Reflections At Midnight (Part One)

 

(Side Note)

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while and at the time of its original conception a couple months have gone by. So, considering a few things, I decided to review it before posting. But, looking over my notes, this post really started as the title implies: Reflections at Midnight. So, here goes:

Late Night Moments

                I wake up at odd hours, my mind racing about things that I deal with. Especially over the last year. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a tough one. There’s been a lot of heartache, disappointment and things to consider.

                Looking over what I have written down, what I want to avoid is a post ranting or complaining about what went on. What went on simply happened. That’s all there is to it. It’s given me time to consider how I first started as a writer.

                A Writer’s Thoughts began as simply me journaling. Talking about what I think about, what I hope to accomplish, life in general, and more. I really didn’t know what I was doing after being told I needed a website (to be honest I still don’t, lol).

Over the past few weeks, I find myself back where I started, realizing that sometimes going back to the beginning might be the best medicine. To gain a new perspective. So, here we are having ‘Reflections at Midnight’.

They say sometimes if you want to find your way, then you have to go back to the beginning. So since it’s been a while since I have done one of these posts, I feel I’m long overdue.

While I have a lot to reflect on, in this post I want to focus on toxic environments. How they do so much damage to your heart and soul. After I looked at my notes, it was hard not to dive into all the hurt and cite a few examples. Especially when the most toxic environment I know has been my job (and now former employer).

I know some will read this and take it personal. It’s hard for anyone to admit they’re wrong. Most don’t have the capacity to reflect on their own behavior and admit they made mistakes. I’ll even be the first to admit I am far from perfect. I have plenty of faults and imperfections that are challenges all their own.

So, as I said, some may take what I write as a sliver of spite from which I am venting my frustrations. But to be clear, that is neither my intent nor purpose, however. I simply can’t keep things bottled up. But I’m also not out to point fingers. That’s childish.

                So, let’s get started.

A Need for Change

               

                Of all the things I’ve thought about in the past few months, this statement best sums everything up. The flags have been there, but whether out of sheer stubbornness or determination, I ignored them. But I’m sure you’re asking what I mean by that.

                I guess it’s better to say that I’ve been hearing the word ‘change’ for quite some time. It’s a prompting insisting that if I am to succeed as a writer, then I need to look where I’m at and take stock. So I’ve been doing that. Gauging what’s harmful in my life and trying to figure out how to remove it.

I think at some point we all hear or feel this push. An inkling or indicator that things are out of balance. But when we arrive at this point at that point in our lives, the answers aren’t always clear.

                One might think it’s easy to figure out, but as humans, we tend to make things more complicated than we should. Sometimes, we make excuses and get bogged down in the process. We might even feel a small bit of hopelessness because making such a move may appear impossible. Still, it doesn’t go away. Like a rat gnawing a hole in a wall, it persists until we either settle or jarred into action.

                I some cases there’s an external force at work. Circumstances take place in our environment that become indicators that something has to give. Even people and places that become toxic enough to make us question why we are even here. For me, it was this. I allowed a lot of things to creep into my life that weren’t healthy.

                Most of the time we don’t think about it, and often takes something coming along to wake us up. In retrospect, seeing how much my love of writing has suffered over the past year, if not slightly longer, was one of the things gnawing at me.

                Things at my job have grown progressively worse over the years, particularly in the last maybe two years or so. It’s hard to really pin down. But it has given me a lot to look back on in the past few weeks.

Trying to exist in a toxic environment, whether it’s work related or otherwise, isn’t a healthy affair. With every breath, the pollutants spewed into the air, either by coworkers, friends, or just the general community you exist in, stifles you, choking not only your joy, but your desires, ambitions and passions. You’re slowly worn down, left feeling empty, dissatisfied and defeated.

                Yet we have this annoying tendency to convince ourselves that if we just wait it out, things will get better. More often than not, though, it doesn’t. All we do is trap ourselves in situations we don’t need to stay in. We create a cage that, while we have the power to, we don’t leave.

