Tag: Toxic Work Place

  • The Return of the Cold

    The wife has a cold, and is laid up in bed today. She was laid up in bed yesterday, too, so I feel like we are repeating ourselves. This cold came from our child. I hate to be like that, but it’s true. The kid was the carrier monkey, as she had this exact same thing a week ago. The kid had a sore throat on the past Thursday night, so we kept her home from school on the next day. About half way through Friday, she was pretty much back to normal. She was still a little groggy, but the sore throat was gone. Today, my wife doesn’t have the sore throat, but she feels like crap. Furthermore, this leads me to believe that I will be sick next week.

    As annoying as all of this is, this is the way life used to be. The kid would go to school, get a cold, then we all would get it in the house. It’s amazing that once we stopped isolating, and wearing a mask, the old cycle of disease has returned. Good or bad, the rhinovirus cycle was a part of the old normal.

    On a small level, it has been rewarding taking care of my wife and kid through their little colds. It’s always nice to be needed, not that they haven’t made me feel needed. It’s nice to take care of something you love.

    The funny part of all of this, is that I started to remember back when I worked in the very toxic office, how I would look forward to getting sick, so I wouldn’t have to go in to work. When I would get that first weird feeling of being rundown, I would celebrate a little in my mind. Yet again, another sign that I should have quit that job sooner. You live, you learn.

  • What I Allow to Define Me

    Lately, I started to observe something about myself; When I meet someone new, the question of “What do you do?” comes up, and I say, “I used to be in theatre, and arts administration.”

    Now, I haven’t had an arts admin job in two years, and I haven’t worked in theatre for three and a half years, and though I did use the pass tense, I still use these jobs to define me, to explain who I am. Maybe, subconsciously, I think I’m going back to these fields, but I am no longer sure that I will.

    I am self-conscious of where I find myself now, and I am not sure how to describe it to others. I am a stay at home parent, and I have trouble saying it out loud. Part of it is that I feel like I defaulted into this position, and the other part is that it doesn’t cover the whole picture. I am a stay at home dad because I became unemployed over COVID, and I started taking care of the kid, and her remote schooling because my wife was working remotely and she needed to focus on that. What started as a temporary fix, until I found another job, evolved into where we are today.

    I am happier than I have been in a long time. Sure, I still have stresses and worries about the future, but what I have noticed lately is that I no longer dread getting up in the morning. I don’t hate the day before it begins. I don’t fear going to bed, because what the next day will bring. I see now that I had lived so much of the past ten years like that; angry and frustrated at every place that I worked.

    I do have to take some responsibility here. Yes, the jobs were toxic, but I also made the choice to go to work there, day after day. Maybe I thought I could change the people and places that I worked at. Maybe I thought I couldn’t find a better job. The bottom line is that I actively made the choice, for a long time, not to find a way out.

    The only thing that kept me from imploding was the theatre work that I did over those ten years, and the friends I made from it. And the overwhelming majority of the work was in puppetry. Every time I got a job, I would throw myself into it, just commit and do it. It was rewarding, confirmed the reason I moved to NYC, and also validated my existence, at least on an artistic level.

    And here I am, years removed from both, and still I present these titles to people, as if they are relevant to who I currently am.