That’s All She Wrote

When good jobs go bad, we have to make choices about where and who we want to be, even when it scares us.

A year ago this past week, I started a new full-time job as an in-house writer for a small digital marketing company. Months earlier, I began writing for them on a freelance basis, along with other companies I counted as my clients. Then, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. At first, it seemed like such a great fit. A tiny group of cool people and a casual work atmosphere. No brick-and-mortar building; the entire office resides online. The pay fell far beneath what my skill set is worth, but I planned to stick around long enough to see if that would change.

The job was great. Until it wasn’t. The details of why aren’t really the point here, although if I wanted to write a 2,000-word piece on how to drag a company down from the inside, the past six months would give me plenty of research material.

“And in the morning, he dress and go to hell
All activated by a little timer bell”
“Forty or Fifty” by Spin Doctors

Those lyrics danced into my head many times when my alarm went off on weekday mornings. Poor management choices and idiotic new approaches to how writing should be dumbed down took their toll. I knew I needed to leave my job. Then, the company fired a baffling shot over the bow. I experienced trouble concentrating and cried a lot in the two days following the Robb Elementary school shooting in Uvalde and didn’t finish all my assignments. Knowing this, they still wrote me up for missing a deadline. I knew the time had come to put on my shoes and start walking. 

Still, fear makes for one powerful co-pilot.

After the write-up, I spent weeks with my head down, doing my work, and trying to keep my anxiety on a low flame. Still, losing sleep and fighting off panic attacks became my part-time job. Despite it all, I felt I couldn’t walk away from a full-time paycheck with no replacement for that income ready to go. 

Then, I got sick. Thursday, I was informed I had to make up all the work I missed while being out for two sick days last week, even if that meant working nights and the weekend. 

When I hung up the phone after being told this, I knew I had a choice. Swallow – no, choke down – my anger and resentment and work through the weekend because I felt too frightened to leap without a net. Or I could make a clear statement that I will not hang around somewhere I am clearly not valued. In short, I snapped and, even more importantly, I did not back down out of fear.

These past years have taught me how strong of a woman I have become. I survived caretaking a parent with dementia. I survived the poverty and loss of social contact that the experience forced me to endure. I survived moving and losing my mom. I survived trying to put my career back together when Covid first reared its head on a global level and everything shut down. 

Finally, after all these years of hoisting fear up on a pedestal and bowing down to it, I recognize that I am a survivor. I realized that if I quit my job, I would land on my feet. If I landed on my ass instead, I would likely get up soon enough. In this case, I had to choose the devil I did not know because I could no longer stand hanging around the one with whom I had become quite so familiar.

Still… did I have the stones to walk away from the security of a regular paycheck, even though it comes with a deduction not just for taxes but also for my sanity? Thursday night around 10:30, I felt seized with doubt. “Just suck it up a few more weeks. Something will come along. Don’t do anything foolish.”

Then, I asked myself what a strong woman would do without factoring fear into it. The immediate answer came to me. She would set fire to that bridge and walk away laughing. With that realization, I put on my headphones and cranked up “The Green Manalishi” by Judas Priest. 

Today, on a hot and quiet Sunday, I set off a bomb in my world. I sent an email to the company owner and management informing them that I had reached the end of my rope and that “I resign my position here effective immediately.” 

I have two freelance jobs that will cover some bills. I will have to hustle to fill in the rest. I shall rely on faith, moxy, and a healthy sense of humor to carry me through. But even more importantly, I will relish the fact that I proved capable of setting off a bomb in my world because I needed to light that fuse. 

Guess I won’t be working this weekend after all. Because that’s all she wrote. And the alarm clock on my phone set for Monday? I turned it off.

People I May Know

An essay/short story hybrid about getting an unwelcome invitation by social media to reconnect with a childhood bully.

Social media dangled an offer in front of me, both unaware and uninterested in how it might land. “People You May Know”. The Facebook feature created to make you squeal and say, “Oh my God, look at this person I do know, or at least I used to know! We can now reconnect, thanks to the power of Zuckerberg’s algorithms!”

I last knew this person when we were kids. I met Heidi when we shared a third-grade classroom in my hometown. Friendly at first, she soon turned on me for no reason I could ever ascertain. 

“Fatty,” she’d whisper, as she walked past my desk. She quickly promoted herself to My Bully and overshadowed the rest of my years in elementary school with taunts about my weight. She always delivered her torment out of the earshot of adults.

Heidi usurped my outgoing nature and rerouted the wiring in my head.  Eight-year-old children, both of us. “You’ll always be fat and ugly,” she announced on the playground in front of the whole class. The words felt biblical. 

By the time we entered middle school, Heidi moved on and found other victims. Yet, we did have something in common; we both entered the world of eating disorders. She got anorexia—the “good” one, in my eyes. I couldn’t even get sick right. I became a binge eater, which in turn, made my weight balloon. I self-fulfilled her prophecy. 

Heidi ended up in the hospital in our freshman year. I ended up yo-yo dieting for the next twenty years. Only one of us received any sympathy.

It wasn’t until, as an adult, I looked at old grade school pictures and realized I never qualified as “fatty” when the bullying began. Instead, I was average weight for a kid my age. By then, it was too late. That little girl internalized the vicious message and carried it onto more than one therapist’s couch as an adult. 

Oh, Facebook, you little detective you. This is indeed People I May Know. I could message Heidi and detail the damage done by her verbal assaults. How dare you, you little bitch! Why?! Why me?

Instead, I clicked the “Remove” button on the notification. Half an hour later, I stood in front of the open refrigerator door, unaware that I had even walked into my kitchen.