Toxic Spaces and What We Tolerate
Schools, Workplaces, Oh My
You walk into work yet again with a deficit. It seems that every day you are fighting a losing battle, but the truth is you stopped fighting long ago. Your time is filled going through the motions, hating most of what is happening around you, waiting until the clock says you can flee.
The people here are strangers, but it started a little better than that. In the good office with a view sits your almost-friend turned aloof stranger. Remember that time you met up, talked, had a good time, and assumed you made a real friend from work?
But funny things tend to happen when you are involved. People reveal themselves. They do not want you around, that is what that voice says everywhere you go. You hate that voice but know he is right. Normal things like a happy work environment, and even the most barely-there camaraderie with these people, are out of your reach. Again. This is just the way it is.
Everyone knows when it’s time to schmooze the boss, tell him what he wants to hear, and most of all, talk baseball with him. That is the key to becoming an office favorite, winning promotions, getting the good assignment, the best parking spaces, and everything. You do not know anything about baseball, not enough to even fake it. Your desk might as well be outside the walls, because that is as far as you are from the inner circle of this place.
The worst, though, is that these confines are not safe. X might as well threaten you openly at this point. X does not like you and enforces the rules of the clique. He is dumb and has been bestowed with gatekeeping powers. X has the ear of the boss, and only certain kinds of people get hired here.
All of this flashes through your head several times a day. This is what life is like five days a week, but the shame and frustration does not go away just because Friday arrives. Nothing is ever likely to change, you are certain.
Now we turn from the inner heartaches of a poor soul to the perspective of your friendly author. The above is not rare. They are the quiet struggles of countless people. I chose to speak to an adult employee of some office situation, but now transfer everything described to a high school setting. Take all your creativity and what your mind-theater was playing in your head, with the characters and tension therein, and cast a shy, semi-normal, sensitive kid in the lead role.
This was my high school experience. Although, your author does not intend to make this story an exposition of his memoir. Let’s talk and think more in the universal and everyday than the singular and uncommon.
If you were treated in a work environment like stated above, would anyone notice? Well, there are a few things I will state with confidence. You would be miserable. Those circumstances are unfair and dysfunctional. Some higher-ups would take this seriously, and there would be heck to pay, if one did experience and report physical threats.
With all this in mind, let me state the most important takeaway from this story: if pervasive small-mindedness and bullying is not tolerable in a place of work, why do we continue to turn away and allow high school culture (or anywhere) to continue on as if it’s healthy?
At least in one case we are talking about adults who are getting paid instead of clueless kids. The second scenario is more frightening than the first. Kids do not, at least most of them, have enough earned wisdom to withstand exclusionary, all-encompassing, daily torment.
Oh, and even though I mentioned bullying, try to circle that word with your mind-pen and place it in the back of the deck. Deemphasize it, I mean. What I speak of is bullying but a little different from what we have all heard over and over. As usual, I do not wish to repeat something that is well-known.
I am speaking about outcomes that are implied with looks, body language, boundary-crossing, and sometimes, vague language. Immature teachers also play a part.
At the same time, I must drive home how an atmosphere of violence can infect every nook and cranny of every hall and every aspect of mandatory school. Teenagers live in these places. These are formative years.
In the rooms, the secret corners, the parking lot, and among the lockers of high school, violence never left my awareness. It was the currency. If one could inflict physical punishment on others at the drop of a hat, that one was cool and worthy of emulation. To all I have said, add this: high school is more than a building and is a time period and a culture beyond the actual school.
Of course, no adult said uncomfortable things out loud. I had a disrespectful view of authority figures because they were double talkers and liars. They said fighting was not allowed, yet everyone knew that fighting was the coolest possible thing that could happen—under certain conditions.
It did not take a boy genius to sense that his body was unsafe from attack. Also, everyone secretly clamoring for a physical confrontation did not instill self-esteem, maturity, or positive mental health into all those impressionable minds.
Fighting was fine, because it was (and is) part of how insensitive people view the world: us vs. them. With this in mind, fighting separated the sheep from the goats, and those with character versus those with cowardly DNA. It was assumed that the victims would grow up to perform menial jobs working for the perpetrators. That is just the way of the world.
If bullying is what this was and still is, then it is a kind of social contract agreed upon by the subjects (kids) and the ruling class (adults). Someone out there might feel that I am over-dramatizing what is just an inescapable and harmless part of growing up. That might be possible, but I must stand firm with my point of view.
What is needed is understanding, and now I mean for everyone at any stage of living including right now as much as in the past.
The way I started this story was intended to put adults now in the role of powerless teenagers enduring what some conceive of as fine and even a good thing. You would not stand for being mistreated this way. The police might get involved and arrests could even happen.
Don’t try to toughen up young folks through phony maturation rituals. Be part of the solution and not the problem. That is all for my diatribe today and this is the end of my brief story.
This is a good one to read. It will make you think:
It’s hard to get a teen to realize how atypical their life experience is compared to what it will become. High school can be so judgmental and vicious, and adult life is often much less so. But as you say, some work places retain that high school toxicity.