Love and hate and work

I distinctly remember loving and hating my job with equal gusto, during a particularly difficult period. I guess this is true in all roles, there are good bits and bad bits. What struck me at the time, and reflecting back on it, was the difference between the highs and lows.

I was really invested in the work I was doing, I had deep subject knowledge and I was good at my job. I had a natural aptitude for both product management and leading teams and my results spoke for themselves (of course, I wouldn’t ‘blow my own trumpet’ because I’d been conditioned not to ‘show off’). I was respected by my peers and was a ‘go to’ person in my field. I worked with a close group of colleagues who were also friends. We were a tight team, a real crew.

Much of what we did was ground-breaking, creating new products and services, and I loved having that freedom and opportunity. Having a blank sheet of paper didn’t phase me, it excited me. The work was interesting and challenging, the people I worked with were interesting, talented and engaging. We had a lot of fun together.

All great, right?

Well, no. Because I hated the organisation I was in and the people I worked for. It was a fear-driven, command-and-control, hierarchical organisation run by bullies. They were risk-averse and bureaucratic, which was kryptonite to the experimental, entrepreneurial work I was involved in. I was frequently told that the product area I worked in was irrelevant and a ‘cinderella business’, and I was often denied access to people and resources because we weren’t ‘important’.

It was impossible to get decisions made because managers insisted on excessive amounts of information and demanded certainty, whilst the decision-making process was sclerotic. At the same time, the scope of decisions that I could take had been reduced to the level of ordering stationary, and even then I needed a sign-off from my boss. That’s if I had a boss, because in the frequent re-organisations we were always an afterthought. We were never consulted and even, once or twice, left out of the new org charts.

Along with this constant indifference towards us, there were moments of outright abuse. As the team leader, I bore the brunt of the attacks (I saw part of my role being to shield my team from that sort of thing). It ranged from the random acts of mild bullying and weaponised bureaucracy to a sustained period of psychological abuse. Pretty serious stuff.

And that’s where the problem arose. Because I loved the work I was doing and the people I worked with so much, I put up with the stuff I hated through a mixture of stubbornness, delusion and denial.

The organisational stuff, the institutionalised bullying and suffocating bureaucracy, I couldn’t do that much about. I adapted, I learnt to keep my head down and operate under the radar. I relied on personal relationships to get around the formal process, I used subversion rather than confrontation. I was not going to be deflected from my goals by these people and I wasn’t going to walk away either. I was going to outlast them. Like I said, I was stubborn.

I also convinced myself that things would change. This wasn’t an entirely unreasonable hope, we worked with other parts of the business and there was often talk of us moving to join them, or a consolidation of all the groups working in our field. However, it was a idea I was willing to embrace and didn’t apply much critical thought to. Hope springs eternal, right?

However, my management consistently blocked any such moves, seeing my team as a bargaining chip (it seems that we did have some value after all, but not in a way that was helpful to us). Even so, I kept persuading myself things would change, partly because we were all convinced things couldn’t get much worse (we were wrong. They could and they did).

And finally, I was in denial about quite how bad things were and how much the abuse was damaging me. This is not uncommon in abusive relationships, to downplay the abuse and its impact. I didn’t want to give up all the stuff I loved, I didn’t want to walk away from the job I had invested so much in but the only way I could justify staying was to pretend the way I was being treated wasn’t as bad as it really was.

So did I outlast them? Did we get to move to another part of the business? Did I imagine things were worse than they really were?

I think you can probably guess the answers. No to all of these questions. They, the people and the organisation, crushed me. Nothing was left, apart from the delusion and denial. I continued to underplay the damage that had been done to me, I deluded myself that I could quickly ‘bounce back’. But the damage was much greater than I imagined even in my darkest moments, its impact longer lasting than I thought possible.

If I hadn’t have loved my job so much, would I have put up with the toxicity and abuse? No, I don’t think I would. I was trapped by my own enthusiasm and commitment and the bonds I had built with my ‘crew’. If I hadn’t have particularly cared about the work, if I hadn’t have had any real friends at work, I would’nt have put up with a fraction of the abuse. I’d have moved much earlier, before any real damage was done.

It’s possible to love your job too much. It’s possible to love it more than you love yourself. That’s when it gets really dangerous. That’s why self-love and self-care are so important, they protect you from that type of overcommitment. They are also an essential part of recovery.

Learning to love myself and care for myself, things I was not taught, have been key to my recovery. However, I first had to develop the self-awareness to know what I was going through, to connect with my feelings and listen to what my body was telling me.

If I had learnt these sooner, I would have been able to protect myself and I would have known that the job is just not that important. It’s certainly not worth suffering for.

Because it’s great to love your job but that will never be enough to compensate for the harm the parts you hate are doing to you. When mild irritation becomes real pain, it’s time to walk away.