I’ve found myself in this place more often than I’d care to admit. Maybe it’s because I’m stubborn or it stems from my desire to persevere. I hate giving up, which is both positive and negative.

Perhaps it’s me. I’m a little too honest, possibly even naïve, when dealing with people. I have this unconscious expectation for them to be as straight with me as I am with them. That, however, isn’t always the way it goes or the truth of the matter.

Yet, I still hold hope that there is something redeemable remaining in the exchange. That things can’t be this way all the time, but more often than not, the truth of what’s really there pokes its ugly head up like a trapdoor spider dragging you into its den. They or the environment are who they are and it isn’t going to change.

Pessimistic, I know. But life has its patterns. And, with toxic environments or people, this is especially true. It makes it easy to be taken advantage of or manipulated. There are plenty of people out there with a need for control.

Given enough time, these environments can grow worse. Another person or situation enters the mix, deepening the quagmire, and adding their or its own broken mess into the muck. It’s fairly destructive. Not only to you, but to everyone.

It can change you, too. Not always for the better. It’s easy to become defensive, bitter, and distrustful.

                So, in saying all this, it’s finally sunk in that I’ve allowed myself to remain in a place where I don’t belong for far too long. In the beginning, it wasn’t always this way, but as I described previously, things change.

                I realized I was stuck, blind to the answer right in front of me. I had an inkling, but I didn’t see a way out. Or I should say I didn’t know what the best way out was. Yet, I understood I needed some kind of environmental change. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that things hit home for me.

               The questions I was always asking sank in.

               Where or what am I looking to change?

               How do I bring about this change?

              Where do I start?

              What factors are out of sync?

              So before I go there are some things to consider. I don’t want this to be some rant about hurt feelings or any such nonsense. Think of it as a disclaimer, I suppose. The goal is hopefully to help someone else who’s stuck too and is looking for a way out of their situation. Hopefully. A little food for thought.

The Catalyst

              For anyone not familiar with the word Catalyst, and I’m not trying to be condescending, I’ll give a brief explanation.

               A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction, or lowers the temperature or pressure needed to start one, without itself being consumed during the reaction.

               Simply put: It is an event or thing added to the mixture that forces some kind of reaction. This reaction can be positive or negative, depending on the circumstances. It is, by its nature, a force of change.

                So for the context of one of the toxic things in my life, I’ll start with where I work. Now, for professional reasons, I won’t give the name of my employer or coworkers, and I will do my best to avoid sounding like I’m going out of my way to eviscerate people in a literary sense. That’s just stupid and tacky.

                 I started at my job nine years ago. I was enthusiastic about where it could take me and it afforded a lot of benefits that I could take advantage of. Now, while some of the things in the writing world hadn’t quite hit home, I still had my goals and was working on my current book series.

                 I promised myself that this would be my last job as I worked toward building and learning about what it took to have a writing career. For a long time, things worked themselves out. There was a balance between both. But companies change and so do the people who work there.

                Now I want to say that, in my opinion, there are no ‘evil corporations’. Though that might depend on who you talk to. There are, however, bad people who work in the company that make it seem like some ominous overlord bent on devouring your soul. It’s those people who can ruin a company or environment.

                As someone who in a sense is trying to build a business, I understand far better now than I did then, that there are decisions one needs to make in order for the business to survive. Yet it’s how someone goes about it is where problems start.

                Not all work environments are toxic, but there are people or catalysts within that formula who can cause a negative reaction. Earlier, while I called them bad people, and there are genuinely bad people in the world, they are still people. Ones who have their own issues and demons that ride them like a cowboy racing his horse off into the sunset.

                Over the years, this became the crux of the problem. I’ve been in management for most of my career, if you can call it that, but there was this power and control factor from the differing individuals in authority that always rubbed me the wrong way.

                I’m a problem solver by nature. I ask questions to understand a given situation, yet most of the time, with the average boss or coworkers, things like this rock the boat. They only want drones or nothing that might risk adding extra work. It’s a problem.

