#wow who knew working in therapy on internal communication would actually give results like having clearer internal communication!

[0809sysblings]

some hard Council Truths one (I. Me.) must come to terms with...

there are always more council members than you think

if you think the dissociation is not "doing its job and helping you function", you are wrong. it is. yes, believe it or not, things would be worse

you are probably forgetting and losing more time than you think

yeah it was probably that bad. if you think you are over-exaggerating, chances are you are actually under-exaggerating

[theladysmith]

Reboot.

Hiya. Happy new year. It's 2017.

After a few years of trotting out my social media efforts out as a website presence, I’ve decided to rethink, revamp and relaunch my blog. 2016 was quite the year for me, so much so that I think I might need to write about it, and I’m just delusional enough to think that as my jewelry and design and life-as-a-human work evolves, people might want to learn a bit about my process and the life that insulates it.  

So I suppose this post represents a relaunch (or a messy new launch) of my blog. I generally prefer to photo document life, and so spend a lot of time on Instagram, which in turn feeds my Tumblr, and for a long while I’ve felt that this is enough social media presence for me, that my images and captions speak enough about my art-life and my life-life. Until recently. Life-life this year has been challenging, and photo-captioning it doesn’t really allow for the deeper dive that I might want to allow myself every once and awhile. My desire to discuss what’s going down without the threat of caption limits grows daily. I can’t keep my expectations to myself anymore. I guess that’s where you come in: I’m asking for witness.

 I had originally written a long, hand-wringingly dramatic post about how I lost my J-o-b several months ago. I was aiming to be concise, but emotions got the better of me and it just started to get whiny. I may post it eventually, but I dunno. I wrote and rewrote this post over the fall, and am now revisiting it 5 months and a New Years later and I realized that I've simmered down some.  I feel like telling the story now for historical context, as the lay-off and its repercussions has completely changed my life for the better, and as result has fired up my art-life so much that I can no longer deny that my art-life is in fact my real and true life-life. I can no longer function as a human without working as an artist. That has been the biggest, hardest and most joyful lesson to come out of the shit-show that was 2016.  (Full disclosure: I had secured legal representation after my lay-off due to several human rights violations that I experienced as an employee of Sotheby's International Realty Canada's Oakville office, but a change of situation has now freed me to talk about it. I offer this as a cautionary illustration of what a skilled, experienced and friendly employee can experience working for woefully ignorant and shockingly under-qualified management. You know, 'cause the world needs another tale like this...

I started a new job with the regional Sotheby’s International Realty office in August ’15, and I was crazy-excited to be working with a world-class marketing team and historically significant brand in a new (to me) field with a short walking commute. Walking to, but mostly from work soon became the best part of the job, as the management direction became abusive, the expectations were never communicated and the high-school-level office drama emerged just a few weeks after starting the job. At lunch with my brother in mid-September I casually mentioned that I wasn’t very happy with how things were going, but maybe it was just growing pains. By our trip to NYCC in early October, I was depressed each and every night (especially Sunday nights!) knowing that I would eventually have to go back to work, and was planning a pie-in-the-sky escape plan out of self-preservation. I also wasn’t feeling very well, but I figured it was my annual late-in-the-year energy slump and the Monday-Friday frustrations feeding stress-related illness . I told myself to hang on, that the job would improve.  It did not improve. Let’s cut to the beginning of 2016, shall we?

After indescribable work stress, a suspicious lymph node infection, a total immune system crash, and 5 and a half months of unending illness (head colds! sinus infections! gastroenteritis! the flu! another cold!), I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer in February, just a week before I turned 40.

To illustrate the degree of shit to which the job had gone, I offer this story: I spent my 40th birthday sick as a dog, yet in a compulsary meeting at work where I was scheduled to make a 1/2 hour presentation with next-to-no voice, which was interrupted by the perfunctory cake and happy birthday song delivered with the energy of a funeral dirge. I finished my presentation to discover that they had eaten the entire cake without leaving me a slice while I was talking! Totally defeated, I spent the evening nested on the couch in my pjs with a head cold so terrible that I was unable to taste the lovely chocolate cake that Mike had gotten for me. I was miserable, scared and angry, and I didn't know what to do. I can't ever remember feeling more hopeless.  I wish that was the only horrible story I could tell of this recent job, but there are about 3 dozen more, most far more depressing, including the one where MY BOSS INFORMED MY COWORKERS OF MY DIAGNOSIS BY EMAIL WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. But let’s not go there right now...

