I woke up in the morning, after a tiring, short nap. And I already knew that I never wanted to see him again. It was not me, it was my body that decided: enough. It took him 10 years.
Yes, it’s a lost decade. The ten tastiest, best years of life burnt on a corpo altar. Then psychiatric treatment and therapy. Two and a half years I was standing upright to go back to work and live a normal life. Only now I am 45 years old, I am an old spinster and I already know that I will never have a child. The time I could do it was eaten by the corporation.
Nice bad beginnings
I started out as a serial editor at B. I was 32 years old. I remember my first day at work. Two gates in front of the entrance. Security guards in the first corridor. When I went to the interview, I got lost in a maze of rooms. One similar to the other. Desks, computers, and people glancing at me with pity.
But I was so proud! – Really, did you get a job at B.? – friends asked. There was a hidden jealousy in their voice. Anyone who thought about a publishing job knew that B. was a certain place. That they don’t tell me about a contract here. I will earn meaningful money, guaranteed bonus system, free gym with a swimming pool and amazing team-building trips twice a year. Nice canteen in the basement.
Talk to your doctor without leaving your home partner link
“I’m proud of you, daughter,” my mother rejoiced. We both knew best how much it cost us to complete my studies, to stay in the capital for five years. For seven years after my graduation, I worked in pubs. I didn’t want to go back to my hometown. – Mum, you’ll see, I can do it. There is work in Warsaw, there are opportunities. I want to work with the word. It was you who awakened my love for the language? – I was laughing.
awans
The first years in the publishing house I gave my best. What I didn’t notice was that my life only starts to revolve around a corporate desk. I stayed longer in the editorial office: first, because I wanted to learn and demonstrate as much as possible, then because they asked me to, and finally, because I was given so much work that I was not able to complete everything within eight hours. I returned to the rented apartment exhausted. I bought myself a cat so I could talk to someone. There was always time to socialize later. And that didn’t come after that.
When I got promoted to deputy editor-in-chief, I had butterflies in my stomach. Literally. I felt like I was kissing a boyfriend. I called my mom and chirped about promotion like a teenager. A few days later she called me and asked how I was. That day I did not feel well, because a series of meetings and meetings with my boss began at work because of my new function. I was presented with new duties and tasks over and over again, I stayed at work for 12 hours.
Once, my mother called: – Maybe they would give you a short vacation? You have not been with Z for eight months. When will you visit us? – I heard the nervousness in her words.
She pissed me off. She did not understand how the new function absorbed me, absorbed me. It didn’t matter that I felt more and more tired and irritable. In retrospect, I know that it was in that coin that my “corpoderession” began.
– You have to be very careful not to use the word corpodepression – says business psychologist Jacek Santorski. – “Corpodepression”, workaholism, and burnout are rather a kind of social “costume” for more basic personality problems. We can include obsessive thinking and acting, perfectionism, submission, and among them there may be hypersensitivity and a tendency to depression.
In a corporate environment, these traits can provide fertile ground for disclosure and empowerment.
According to Santorski, the depressive reaction to working in a corporation is more about someone who is unable to cope constructively
with pressure, frustration, time pressure or control. A mature, strong person will be able to withdraw from a place that does not suit him. If it stays in it and it ends with depression, i.e. that for some reason she was unable to cope with a difficult situation and these are most often problems of a personal nature, e.g. low self-esteem, fear of change, tendency to be in a dependency relationship, etc.
Dude, we’re going to Greece!
The vice-general’s first salary and bonuses for well-done numbers made me dizzy. “Dude, you won’t believe how much I’m getting,” I called my friend from college. – Get your suitcase ready for the summer, because I’m taking you to Greece. Do you remember? Did we draw it on the dream map? – I chatted like coke. But Anita was in a different place in her life. Two little children. Husband. – Will you take my kids too? – she fired up, and then added: – Agnieszka, do you have someone?
I did not have. Every day of mine was the same. Wake-up call at seven, strong coffee, I sit down to do my makeup. On the way to work, I listen to the news, I want to be up to date. Breakfast only in the canteen. Item 8.30. I sit down at my desk and get ready to meet my boss for the first time. We had them everyday. Always at the same time. We discussed editorial matters, and once a week there was a college with the editors of the title. One day my boss pointed out to me: – The girls are complaining about you. You’re delaying the work of the team and you’re being rude, ‘he blurted out. I was stunned: for a year and a half of co-chiefing, I didn’t get a single signal that one of them was dissatisfied. Yes, I did not fraternize with them. I was preoccupied with my work, but almost every week we were praised for a great track done. I was fighting for bonuses for them. I had the impression that they were as happy as I was.