Most people these days want to only do the bare minimum. There’s no sense of excellence. When someone comes along who has that personality type and genuinely wants to get things done, they are often beaten down and stepped on. I’ve always said: Leaders lead and managers manage and it’s really true.

                So, going back to my catalyst, each is a culmination of the last few years. At different intervals, like chemicals, there have been those added to the mix who have caused and an increasingly negative chain reaction.

The resulting chemistry speaks for itself. Scads of favoritism, manipulations, deceptions, petty punishments and reprimands, gossip and slander. The list is extensive.

                I’ve watched people fired over made up reasons and stalked on social media with the intention of terminating them should they make a comment or post deemed unacceptable by those in leadership. Again, these are just examples of what I have witnessed.

                Like my coworkers, I’ve been on the receiving end as well and after a most recent incident, one that led me to write this post, it helped me realize that it’s time to move on. It also helped me see how abusive the environment has become. Especially when another person is allowed to speak to you however they want without consequence.

                When it gets to that point, you’d better take a moment to get a lay of the land. If you matter so little that you get spoken to as if you are worthless and belittled, you need to leave. Work, home life, even your friend circle. That kind of environment will tear you apart.

If things were so bad why did you stay?

               

                Valid question. Why do any of us stay in a harmful environment? Maybe we hope for a change. That something will be different, given enough time. For me, it was a combination of things.

                At one time, I found a balance between work and writing. I found out what I needed to do and was learning from the mistakes I made getting to this point. “There is no greater teacher than failure, for without struggle, there is no growth,” as the saying goes.

                I had benefits and advantages that my tenure offered. I’m also stubborn. I don’t like to back down from a fight. But it doesn’t make the environment any less abusive.

For example, it was little things at first. A comment here, a critique there. I mean, that’s with any job. I was in management at the time, so obviously there are going to be things that come up. Managers have it tough too. I’m also not above making the proper changes to be successful on the job.

               Over time, however, as managers came and went, things changed. Demands, comments, and condescending attitudes became more frequent. There’s a certain level of hurt the goes with being spoken to as if you are stupid. There’s even a greater level of conditioning that goes with forcing yourself to put up with it.

                But what happens when you speak up? It doesn’t go over well, doesn’t it? To those you address, it’s seen as disrespect, and disrespect is met with only one response: punishment.

                So, for the sake of your goals, personal security, or whatever other reason, you try to tough it out. I mean if the benefits are too hard to pass up and the long-term rewards are a major pros, then I can understand why. After all, those people will not be around forever, right?

                To a degree, this might be true. I mean the rotten usually self-sabotage themselves. Well, eventually. But how long are you willing to wait?

                Days, months, years? How much of your peace are you willing to surrender to another? How much of your health and well-being, for that matter, are you willing to sacrifice on the altar of that person’s egos to appease them? Yet again, we all do it.

                In some ways, you can apply this to how abusive relationships work, but that’s a topic for another day. Still, the principle is the same. You can’t sacrifice your own health and well-being for the sake of a goal that you might lose hope of achieving.

                While this all may sound dramatic, it’s not the intent. My point is that it took me a long time to realize that there are other ways to get to where I want to be without having to stay somewhere that I no longer fit. You can’t take a cylinder and jam it into a square hole without doing damage to the cylinder. You can, however, find the right fit for the cylinder so that it’s in its proper place.

                As mentioned before, the environment could get better. Maybe someone comes along to add a new dynamic, to be the right catalyst, but in a work setting, it’s often temporary. Still, for better or worse, take the time to gain perspective.

                If you’re having panic attacks out of fear or frustration, privately breaking down in tears, or having so much anxiety that you struggle to function, it’s a clear indicator that something is wrong. And if you aren’t the problem, because I have asked myself this question many times, then something else or someone else is.

                So get out, find that place where you belong. Find what you need to pursue that hope or dream, because to be successful, you must have a balance that gives you the means to support not only your well-being but also your peace.