I'm quitting my job. My 4-day a week 2 days remote job where day in and day out I have a version of the same conversation. I've made my appeals to be fully remote. I've done the math. I drew a line. I'm immediately tempted to devolve into cliches, but I know better. This was inevitable. I called it before I ever hired on.
Groups fired an incredible office manager within weeks of me starting. They allowed a lie from a bitch-ass counselor to bolster their already-decided-upon desire to remove her. This was without warning or appeal and over an infraction that, even if it were true, her violating HIPPA, would have warranted a slap on the wrist. But, because they don't care about who you are or how good you are, she was out.
I sat in for a couple groups for training. One counselor is as messy as you get from any client. She involves herself in their lives like it's personal entertainment. She allows chaos and laziness to suffice as "counseling." She throws office managers under the bus. She's just someone who has it together enough to get a credential, but has no business telling anyone how to operate. She's been at Groups for years.
I've watched the seductive power of Groups work. The 4-day week is a trap. You need to be comfortable and comparing it to the often over-worked and ridiculous social-work job you came from. Will they mission-creep you for more responsibilities? Absolutely. If you're an office manager, they won't even pay you for the lauded "help" that keeps you staying late and covering different areas.
Groups encourages you to think of your Suboxone as diabetes medication. Say nothing of the long-term effects on your liver or teeth, isn't "harm-reduction" preferable to running these streets? The whole ethos is "keep paying us to keep you stable, no, to save your life actually." It doesn't matter if you actually get a better grasp on your automatic responses, addictive tendencies, self-talk, or sense of agency. It matters that you can get complacent and dependent on their drug verses yours.
If I don't matter, I turn into an incredibly dangerous person. You don't get the sense that you matter when you take the time to explain yourself and be very deliberate in how you conduct yourself, and it's met with silence or dismissal. If there's a more pungent scent in the air than that of resentment, I don't know what it is. I don't want to huff it and have it churn me out from the inside.
I'm not precisely annoyed at the amount of work or searching I'm going to have to return to, but I am utterly dismayed and dejected that I must do so at all. I hate constantly learning in subtle to explicit ways how little I matter and how meaningless the examples I try to set are in the face of the people I find myself working for. They matter to me in literal life and death terms. I'm not propagandizing myself, I literally need to feel like I'm growing and changing in positive ways, or I'll crack. Only I can save me.
I have a client I spoke to after my last group today. We've done this a few times. We're about the same age, she's got two kids, and she's more keen to describe her life experience in terms of energy or quasi-mystical terms, but I get the gist. She's lonely. She's gaining all of this new awareness about herself and how people operate, and it's, especially for an emotional person, extremely depressing and isolating. Yep. The more you learn, and the more responsibility you take, the more alone you get. You're no longer part of the herd in an important way. What you do with that is anyone's guess.
I have a friend who seems stuck in a contradiction. She got fired from her job, technically resigned, because they found an illegal substance in her car. She's a drug counselor. She was the director of programming in a prison, was falsely accused of trafficking, and consented to her car being searched, knowing Kratom was in there. I don't know how to square her professed love for the job and any willingness whatsoever to have illegal anything on a prison ground. My friend "coincidentally" keeps the kind of company that are all either in active addiction, doing not-great in recovery, or otherwise doing things like killing themselves or accidentally overdosing on CBD in which I'm called over because she's not good at handling panic-inducing situations.
Why talk about my friend and my client? What does thinking about them evoke when I'm writing another meaningless digression of corporate ambivalence and greed? I think we're all manifesting this self-destructive impulse. We know what we have and how we're going about it is fucked up. Whether it makes us just want to break down and cry, ignorantly claim to "thrive in chaos," or starts seeping into your shoulders the weight of your captured state, either you, or the faceless infinite series of "the way it is" sentiments will break. You're considerably less robust.
I'm continuing to make a bet that the search is worth more than the suffering. I'm claiming that working to create and sacrifice in service to that creation is more life-affirming, true, and necessary than a consistent paycheck. I initially wrote "comfortable" paycheck, as though it's comfort that moves me to leave. It's incredibly uncomfortable to feel erased and taken advantage of. I understand why you'd prefer drugs or chaos or literally any narrative that otherwise fills in the blanks for how that makes you feel.
I don't think we'll ever transcend it. I think I'm going to have to be ruthless, and I really don't want to. But I'm alone, like my client, like my friend, and anyone who can't see through the consequences of dependent "stability" upon self-absolution. It's like parallel play that sends us over personal cliffs. What even is "together" or doing "better" in this context?
No comments:
Post a Comment