Fall
After four years in a corporation, I was a skinny, bony in my thirties. I couldn’t think of anything else but the next topics to be realized and the closing of the issue. I worked in isolation. I saw the band through the glass. The daily mini-meetings with the boss became so familiar to me that when he went on vacation, I missed something.
After one such stay with his family skiing with his family, he wrote me an e-mail informing me that from today I am working in the editorial office next door as a serial editor. That is the decision. I had half an hour to pack my belongings and move to the next room. The girls were muttering something and I was packing myself in silence. Nobody welcomed me in the new editorial office.
I don’t even know how many times I tried to find out from my boss why the shift happened. He was still my supervisor as he oversaw the work of three titles. But from that “degradation” he seemed to have turned into a different person. It was like a witchcraft mary. He avoided my gaze. He didn’t speak in the corridor. At editorial colleges, he ignored my comments and suggestions, dropped my topics. Thinking about what might have gone wrong kept me awake at night. The more I wandered over, the more I tried to prove that I was the same great editor. However, the new team blew me away. I was transparent to them.
Jacek Santorski: – We have to decide whether the cart is in front of the horse or the horse is in front of the cart. If we stay in an environment that degrades and debases us, why do we do it? There are people who recover unscathed from difficult situations, from pathogenic places where abuse occurs. They can maintain a sense of dignity and do not lose their inner compass of who they are, what are their goals and needs, and how they want to achieve them. It is not a given place that has a decisive influence on a specific type of behavior,
rather, it results from internal choices and attitudes. A corporation, like any other place based on a hierarchical structure, can generate the ground for activating inappropriate mechanisms of behavior towards people working in it. But a similar situation can occur in a church, hospital, school, theater, or any other institution with an extensive structure. Therefore, I am far from judging that corporations are “evil” and that the people who work in them become “victims of the system.” Instead, I will encourage a person who is struggling
in the workplace, she looked at herself carefully and without judgment. It is probably in her that a mechanism is activated that prevents her from breaking with a place that is toxic to her or resisting evil. Something underlies the decision that despite the discomfort, she decides to be stuck in it. After all, nobody holds anyone in the corporation by force like a prisoner in a camp! If I do not leave, although I wish to, I would see the problem in a human being,
and the corporation treated this liberating problem as the context.
What is, f… .wa have!
I remember this situation: (small, blind kitchen, where I was brewing another coffee): – You drink a lot of coffee – one girl asked. “There are rumors you’re adding something to her,” she giggled. It stunned me. The next day I waited for her in the cafeteria.
– What did you mean yesterday? I asked, hearing my voice tremble. She wouldn’t say. She rolled her eyes. I couldn’t stand it: – What the fuck is it? Then she looked around at the people at the tables, got up and left the room in no hurry. Since then, no person from the editorial office has spoken to me again. I worked in an office building with several floors, among dozens of people, and I was completely lonely.
– Effects of debilitating corporate work and mistreatment
in the professional environment, they are very severe – says Katarzyna Kucewicz, a psychologist and psychotherapist. – If we are dealing with a more closed, not emotional person, these effects will come out in the body symptoms (stomach pain, rashes, restless legs syndrome, hypertension). People who have access to their emotions may fall into alternating moods of sadness and fear
and frustration. Of course, there are concepts in psychology that show that a person, e.g. a mobbed, often contributes to being rejected with his pathological passivity, but this is no excuse for the psychopathic behavior of colleagues.
The last leaps
I can’t say why I kept going to this job. What I wanted to prove to myself and others. Yes, I had to rent an apartment, I had, like most, a financial loop around my neck, but I could stop it. I could?
– Agnieszka, leave it crap. You’re gone, my little children’s friend told me. – Easy to say! I like doing what I do. I like editing reportages, working with text. And I’m damn good at it, I insisted.