By the end of March, I was finally “healthy” (in that I was no longer actively sick with something, except for cancer), and I was feeling a little more optimistic because the multiple doctor's appointments, nasal endoscopies, CT scan and biopsies had determined that the cancer was isolated just to my thyroid. I had a great new family doctor and surgeon who had managed to answer most of my many questions and my surgery had been set for early May. The daily personal bullying at work had even simmered down a bit, but this was just temporary because of yet another massive drama regarding another coworker, so my issues were briefly off the radar. Emphasis on briefly. 

I had been working with an amazing therapist (and friend) out of Ottawa via Skype for a few weeks while I navigated my treatment options, and with her support I made the decision to move to working 4 days a week for awhile, to give myself a bit more time to schedule doctor and therapy appointments. The 4 day work week, while definitely no shorter in terms of hours, felt like one of the most adult and freeing decisions I had ever made in my professional life. I was starting to feel very well prepared and almost excited for my surgery. My health was improving (as was my outlook) and it felt good.

My total thyroidectomy was on May 5. O5/05 - I felt like the numbers were auspicious, and I guess they were. The surgery, while a little longer than expect, went perfectly. When I woke up in recovery, high as a kite on morphine, I knew a moment (albeit drug-induced) of pure gratitude and love for everyone and everything. I had never experienced that before - it was lovely. Memorable. I still think of it daily. Propped up with a massive bandage on my throat, I squawked a little 'hello' to myself and beamed that the surgery hadn't taken my voice (there is a small chance of permanent change or loss of voice with all thyroid surgery, as the vocal cords run through the thyroid.)

I had some trouble with my blood calcium levels that kept me in the hospital a little longer than the overnight that I had expected, but by 8 pm the next day I was home, happy and relatively comfortable. I healed like a champ. Work benevolently (can't roll my eyes hard enough here) gave me my 4 remaining sick days to recover, and I worked from home the following week because my voice had still barely recovered and my incision line was periodically sore. I even managed to get to the Ottawa Comic Con a week after my surgery so that I could visit Mike and our friends who were exhibiting. After my stitches were removed (which was the creepiest physical sensation I've ever experienced) I spent a few days recovering at my family home. All of this time felt like such a gift. 

My return to work was tough. My voice was weak and would give out mid-sentence, which was weirdly exhausting, and my energy levels were a little all over the place because my body was still getting used to the new Synthroid thyroid medication that I was now on for life. I felt overall that I was doing pretty well, but work quickly reminded me they thought otherwise. The prevailing attitude was "wow, your illness was such an inconvenience" or "actually, we got along just fine without you."  I had started a job search during the dark days of deep winter, but after my diagnosis I just let it drop. I started to reconsider. But I I felt like I had really survived something, so the trials and dramas of work should've seemed like nothing in comparison, right? As spring continued, the job environment worsened. The brokerage manager (henceforth to be referred to as Terrible Manager/Person, as she really was both a terrible manager and a terrible person) continued to throw me under the bus, cc-ing emails where she blasted me for non-issues to the entire national management team, wasting everyone's time. I went far and beyond my job description on a few special projects, but my efforts weren't even recognized with a simple thanks. The few actual design-oriented projects that came across my desk were promptly taken away from me and weakly completed by the Toronto office, which was frustrating because my position had been advertised as a graphic designer position but had flattened into a straight coordinator position, leaving me increasingly upset with my decision to leave my former job (which hadn't been the best, but at least they had respected my skills and input.)  The professional criticism was unending, and totally unnerving - was I going crazy? Was I actually terrible at this job? You know, the same kind of job I'd been doing for 10+ years, with glowing reviews from former employers? I felt completely lost...however, when the criticism started to involve how I looked and what I wore ("hey, did you know you can lose 10 lbs just by cutting out bread for a week?" "Wow I like your blouse, oh wait, you got it at WalMart? And you wear it here!?" "I heard of a medical trial on the radio for people with skin issues and I thought of you immediately..." THOSE WERE ALL SAID TO ME WITHIN A WEEK'S TIME), I realized there was no fixing this shit show, no matter how long I stayed or how hard I tried. (Honestly, apart from a shitheaded misogynist manager once telling me "you know, you'd be a lot prettier if you smiled more!", I have never, ever been subjected to as much criticism regarding how I looked as I was at Sotheby's. I was always dressed office appropriate with professional hair and makeup and boring shoes, but nary a week went past without someone making some kind of comment about my skin, my weight, my illness, my clothes, the frequency with which I wore some things, or my boring shoes. And it's worth mentioning that it was almost always women making these statements...

