It's me. Hi, I'm the problem. It's me...Or is it?
Like most people, I am far from perfect, and I am the first to admit this. However, I've not so secretly noticed that I tend to blame my situation or environment when things are going not so well. The classic story where I've seen this play out over and over in my life, over the last decade, is that of the terrible job. If you live in NYC and live an unfulfilling life working in the tech startup space, this is probably not an uncommon story.
For me, the source of terror usually stemmed from conflicts with people who were managing me or with whom I was closely working. People often attribute this to young founders or highly competent individual contributors becoming people managers overnight without any proper training or experience. In some ways, for me, this has felt like an overwhelmingly challenging scenario because I consider myself to be a thoughtful and empathetic person who has pretty good EQ and so the constancy of interpersonal conflict was extra taxing. Second, there are many things you can control in your life, but other people and how they think or behave, is not one of them. I will also add that there was the typical tech startup backdrop of white, male, frat boy persona dominating the culture that just made everything worse.
To be clear, from a purely objective perspective, I do think I have been in some incredibly difficult and straight up toxic jobs. I say this because the average tenure in those workplaces were under a year and the majority of people on those teams had negative experiences and made both informal and formal complaints to management regarding those team leaders. I think it's fair to say that when most people agree that a particular person is the problem that there is some validity to that.
To top it off, there were aspects of each individual's personality that especially clashed with my personality, as well as values, that created a truly challenging environment for me to work in. I felt like I could never be my authentic self without potentially putting myself in the danger zone.
While acknowledging that those were some wild situations to be in--especially in the first few years of my career--I don't think I was able to see and acknowledge the role I played in contributing to those conflicts. I truly felt like a righteous victim who was being bullied or existing at the whims of unreasonable individuals. I felt like I had no power or control over my own life. It's hard to separate work from you and your life when you spend most of your life at work and your entire schedule is centered on work. However, it was me who let the stress from work dictate my life. I let that conflict be the strongest force influencing my day-to-day. So, it's no surprise that those years felt unbelievably miserable and unbearable. I was twenty-four years old and dealing with unexplainable body aches and headaches, forcing me to pop Advil daily just to get through the day. I woke up each day feeling like I had been hit by a bus and surprised I was still alive and functioning. I had brain fog, was anxious all the time, and was tired no matter how much I slept. I ended up going to a rheumatologist and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which is a condition where you have musculoskeletal pain throughout the body, as well as constant fatigue, issues with sleep, mood, and memory.
I ended up taking a medical leave for three months shortly after having been hospitalized twice in the ER within a week. During that time, my fibromyalgia lifted and I no longer had the unrelenting pain radiating throughout my body. When my leave was about to expire, I thought long and hard about whether or not I should go back to work. I had received another job offer during that time, but did not feel it was the right next step. So, I decided to go back. And this time, things improved...partially because the person who had managed me was no longer my manager and so the conflict seemingly dissipated, but also because I decided to care less. Given the fragility I felt my health was still in, I just went with the flow of things. I felt less need to resist and do things the way I wanted...in short, I stopped caring. That seemed to fix 70% of things. Within a year of returning, I ended up applying to and getting into graduate school and I left that last job. I went on a two week vacation and when I came back, I gave my notice and left three weeks later.
The underlying question for me has been: am I the problem? After meeting the first bad manager, I thought it's definitely this dude. The second bad manager at the same company, I thought, wow...this company is something else. After switching jobs and having a third bad manager, I was starting to think the problem was me. After all, I was either very unlucky or I was the one with the issue. It seemed like no matter where I went, I ended up under the worst possible managers. I spent a lot of time in therapy processing this question and I think the answer is both. As I stated above, objectively, these were less than ideal situations that multiple people were also experiencing. On the other hand, I let these experiences affect my mental and physical health in ways that other people were not experiencing. I let these unlucky and crappy situations affect the most important parts of my life and that's on me. This story continues on and I'll share more in my next post, but I do think there is something about this story being a part of my karma and the thing that I'm supposed to grapple with in my career to lead me down a certain path.
To wrap up, I want to reflect on a few things that I learned in the first part of my career through all the chaos. First, we cannot control how we feel, but we can choose how much to let our emotions and surrounding impact us. We can learn to let go of the noise outside of us...because whether or not we like it, it's just there and will continue regardless of how much importance we give it. Second, there will always be conflict, especially interpersonal conflict. It's a guaranteed outcome of human interaction. Learning how to navigate it, coexist with it, and ultimately not let it dictate our lives is a skill that we can learn how to hone over time. Third, blame is not helpful. It was neither helpful to blame or complain about those people. It also wasn't helpful to blame myself. Attributing blame doesn't solve the issue nor does it make anyone feel better. Move onto something that either helps you feel better or resolves the problem. Don't waste your life being stuck in the wallowing emotions that blame creates.
It will soon be close to four years since I left that toxic job, but I still find myself thinking about those days and writing about them here. I guess it's a testament to how hard those times were and how much they have shaped the anxiety and fears I still grapple with today. I want to let go of those years, to clear the energy they have taken up, and to open up this upcoming year with a more resilient version of myself that is able to withstand any unlucky situation that I might happen upon.