Dumped

Like most of my past break-ups, my most recent was not a surprise. There were red flags from the beginning. When my boss showed me the kitchen during my tour of the facility she laughed nervously and said, "We usually just come down here for like 15 minutes and wolf down lunch. That's all the time we have." The first week, I was already working overtime. At six months, I realized that I had absolutely no decision-making power, yet somehow things were still my fault. By nine months, I couldn't sleep at night, and I cried in the shower before work. Why was everything I did wrong? Why couldn't I meet their needs?



The relationship started to become abusive. They'd say they needed one thing; then after I spent a week working on it, they'd go in a completely different direction. I'd work really hard on something and then they wouldn't even use it. They didn't trust me. They didn't like my clothes.

I felt like I was giving, giving, giving and never really felt appreciated. No one noticed the special little things I'd do to make their lives easier. I had no power. All the decisions about our future were made by VPs behind closed doors. There was no system for collectively evaluating our relationship, no way to voice my feelings of powerlessness. It was like a bad marriage.

I never had inflated expectations about the longevity of our relationship. Statistically most relationships don't work out, so why get your hopes up, right? I always new deep down that it wasn't forever. They wanted me to commit to three to five years. But then, because of a merger and budget cuts, they eliminated my position after one.



It's not the actual break-up that gets me. It's the reminder that I'm not at all in control of my own destiny, at least not professionally. It's the knowledge that, like so many other relationships, this one failed miserably despite my best intentions and hard work. People always say that it doesn't matter if a relationship ends as long as you learned something in the process. So why do I feel like I just wasted a year of my life learning things I didn't really want to know anyway?

Sally T., Unemployed