We went to HeroesCon in Charlotte in mid June and had the best time (as usual) and I came back to work high on art and our amazing friends, only to be deflated and sluggish 2 days later, looking forward to the next long weekend, con or event. Something at work had changed too, I could feel it. I was left out of or uninvited to trainings and dealings with the rest of the national marketing team. My long-promised raise that had been due in November (per my contract, but withheld by Terrible Manager/Person who never felt inclined to complete my 6 month review) suddenly arrived unceremoniously by email. I was told that a new agent was taking my office and I would need to move the contents of my office to a barren corner of an unused board room where a new office was going to be built for me by mid-July. That plan got fast-tracked, suddenly I was given 2 day's notice that my office space was moving, and it was literally taken down around me as I tried to finish up work before I was due to leave for a long weekend in Montreal at the end of the first week of July. My long-developed filing system was destroyed, my organization systems were hastily thrown into boxes, all of it was moved to the empty board/storage room. I was incredulous as I left work for my long weekend - what a mess that was going to be to come back to.

While I was away, there was the usual monthly general office meeting for all the Oakville and Niagara on the Lake agents, Terrible Manager/Person and office staff. Terrible Manager/Person and 2 agents (who I had rarely worked with but who had always been terrible to me when I had to work with them) spent considerable time during the meeting slandering me to the rest of the group (which I heard about the day I was laid off.) One agent who had exhibited an absolute hate-on for me from day one (and who was tight friends with Terrible Manager/Person) apparently stood up and declared "why should my business suffer because someone is sick!?" It's worth noting she had only come to me twice in the space of 6 months for actual help, and I kept her advertising initiatives on track when she had dropped the ball...anyway... The day I returned back to work from our Montreal weekend, I was knee-deep in sorting out an issue between an agent who was away in Eastern Europe on vacation, the agent who was looking after her affairs in the meantime, and the printer who had dropped the ball on their job. I had it sorted out, and had emailed both the agent and my manager that everything was copacetic, but because of a 6+ hour time difference between here and Croatia, and the fact that Terrible Manager/Person was rarely timely in checking her emails or reading email threads, she bitched me out to the national team once again. That was is, I lost it. That afternoon, I confronted her about it, explaining that every time she cc'd the team about some issue she had with me or my work instead of speaking directly with me, she cost everyone time, especially me, and seeing as how I was constantly over-my-head busy, I was done with that kind of unprofessional bullshit. Her face went blank, and she said ok, and walked out of my office. 

I was laid off the next morning. They called it corporate restructuring, as they always do, and told me that the Toronto team was taking over the Oakville and NOTL office marketing needs. They reposted my exact job description (the same one that I had applied to the year before) the next morning - there it was sitting in my inbox at 7 am. I still find it utterly hilarious that they didn't think I'd see that...but considering the very first thing that Terrible Manager/Person asked me to do when I came on board was "to change everyone's emails so that they could somehow look like they were written in cursive handwriting font on a parchment paper background, because it's just so much nicer and elegant", I'm not fucking surprised...(for real, that was the first request that I received as a Graphic Designer/Marketing Coordinator for Sotheby's International Realty Canada. Elegant indeed. I should've run right then and there...)

So, five months later! Where's my head at? I'M SO HAPPY I DON'T WORK FOR THE RICH AND ENTITLED ANYMORE! SO HAPPY I DON'T WORK FOR A TERRIBLE MANAGER/PERSON ANYMORE! SO ABSOLUTELY SURE THAT I AM DONE WITH CORPORATE CULTURE FOR MAYBE EVERRRRRR... All caps screaming aside, I'm at a bit of a loss to describe how life changing last year was. I feel like the creative girl that I was when I was in college, full of ideas, making art on the daily and feeling happy, hopefully and resourceful. The messy breakup feels that the lay-off brought are dissolving - I can't help but note that I don't really have any lingering friendships from that job; I've had them from every job I ever had, but this one was different. I am really aware that people were only friends with me when they needed something. Human nature I guess...or real estate agent nature. Who knows(/cares)? I don't know what the next year is going to look like, but right now it looks like planning, making, organizing, selling and promoting. I may have to take a part time job eventually, I may not, I may find lots more freelance (was doing ok with it in the remainder of 2016), I may not. I truly have no idea. But considering that everything that I held as concrete and permanent this time last year has completely changed and I'm thriving in spite or because of, I'm feeling pretty ok about it all. I wish you a very happy new year. I am very happy to be here to do so.

(If you're working a job that involves you feeling terrible about yourself and your abilities on a daily/weekly basis, if you have to deal with a Terrible Manager/Coworker/Person with no one to back you up, if your job was promised as one thing but has backslid into something undesired, or worse, health-threatening, please make every effort to free yourself. I know how it feels to be locked in, desperate, scared and seemingly without options. You can at least talk to someone, be heard, and vent your frustrations, and through that you can find a path and resources to find something better. I am happy to lend an ear and/or shoulder to anyone who needs to decompress from their workplace tension, and more importantly, brainstorm ways to get out of an abusive job. It is absolutely not worth your health or peace of mind - it is time spent that none of us will ever get back.)