yourself. As you are doing this self-inventory, it is important not to dwell on any one thing for too long. The goal is to essentially answer the question "Who am I?"

You want to take into account all of your positive qualities and your negative qualities (it helps to ask someone that is close to you and is also a safe person for you. They should be able to be honest with you but also treat such a delicate topic with the necessary sensitivity to ensure that  you'll still have a relationship afterward). When you've completed your self-inventory you should have a list which you can then analyze and then decide how you would move forward. What's more, the lsit should present an somewhat objective picture of you in what ever area of your life you are inventorying.

In my case, for work, I was mostly very proud of the work I had done with my current employer.

I was orginally hired as a contract employee on a 6-month term. It did not take long for me to fall in love with the company. Every year since I began there and before, this company has consistently ranked amoung the 100 best places to work and in those early days, I absolutely felt that. On top of that, they paid very well for the easiest hourly IT position I had taken on, to date. 90% of the work was asking external customers to click forgot password, or asking if they had cleared their cache and cookies recently, as the team supported the companies proprietary websites.

I sought out to prove my value to the team almost immediately. I worked hard to become the top performing member of  team, on the individual contributor level. My annual performance reviews were glowing and the team was growing.  It wasn't long before the team started growing, so when our team lead, who was hired around the same time as me (we were super close in those days), was promoted to supervisor, leaving the team lead position vacant. I was highly encouraged to apply and I really wanted it. I poured myself into being the best analyst that I could be.

When it came time for interviews, it was me and one of my coworkers, who were in the running for the position. He was good, but not as good as me IMO, but I'm probably a tad bit biased. I felt my interview went well, there were some rocky moments but I felt I was able to end on a high-note.

Decision day came, and it wasn't me. I wasn't surprised by this simply because the other guy lived close to HQ vs. me who lived 400 miles away and he had a better rapport with the team, as he was one of the first to be hired when the team was formed. It was a good decision and I respected it, but inside I was devastated. How could they not see the value I tried everyday to add to our little team?

Despite me not getting the lead position, our leadership continued, to invest in me by putting me through KCS training through the HDI corporation. It's a very intuitive method for running any type of service desk team. So besides, our now supervisor, I was the first on the team to complete both the offered trainings and be promoted in quick succession from KCS0 to KCS 2 and then KCS Coach. I was proud of my accoumplishments but these victories felt a bit hollow. These KCS promotions did not come with any formal promotions or raises, but they did come with increased responsibility and additional tasks, that at the time I was more than happy to do but in hindsight I was not properly compensated for. In fact besides when I got hired on it December of 2019, it was nearly 3 years before I received another raise, despite the paid and unpaid (I was so stupid, never do this)  work that I was putting in.

Fast forward to the present and we find me, having been employed now for 5.5 years with this company. During those 5 years I've been on protected FMLA leave 5 times. 4 of those times were to spend some time at the luxury resort and spa (rehab).  By the time that I was off to detox and then homelessness during the 4th leave, the cracks had more than began to show. I'm sure that everyone could see it, but they were all too nice to say anything to my face.

When I returned after the 4th leave, following a night in jail and  a court appearance, having to post bail for the first time in my life, a quick 3 day detox from the alcohol and a mad dash to find a place to live after the awful lie that Freddy told  that left me homeless due to Ariona's DV law, and despite all odds somehow managing to pull myself out of those trenches for another opportunity to make more fuck-ups. Becuause life withiout fuck-ups would be boring. But I write this in the hopes that someone doesn't have to make quite as many fuck-ups as I have in my 35 years round the sun.

In the initest in laying the groundwork for conclusions that I later came to, it's important for you to understand my relationship with work and how I came from top of the heap to bottom of the barrell. We will return to the incident that this blog is named for very soon

I don't want to pack too muxh into this post so suffice it to say keep and eye out for part 2.