I’m letting people who hurt me in the past live rent free in my mind.
One episode involves a former landlord that tried to run me over in an intersection with no traffic cameras.
Another one involves a manager that fired me for informing that one of his favorites yelled during night shift and ignored alarms to talk. He fired me the next day, used the exit interview to tell me everything I didn’t do right (but kept quiet about his favorites, even though I did the job like them), still had the utmost confidence on his favorites, accused me of being lazy and instead of simply firing me and keeping neutral he chose to take it personal, proceeded to try to scare me insinuating I wouldn’t work for his system again, when that failed, tried to humiliate me and then fired me. This was in an non union hospital.
When I think about it I get angry. Id like not to be so thin skinned, but here I am.
In my rare cases, it’s been one of those issues where I didn’t know they were keeping it from someone BUT it’s something that should be obvious if you thought about it for a second, OR, they claim they told me it was a secret, but it was not obvious. And I have to say, “At no point did you tell me this was a secret.” Which, you know, makes them look WORSE because now it looks like it was not only a secret, but they were intentionally covering it up as well. And then somehow that’s my fault. It becomes a game of “he said, she said,” and I lost some friends over that over the decades. Was I right? Yeah, but that’s not the point.
The problem is people lie all the time. I do my best, but sometimes I don’t get those clues. And sometimes? I have had people lie FOR ME when there was no need to begin with. Like someone tried to “cover up” where I was some evening from my wife, when my wife knew where I was (a goth club). But then he claimed I was with him, and I wasn’t. So that started a whole mess. I had to explain, “I was still at the goth club, he thinks I was with him, because he thought you weren’t supposed to know I was at the goth club, and ‘was doing me a solid’ for no reason.” It got to the point I told everyone, “Never lie for me. Either I can stand on my own actions, or I deserve to get caught for being stupid. I am not someone who can keep track of things that actually happened, much less lies.” Lies make me panicky because, well, like I said earlier, I have accidentally exposed people.
I try not to. But I make mistakes.