“People who repeatedly attack your confidence and self-esteem are quite aware of your potential, even if you are not.”

-Wayne Gerard Trotman

I am lately stunned by a co-worker who claims that they are trying to help when they provide unsolicited, mean-spirited feedback. I have trained myself to try and accept her criticism with grace and that all such criticism is feedback that can be useful later. Silent response, however, is not always grace. The first time she gave me one-on-one a correction, it was aside in the middle of work; she was trained and I a trainee, so I thought it was honest feedback. The second time was during dinner after work ten months later, more publicly but framed by attempts to gain my trust. 

After discussing my co-worker’s comments over time with my bosses and with other co-workers, this gal and I decided to re-start our professionalism. We each said our piece last week , shook on it, and agreed to good intents from that point forward. 

We then had a chance to test our new start, and were assigned to work a clinic together. It was a good day and we made it through, until the last hour came. I was in the middle of tidying up our space before moving to the next task and she comes out of the middle of her task to ask me why I’m not at my next task yet because I took 20 seconds to talk to a coworker who just also happens to be my friend. Within earshot of our bosses and the patients, she chastised my friendship as well as my ability to efficiently manage my time. I was later told the patients were asking why she was speaking to me in such a way.

At the time this happened, I could not believe her comments. We had just agreed to a new start only the week before, so how did she now have the license to say whatever she liked? I managed to carry on with no flow lost to the clinic, somehow. I was in no mood to start a fight with the day nearly gone, and since she was supposed to be the first one of us out and I was to close the clinic, I later told her she could leave. She didn’t need to worry – I would clean up. She stayed anyway, and continued to say mean things as we were cleaning. It took me three separate times to dismiss her before she took the hint and left. I could finally finish the work day alone, but not in peace. An inner paranoid voice had already internalized her comments and continued to chastise me as I was cleaning up. A couple of stinging, foggy tears burned hot.

I cannot tell what was worse: the fact that I was bullied again thirdly, this time publicly and in front of my superiors during work, or the fact I did not shut it down again.  My direct report pulled me aside to ask what happened, and I could still do nothing aside from expressing astonishment that she was still coming at me spitefully even after we had shaken hands and agreed to a do-over. 

Now what? If I say anything else to my co-worker it might cause trouble for me later, and if I don’t say anything to defend myself I may be subject to listening to her comments for the foreseeable future if she doesn’t manage to ruin my career first. The paranoia in my head says I am caught between a rock and a hard place. Our bullying and harassment training says to leave this in the hands of the management. I have done so for the last two months and am trying to be patient. My insides, however, have another agenda.

All I really want to do is scream it out and then get back to work.  I wish that none of this had happened. I wish I did not have to worry about my environment. I wish that all my co-workers could be my friends and that we could laugh over a pint daily after work. But I also wish I could eat an infinite number of roadhouse yeast rolls with none of the subsequent bloating.

For context, I used to be a tattle-teller when I was little. The elder of three, I thought one of my jobs was to report to my parents when my siblings slipped up; in my mind they needed to learn the same lessons I had. Mom told me I was trying to be a mother where I should have been a sibling. In my kindergarten class, I once told on a classmate to the assistant teacher because they had not pushed in their chair prior to leaving the room for an outing. Instead of praise, I received a 5 minute time-out from a 15 minute recess, head down on the playground’s picnic table. 33% of my free time gone that day – rest assured I resolved never again to be a snitch. There was no reward for me to mind anyone else’s business but my own, so I resolved to keep silent about other people’s problems.

After nearly 20 years of using that silence, I have learned to see a little good in everybody, and this intent has been validated by friends and some colleagues. However, my difficulty remains in recognizing bad intent; shouldn’t we all be working to make our work, and by extension our lives, better? How odd that the real social world has a penchant for entropy, and that agreements frequently and quickly unravel. And I often get the lash of the entropy. Perhaps I chastise myself so that outside mean-spiritedness does not hurt as much. Perhaps that is why I keep silent in the moments mean things are said.

Silence may not be grace under the bullies, but maybe it can be grace given to them. I only hope I can give that grace in the future without demeaning myself or others.