Dear Liz: Did I eff up at work?
To which I say NO YOU DID NOT!
I asked and you answered! Today we have our first reader question about a dilemma in which anxiety and intuition feel inextricable. Fear not, I am here to extricate!!!
Dear Liz,
Here’s a situation I keep going back to over and over in my mind, wondering if I have a major blindspot: When I went back to work in an office full time, I put my son in daycare. Because daycares are germ factories, the whole family kept getting sick, and I had to take multiple days off work each month. Of course I ended up coming down with bronchitis when I had run out of PTO and had a time-sensitive project due. (Also, I have an autoimmune disease which is protected under ADA, which HR was aware of.)
I wrote my manager and asked if I could work from home, that way we’d ensure the project got completed on time and I wouldn’t have to worry about being sick and unpaid. I thought I was writing to them with a solution— I’d always been told don’t go to your boss with problems, go with solutions. But instead of getting clearance to WFH I got written up for insubordination for asking! I never anticipated that could be an outcome AT ALL.
I still linger on that initial email and how I thought I was asking for something reasonable in a reasonable way, but it was interpreted in totally the opposite manner. And now I keep thinking “Can I not see myself the way others can?”
-Fear and Loathing in Corporate America
Dear Fear and Loathing,
Your letter makes me want to SCREAM! It captures so many of the indignities facing working mothers and people with chronic illnesses, and I’m sorry you experienced this mess.
As a highly biased and roundly unqualified giver of advice with regard to corporate America, a land in which I’ve never set foot, I am completely on your side. (Like I would side with management, are you kidding me?! You could’ve written me that you showed up in a hot dog costume and were posting to your OnlyFans from your work computer and I’d be like WOW hostile work environment much???) But applying the principles I gleaned in researching intuition, here’s what I think:
These moments when we get a response that feels completely out of left field are scary and humbling. Humbling because they reveal to us how we never have 360 degrees on anything because we are always hindered by our own perspective, empathetic as we may be. And the clash of perspectives out here in the mean world pulls the rug out from under us and throws everything we thought we knew into disarray.
As humans, we love patterns and knowing what to expect. Our brains are organized to detect patterns and to sound alarms when we encounter information that goes against the grain. We crave certainty so badly, and yet we live in a most uncertain world. This fissure between our desires and our reality is our core human predicament. So, it sounds like you went into this situation expecting one outcome and were met with a wholly different one. That is low-key, small t-traumatizing. Why don’t people just behave the way we want them to?! It is criminal when they do not. And also, very, very human, for all us here humans.
Since the response you received doesn’t fit into a pattern, it’s easy to spiral. And maybe on the edges there might have been some kind of mitigating language in the email to soften the request, though I doubt you came in hot. Also, ugh, the problem of digital communication, its tonal illegibility, its perpetual cry in out pockets. It’s very natural to take this all on as your fault, and as women we are conditioned to blame ourselves and be small for the comfort of others, especially in the workplace.
Your problem reminds me a lot about reporting I did with psychics, in that for empathetic people it is all too easy to take on others’ shit. Some psychics I interviewed talk about energy hygiene, which means being responsible and aware of our own energy/emotions and auric field, and protecting those boundaries. Rebecca Auman, a witch who had a whole career in the corporate world and now coaches a number of high-impact women, has a whole slate of energy clearing rituals she recommends for the workplace, which include tips like keeping a special handsoap just for you at your desk so you can quite literally wash your hands of colleagues after speaking with them. It’s so easy to forget that we are only responsible for the energy WE put out into the world, not how people receive it. In other words, do your best and be kind, but haters gonna hate. I highly recommend Judith Orloff’s The Empath’s Survival Guide for more ideas.
I also recommend noticing your own mental dialogue around this situation. If the tone is loud, badgering, and mean, like YA BLEW IT, that’s firmly anxiety. It it’s more subtle, kinder, more expansive, that’s intuition. So maybe that voice is saying something like you did the best you could with the information you had at the time or your email was ok and it was willfully misinterpreted then that’s intuition. The words actually aren’t that important; tone and tenor is everything here. So ask yourself: when you are replaying the events, is the first voice bullying and jumping to the worst case scenario? That is anxiety. Perhaps there’s a quieter voice that might be more helpful, beneath all the yelling.
Wishing you the very best. If you can make it through the daycare years, you can make it through anything.
xo liz
As a wise man once said, if you gotta problem, yo I’ll solve it, check out the hook while my DJ revolves it.
OR, send me your vexing anxiety/intuition conundrum!!!! I’ll do my very best to answer it with the whole of my expertise.
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Caity Weaver’s SIDESPLITTING account of attempting to quit sugar had me HOWLING!!!
This roasted veggie recipe elevated my olive oil/salt/pepper game, and let’s face it, aren’t we all fresh out of roasting ideas by this phase of the calendar?
Dust of Snow by Robert Frost
Sarah Perry’s latest, Sweet Nothings!
Brock Colyar is one brave mofo, I would’ve been in the corner crying/leaving this planet the whole time.