The author chronicles his evolution into an angry person in a toxic workplace.
Shortly after I moved to the United States back in the mid-1980s, an aunt remarked that I had changed. I demanded how. That said it all, but I did not know that at the time. She gently told me that I had an aggressive attitude towards people and life. I took that as a badge of honor, of my manhood and ability to get what I needed, wanted, and deserved.
Many years later, I understood that I had progressed from an assertive person to an aggressive one to an angry one with intermittent periods of rage. What happened? I always thought of myself as an easy-going fellow. How had I become so mad with the world?
The change did not happen overnight, and it was rather insidious, looking back. I landed a job in Tampa, Florida, with an organization riven with controversy. Influential organizations wanted it dismantled and fought long and hard to reverse the law that set it up many years ago. When that effort failed, they went after the funding and whittled away at it year after year. It was a challenging place to work, not the least of which were the external organizations seeking to destroy it. The internal organization was rigid and authoritarian. Political forces drove out the executive director who hired me, citing him as too weak and indecisive. The replacement they chose operated more by self-interest than by furthering the agency's mission. He demanded blind obedience, and staff suffered. Obey the leader, and you suffer the consequences of external interests. Disobey the leader and be punished excruciatingly so without recourse. Today, one would call this workplace culture toxic. I stayed for 22 years, climbing the organizational ladder to mid-level management.
It was my first permanent, full-time job when I left college, and the workplace culture came as a shock to me. Staff had various survival strategies. Some became apathetic, put in their hours, followed directions strictly, and became dead weight. Others rebelled openly, and they did not last long, usually. The director fired very few people. Your life was made so miserable, and you chose to leave. Others ran a dangerous game playing sycophantic favor to a director who seemed borderline schizophrenic. Those people were the director's fall guys. Still, others ran covert operations to fulfill a sense of right and duty to the people we served. And finally, others emulated many of the politicians we served by destroying others to succeed. All workplace modalities carried risk, and staff changed their modalities frequently throughout their career. I experienced all but the last modality in my career there.
Why stay, you ask? The answer, not surprisingly, is complex. And hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. The agency paid well, and despite the abuse, there was some security if you played the game well. The abuse was intense but intermittent. Take the pain, and it would soon be over. As time went on, the toxicity of the workplace became akin to an abused spousal relationship. You lose yourself and your ability to believe you can do anything else.
This story, however, is not a dissertation on workplace culture. Instead, it is a story about anger, my anger. Anger, as an emotion, is a catch-all term for me describing a group of emotions. I remember the bruised, hurt feelings I had for being reprimanded severely for unknown and shifting office procedures and protocols early in my job. The wide-eyed optimism I had for the job and workplace cooled. Over time, the hurt and bruised feelings became simmering resentment towards the executive director, the political establishment, and outside organizations trying to undermine us. The pain of resentment boiled over into self-righteous, angry outbursts and a strident refusal to compromise. I weaponized anger to blunt and cut and manipulate and destroy. Weaponizing requires planning, forethought in action. Weaponized anger is not spontaneous but rather coldly calculated. The method of calculation was through control. Self-righteousness requires care to ensure you are not wrong. Self-righteousness anger resulting in one's humiliation was the worst defeat of all, something I experienced often and early in my career.
I succeeded despite you, and I was willing to sacrifice at a high personal cost in this belief. I remembered a time when the unity of a team, a worker among workers, was something I valued. A strong belief in individualism replaced it, and I became more strident with that belief. I didn't understand my unbridled ego and over-the-top sense of entitlement that underpinned that belief.
It is important to understand that this journey into an angry person didn't occur overnight, and it wasn't a constant force in my life. The anger was toxic enough that it dominated too much of my thoughts. I spent so much time in my 20s and 30s nurturing that anger, plotting with it, and using it to manipulate my external environment. Peace became increasingly elusive, sleep was often disturbed, and I lived with a vague dread. I lived more in the future or the past and less in the present. I exercised hard to take the edge off, and it worked, temporarily. I drank more alcohol. It would take days to decompress on vacation, and I would crank back up before I returned.
I blamed my toxic work environment for many years for my growing anger. The workplace was the bane of my existence. Or was it?
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