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Trying To Move On
by Bebe
(USA)
I'm embarrassed to say that I still think about my workplace bullying experience even now, five years later. I dreaded going to work because this person, who was between my boss and me, wanted to make me miserable.
When I was first hired, the bully, B, told me that this office wasn't a place where a lot of finger-pointing went on. I should have realized that that was a warning: Finger-pointing, it turned out, occurred daily -- with me as the target, mind you. Often, mistakes were invented; if I did make mistakes, they were magnified. B defied logic. She also demonstrated a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde type behavior.
When I took initiative and did something unquestionably worthwhile, she attacked me. She screamed at me, red-faced, in front of my coworkers and changed the way things worked at whim so I often felt disconcerted. In the end, I quit. The HR person was a joke, not to mention a friend of the abusive B.
I still feel a certain degree of shame after all this time. I'm angry with myself for not telling her, tactfully, forcefully and eloquently, that I would not tolerate such behavior. In my mind then, doing so just would have caused further awkwardness and anxiety and, most likely, retaliation. But I feel that I never got any resolution by simply leaving the job. And I also feel a degree of resentment for all that I endured. I know that this person was a sad, threatened soul who should mean nothing to me and who shouldn't be permitted to enter my thoughts. But I still find myself thinking about it and feeling, for a moment, the same stomach-tightening uneasiness.