There was an opportunity, which I considered an opportunity to show my best side. We were going to prepare a big supplement devoted to teenagers’ problems. While still a student, I was involved in volunteering and working with adolescent kids. I felt good at it. I went to my boss and presented my project to him. When he smiled at me, that old smile made my legs feel soft. He said: – This is great, Agnieszka. And I got drunk at home tonight for joy. I pampered my project for hours. I was looking for the simplest of excuses to go to the boss and discuss the details. He almost patted my shoulder. He nodded. Finally, the day came when I could come up with an idea for college. I prepared myself very carefully. I felt excited. Meanwhile, during college, I was cross-examined. One of the editors meticulously enumerated errors in the project and suggested my complete lack of competence. I was stuttering with nervousness. The boss was staring at me coldly. He didn’t say anything. Afterwards and for all, he asked my opponent to take care of revising my project and then leading it! I stared at his face and it felt like his mouth was turning into a pig’s face. I was unconscious from exhaustion.
Agony
I went to work for a few more weeks. I insisted that I had to work on my project, otherwise Ewelina would kick it. It was a mistake because she was doing everything she could to destroy me. In the end, none of the reports made by my authors were added to the supplement. While working on a project, my boss would often come to us and look over my shoulder. He asked: Why do you do it like that? And I had a lump in my stomach and lowered my head.
That day, I woke up after a short, tiring nap in the morning and knew that I would not go to work anymore. All my bones hurt, my head and my stomach ached. I stayed in bed for three days. I hardly ate. I peed into a plastic fish bucket, because going to the bathroom seemed like a feat. I saw my boss’s face in my dreams. He smiled at me and said: – Oh, Agnieszka, Agnieszka, you kicked… I squeezed my eyes shut, I wanted him to disappear, but I was chased by his smile, which made me feel sick.
For the next two and a half years I was under the care of a psychiatrist who also persuaded me to go to psychotherapy. I was treated for depression. I spent half a year in my hometown. At mom’s. I returned to Warsaw, but as a different person. Now I work in a new company, in a completely different industry. I’m doing well. I come home after five o’clock. I’m fucking lonely.
Beware of these places?
– Being at the headquarters of one of the corporations, I thought that this is the basin of my patients: burned out, frustrated and often mobbed at work – says Katarzyna Kucewicz. – First example: I met a woman here with a very sick daughter, practically dying, who, due to frequent layoffs, is harassed at work by her friends. He’s trying to find support
in superiors, but they remain passive in the face of conflict in the team. This woman is not a poor, racked victim. She has been working in the corpo for years, she knows how to work, but everything experiences completely different when it comes to her and her daughter. This woman does not want to quit
from work because she considers it to be giving in to pressure. However, he suffers from stomach and headaches, has a rash, and is awake at night. It hides the depression that is devastating it in every way. Another story concerns a girl who has the courage to dismiss the “advances” of the head of department.
After that, her boss began to humiliate her in front of the staff. Unfortunately, high-level corporate positions are very often filled with psychopathic people. In the West, this problem is being eliminated by implementing an anti-mobbing policy
and in larger corporations in Poland, it is also done, e.g. by appointing internal anti-mobbing committees.
Jacek Santorski, on the other hand, adds: – Most enterprises
in Poland, it still has the features of a XNUMXth-century farm. Clumsy
in relationships, bossy or capricious managers are their everyday landscape. Paradoxically, in multinational corporations there may be higher standards and more transparent systems of employment, remuneration, promotion and settlement of an employee for work results than in other places. And in many of them, bosses learn modern leadership. That is why I warn against simplification of the type: bad corpora, burnt corporer with corporations and the media, which “expose” it. I would prefer that the materials on “corpodepression” (although there is no such gradation in the scientific typology and we are aware that this term was coined for the use of media publications) would reveal certain mechanisms that may take place in the corporate environment, but did not generalize it in in such a way that the corporation is always evil, and the man working in it is doomed to problems with physical and mental health.
How does Agnieszka see it?
– Remember, my story is only mine, but I can easily list what I have observed and experienced during ten years of working in a corporation. Authoritarian boss with a psychopathic trait, collusion by co-workers, degradation on a professional, emotional and even social level! Humiliating and diminishing my many years of competences, a load of work impossible to process in the prescribed schedule of hours, reporting everything and controlling, unexpected and incomprehensible changes in the structure of entrusted tasks, public ridicule, e.g. during a meeting. For some reasons (probably also those resulting from my sensitivity, reluctance to shout and ostentatious behavior that allowed others to stay unscathed, and the fact that I could not defend myself and repel evident aggression directed at me), work in a corporation became the basis for I developed a disease from which I had to control over two years.