Washing clean the past but opening up a way into what new future?
I survived that meeting and walked out, then immediately had to run to the toilets and be sick. This has never happened to me before, or since.
At the start of this tale, I said I was unflappable, steady and sensible and with that comes a corresponding lack of high emotion. But now I was in new territory. As I drove home that Monday evening I started to seriously consider a number of ways of just walking out of the wretched job. Weighing my options and trying to come up with a workable plan. There certainly was no easy solution, I needed to earn.
The next part of my tale is unlikely to play out exactly the same for anyone else, but I want you to know that if you are determined you will always find a ‘plan B’. And looking for that plan B is the key. Be brave and be creative. Something I haven’t shared with you yet is that since 2000 I’ve also led tours for a holiday company, during leave from my full-time job. The following day I phoned them up and laid my cards on the table. I was open and honest and said if any opportunities came up I would be available, even at short notice.
By that afternoon I’d had two tour managers come back to me with offers of leading a four-day private tour to the Lake District the next month, and co-leading a week-long tour to Portugal the following one.
The drive home that evening took me a while, as I kept stopping to think through scenarios. My brain was in turmoil and I was desperately trying to imagine every ‘what if?’. It had taken me three months to find a job, from scratch, when I’d been made redundant, so I was very much hoping for a similar timescale, especially as my CV and base cover letter were already sorted.
Could we survive financially for three months if we pulled our belts in, cancelled all unnecessary expenditure and had the extra tour leading money to help? And, more than anything else, how the hell was I going to tell my husband? I was simply dreading the argument I felt sure was inevitable.
I was shaking by the time I got home, but I knew it was now or never. As we were sat on the sofa it all came out. I asked him to let me say everything first before responding, so I could let him know all the details of just how bad things were, about the offer of additional tours and the options I’d considered for saving money and not losing our house.
He sat there and listened and when he did respond it wasn’t with anything I’d imagined in those thousands of ‘what if?’ scenarios that had played out in my head. He simply said “OK. I just want my wife back. We’ll manage.”
Talk about a watershed moment. There was much emotion and there was even more talking through options, but it was all about moving forward. An immense weight had been lifted from my shoulders. We were going to face whatever came next together.
I went into work the following day a happier person. It’s hard to express the emotional roller coaster up to then, but although my journey had reached a significant point it had not come to an end.
That afternoon the tour company called me again, and this time I was offered an incredible opportunity, a month-long trip to Madagascar, from mid-October to mid-November, not one I could have even considered when working full-time but a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I felt the stars were in alignment and knowing this was the point of no return I gleefully said yes.
And so, I handed in my notice and prepared to tackle the next few months head on. It was very noticeable that during my notice period my boss couldn’t say a bad word about me but kept on about how sad they were I was leaving and what were they going to do without me. In the time since I’ve been gone the team has had ‘revolving doors’, with new staff coming in and departing again pretty quickly. Looking back, perhaps my four-and-a-half-year stint there was remarkable more for its longevity!
That was mid-summer last year but now, where has my journey taken me? I was surprised to be able to ‘sign on’ immediately despite having left my job under my own volition. If you are bullied out, mention mental health and you will, quite rightly, be able to claim. I started applying for lots of things, but was struggling to decide what to focus on. Career progression meant I should really be thinking of the next step up, to what my team leader had been: a Communications Manager – especially now I had good experience of media work and had a good wider ‘comms portfolio’ in CV-speak – but my confidence had been totally smashed. I genuinely feared getting a decent job and then making a complete mess of it by discovering I was not up to the task. What to do?
I should have been really nervous at this stage because, if I couldn’t find a job, we would be looking at some serious decisions regarding the house but instead, much to my surprise, I was in a much better place. This was a real revelation to me. I hadn’t realised how ill the job had been making me, how close to a breakdown I was getting. Again, as a usually very steady person I hadn’t recognised the warning signs that I was going downhill having never experienced mental health issues before.
I’ve since met a number of people who have not been able to go back to work after dealing with similar situations, so I was lucky to get out when I did. Friends and family all agree I was really not far from that tipping point, and who knows where I’d be now if I’d continued to grin and bear it.
I now look back at those months last summer as an important part of my healing and recovery. Doing other things – OK, yes, the travelling was a major factor – but also not thinking about that awful job, the toxic environment and the people I interacted with has helped enormously and starting to take delight again in the things that I valued and enjoyed. I was lucky to get a number of interviews relatively quickly, which are all great experience. Even though I was desperate on some levels to get a job, especially financially, I also knew it had to be the right job – and even more it had to be with the right employers.
I was delighted to get through to several last stage interviews when it was between me and just one other person. Frustratingly, I missed out a couple of times, but I’m a great believer in what will be, will be and I tried to take confidence in the fact that I was making it to that stage so frequently. By now I’d been applying for jobs for two months, the clock was ticking.
I found the support of friends very important, especially those who had experienced similar things. The three of us from the comms team at the charity who all left now refer to ourselves as ‘The Survivor’s Club’ and we are still helping each other out, and our friendship has grown stronger. Through the power of instant messaging we were able to prop each other up when any of us needed it. It has also been a surprise to me which of my friends I leaned on most during this time, it wasn’t necessarily my closest friends, or the ones I would have imagined. Embrace what you need at the time.
One thing all three of us have done – and we all agree was a really valuable step on the way back to normality – was to be brave and take fixed-term contracts. It gives you the flexibility to work in a different field, or try a different role. And that is exactly what I’ve done. And, being temporary it gave me enough confidence at this stage to apply for that next step up. A one-year fixed term maternity cover at a military charity, and I was offered the job on the day before I flew out to Madagascar, almost exactly three months after I left my previous job.
I’m now working as a Communications Manager and (re-)discovering very quickly that I can write, I can do this job well and I’m loving every minute of it. The journey is not yet over, as I’ll almost certainly have to start looking for that permanent job in due course, but I needed this period of time to regroup and recover. And, yes, that’s the right word: recover. So that when I begin my job hunt once more, I am back to where I should be and presenting my true self to the job market.
Some of the red flags I’ve highlighted are, perhaps, not a big deal on their own, and we are all so very different, some things might not bother us, but bother somebody else. In my case, having a difficult director was something I probably would have tolerated for much longer and, who knows, I could well have found that next job and moved on in due course, but the personality clash and – without a doubt – bullying I encountered with my new team leader is something, as I was to discover, I couldn’t tolerate.
This account has been really hard to write in places, but utterly cathartic for me. I want you to recognise those red flags and have the confidence to know that you can do something about it and come out the other end as a better version of yourself. Perhaps I’ll never know if I just wasn’t a good fit, or whether it truly is a toxic workplace, although I suspect mostly the latter. Certainly, having so many others who have left the same charity with similar stories has helped, knowing I’m not alone and it wasn’t all ‘me’ has made a huge difference to me during this time.
But, even if it is a case of you being a wrong fit, or there is a personality clash, don’t go around blaming yourself. Own it. The right job is out there and no matter how much we need money, there are other things in life far, far more important, not least happiness, family and your health. You need to protect yourself, you are simply too valuable, and no job is worth damaging yourself over. Follow your heart, be brave and live life to the full.
FINAL RED FLAG – Your job is affecting your mental and/or physical health. Get out!