American Hustle

It is a Sunday morning in Sicily and I'm clicking through Instagram and Facebook and feeling especially lucky that I'm not in the United States. One of the main goals of this three month period in Sicily was to restore my mental health from the continued trauma of being an American Citizen through years and years of catastrophic "unprecedented" events and a toxic hustle culture. I am far from that goal, but stepping in the right direction.

The first phase of this goal has been to gain back the circadian rhythm I lost working a 9-5 corporate position that demanded I give up any semblance of an individual life. 

Daily I pointed out to my 'superiors' that working ten and twelve hour days plus weekends was not only unhealthy screen time for our brains, our human relationships, and our self worth, but completely unproductive and unsustainable in the long run. My boss and coworkers continuously spoke about their spouses and children wishing that they had more time to spend with the family. One colleague confided in me that she had gained 30 pounds in two years, as she struggled to reach unreasonable deadlines day in and day out, on weekends, and over holidays. During one particularly troubling account, a VP proudly pinned on herself a badge of honor for being rushed to the hospital for a panic attack in which she was sure her heart was failing. 

This is not the part that pushed me over the edge, however. Don't get me wrong, I was close, but I hadn't quite realized the extent of the brainwashing until I talked directly to my boss about it. As I complained he kept reiterating that "nobody was asking me to work extra hours". I was confused and taken off guard because he was actually right. Nobody had explicitly told me (except one time where a man quite literally told me that I would have to work over a holiday weekend when I was traveling to New York City and I promptly hung the phone up on him) that I was required to work those hours. It was the same thing when I talked to the CFO. "I would never ask my employees to work those kinds of hours!" She would enthusiastically state to me, and it would leave me feeling like I was not only killing myself at work, but I was doing it voluntarily.

I'd like my next sentence to start with "And then it hit me -". 

But that's not how gaslighting works. Gaslighting works by making you feel crazy about what you see and feel. Gaslighting tells you that you're the problem by outright lying or omitting truths. I believed my superiors when they told me that they hadn't asked me to do any of the things I was doing. I took this Corporate American job's word that the cause of all of my stress was on me and my bad habits. I was waking up in the morning to check my email and not walking away from my computer for ten hours, save to interrupt a 3 hour meeting with an urgent bathroom break. I was gaining weight, I was inflamed, I was not showering, I'd lost every hobby and outlet I had once loved, and by golly it was all my fault.

So I stopped working so much. I limited my hours to 8 per day, I refused to support on weekends, and I told my staff to do the same. We did what we could in those hours allotted and tried to rest our brains on our free time so that we could be refreshed and ready to tackle what came to us when we returned, bright eyed and bushy-tailed. It was glorious. Until it wasn't. 

In the following months, nobody told us to work more hours or to support on weekends. None of them told us to give up our hobbies or to spend less time with friends and family. That is true. Those words were not explicitly stated. What they did do, however, was to tell us that we weren't doing enough. We weren't fixing enough of the mistakes that management had made by misunderstanding Federal contracting and accounting. My small financial team was unable to change the deeply embedded bad spending and staffing habits that had plagued the company for (likely) decades. We weren't able to unravel the false data that was flowing through our homegrown and grossly inadequate accounting system. We weren't attending enough 5AM to 6PM meetings. And we flat out weren't working fast enough. 

Well, fast forward to just about 90 days into quitting Corporate America cold turkey. In these 90 days I have lost 20 pounds, slept at least 10 hours every night, and quit the prozac that I had so desperately needed these past few years. I have taken a walk once a day, I am brushing my teeth and showering and doing all of the things that I was told I must not WANT to do, or I would have found a way. As it turns out, I love doing those things. I love cleaning and organizing my space. I love spending time with my friends and my family and moving my body. The only difference between now and then is that I don't have some dude breathing down my neck about how I'm not good enough no matter what I do or how I do it. I also don't have a paycheck, but don't let that fool you. I had molded my life into one that needed a large paycheck, and now I plan to retract it into something a lot more reasonable. 

I am not suggesting that everyone should do or should have the means to do what I am doing. What I am suggesting is that, if you feel the way I felt, you are not doing it to yourself. You are not crazy. You are not doing it wrong. You are a cog in a wheel that is meant to be held fast so that those at the top don't lose control of their machine lest it come crashing down. So if you can't quit your job, take more time to yourself and let management come down on you. Build up a solid foundation of telling people to eat shit and die when they ask you to do something outrageous. And, for the love of god, if you work for a Federal Contractor supporting the Department of Defense go somewhere else. You are making the worst people in the world rich, and you know it. That part is your fault. Leave and leave now.