How One Toxic Manager Changed Everything

“It sounds like he’s just trying to get rid of you rather than take any corrective action,” said my union steward. 

His voice grew distant over the phone I held to my ear, and in my view of my kitchen turned into a long corridor. 

Despite months of petty conflict with my teammates, it took an HR complaint from my supervisor alleging “insubordination” for me to realize I was in a toxic work environment and my own supervisor was at the center of it. 

Suddenly all the small humiliations and injustices made sense. 

Clear displeasure when I disclosed travel plans six months in advance. 

An unfair performance evaluation. 

Getting shafted in the new office seating arrangement. 

Being left out of meetings about my subject area. 

The sudden attitude change from teammates with whom I thought I had a good working relationship. 

I confided in my coworker who was a higher-up before her own experience with a toxic work environment drove her to take a lower paying role: 

“I’ve dealt with men like that my entire life” she told me. “They’d rather get you fired than have to work with a woman who has a mind of her own.” 

The first few weeks after my realization were intolerable. Panic, constant crying, feeling trapped and ready to blow up my whole life, fights with my partner, despair.

I began searching for a new role. I didn’t care what they were as long as they paid the same and weren’t with my current employer. 

As the auto-rejected applications piled up in my inbox, as I went to more interviews that didn’t result in an offer, I lowered my standards. The standard eventually became “anything as long as it’s not where I am now”. 

I went into survival mode, and started figuring out the various financial situations that could arise if I got fired. How much of a financial hit could I take? 

Slowly, my dreams for my career began to shrivel.

My desire to get management experience died, along with the desire to learn new skills, or make the world a better place. 

Since I had no idea how long it would take to find a new role, I began researching how to survive a toxic workplace. 

It was while I was scrolling those search results in the wee hours one morning that I found the advice to not let one bad supervisor derail my life and steal my ambition. The advice is right. I have spent a lot of time, money, and effort learning the technical skills needed in my career, and I’m not going to let this one small-minded man hold me back.  

Slowly the preoccupied fog lifted, and I have some thoughts: 

1. I need to deidentify from my career. 

I’ve always felt pride at being able to call myself a scientist. When I met new people, I’d yearn for them to ask me what I did for work, even if that question is a bit gauche where I live. 

I took pride in the fact that I could identify a “Woman in STEM” (but more of the desk jockey variety rather than the lab tech type). 

It’s an obscure career field, and it made me seem important, intelligent. I loved the questions about what I do in that field (sit at a desk and do math), what exciting outbreaks have I worked on (none), and am I a published (yes, but it’s not as glamorous as you’d think). 

I’ve always been a person who associated my worth with what I was able to achieve and accomplish. 

Even the thought of not being able to work in my chosen career path sent me spiraling about who I was, and who I would tell people I was. 

I need to walk the fine line between seeking out the career I’d like to work in and meets my financial/intellectual needs, and not making it my entire identity. 

That means I need to figure out who I am outside of work. Some ideas I’m playing with: writer, book-lover, cat-obsessed, health and fitness-loving, meditator, gardener. And also, ultimately these identifiers will never be able to capture the complexity and depth of who I am or who anyone else is, for that matter.

2. I need to invest in my partner, friends, and community. 

The threat of being fired really drove home for me that even though I’m represented by a union and serve an essential function, my employer and supervisors don’t care about me. I am replaceable. Even the people with whom I am friendly with at work are really only friendly with me because we work in the same building and have to see each other every day. 

However, the one place where I am not replaceable is to my friends, family, partner, and community. These are the people that care about me for the person I am, not the function I serve. Therefore, I’m deciding to invest more time and energy into building my community and my relationships. I will be putting more effort into leaving work stress at work, at reaching out to current friends and making new ones, and finding affinity groups and communities to which I want to belong.  

3. In the case I do lose this job, I need to bulk up my emergency savings up. 

Being financially healthy (paying off debt and having an emergency fund with three to six months of expenses) is essential to feeling like it isn’t the end of the world if I lose my job. 

After some setbacks in the last four years, I currently have about four months of expenses saved, but that number ticks up every month that I remain employed. I also benefit from living with a partner who owns our home and can afford to pay the mortgage without me, though I doubt it will come to that. 

In other words, I’m going to be fine partly because of the good money decisions I’ve been making up until this moment. 

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I’m starting to deeply understand how life is about more than just what I do for money. The lack of security, even in jobs that are commonly thought to be the most secure, highlights the death of the career and the futility of clinging to any career or workplace.  

I can no longer allow myself to be preoccupied with a job that only boosts my ego. 

While I don’t want to lose my job without another one lined up, I do feel more prepared than I did a few weeks ago.