Roll Up Your Sleeves

I was trying really hard to maintain a steady voice. “I’m so sorry sweetheart” my Mum said into the phone. “It’s okay it’s okay” I repeated, to what end I don’t know, as things were just about as far from okay as they could possibly be. My Mum was ringing me from my childhood home to tell me that my Dad had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and likely had less than six months to live. It was the C word. The diagnosis was grim. There was to be no happy ending or valiant battle narrative. The disease would take him, sooner rather than later.

My world collapsed from under me.

The pain I felt was immediate, visceral. I howled into my pillow and couldn’t get respite from my feelings of despair. I took a week off from work (which is unheard of for me) and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I became physically ill and was unable to even see my Dad in case I risked his already compromised immune system. Instead I lay in bed and sobbed about my Dad’s missed opportunities; never to retire and travel how he had wanted, never to watch my 5 year old daughter grow up and go to school, the fact he was leaving my Mum, was leaving my brother, was leaving me.

After a week my small family rallied. My brother and I set up a regular roster of visiting him at home. My Dad, such is the man that he was never took to his illness laying down. In the last months of his life he installed additional powerpoints in their home so Mum could replace the wood burning stove with an electric heater. He threw out years worth of tax documents and detritus in order to save us the trouble of clearing these items out after he was no longer with us. He fixed cars and cooked roasts and walked as much as he could. And during this time I drove ‘home’ two to three times a week and just spent time with my Dad in a way I hadn’t since… well probably ever. So we talked.

It wasn’t the conversations you think you might have with a dying person (or as my Dad called it in an odd clinical terminology, “limited lifespan”). We didn’t dissect old disagreements, or ‘make peace’, or cry about lost opportunities. Instead we ate a lot of Chinese food. We watched Ms 5 playing. We talked about politics and cars and my work. We tried desperately to be happy in the face of a reality that was devestatingly sad.

And sometimes we were happy. I know he enjoyed watching my daughter play with her bubble rocket on her 5th birthday. We laughed and joked and shared stories while we ate that chinese food. My brother and I sent our parents to Broome for a week for a much-needed holiday and while he was sad about the limitations his failing body placed on him I know he enjoyed it immensely. My brother and I enoyed even more the fact that we could gift that to him. He came back invigorated, and entertained us with stories of his younger days. He enjoyed telling these stories and I appreciate that I got to hear them.

I watched him like a hawk during this time, surreptiously as he hated a fuss. I watched for new and developing symptoms but he was horrendous at being a patient and never made this process easy. However his medications appeared to be working after a time. Blood tests revealed that he had stablised to an extent since his diagnosis, that his condition, while not having improved, had not gotten any worse. My brother and I kept up the regular roster of visits, under the guide of normalcy, but I started to relax. I knew the end was near-ish, but not imminent.

The flashing of my phone woke me up. It’s a grotesque cliche to say (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) that I knew, but when I saw the missed call on my phone at 2 in the morning, there was only one thing it could be. When I called Mum back I learned that my Dad had suffered two seizures at home in bed, and had been taken by ambulance to casualty. He was dying but somehow we never saw it coming.

We drove down to my home town an hour away to sit with him in the hospital. From the hospital he was transferred to a palliative care ward. Here he lived for a further 2 days, although he never regained consciousness. I will not speak of his and our time in that place here, except to say it was not the end I would have hoped for, however it was dignified and quiet, and in in the end peaceful.

I can never do this story, or my father justice. Partially because this is the story of his death, and not his life. His story is not mine to tell, although there are fragments of this that exemplify the whole. He was an electrician who prided himself on his attention to detail. He was a quiet man who had no patience (a trait I inherited), and wasn’t one for shows of emotions. He called my brother “boy”, myself “girl” and my Mum “woman”. He was pragmatic and until the end wanted to be useful, even though though he already was in ways he didn’t understand. In these last months he cooked and cleaned and vacuumed and looked after everyone (to the chagrin of the nurses), which was his way of showing that he loved us. He could never really articulate his love for us, as is common with men of his generation. But he showed us with everything he did, and continued to do, even while staring death in the face.

Dad died almost three months to the day of his diagnosis, in that palliative care ward. It was October 25th. It was early in the morning and my Mum was with him. It was really sunny that day. We went to MacDonalds for breakfast. These facts are etched in my mind as if they are significant. I want them to be significant because it was the day my Dad died and that is siginifcant to me in a way that it never can be for other people. The problem is that death happens, but people still need to eat, and put petrol in the car, and make vegemite sandwiches for 5 year old girls. It seemed grotesque that life for some can just continue on as normal, while for others that life ceases to be. It seemed disrespectful to my Dad to be eating, and even laughing while he was dead. Is dead. He’s fucking dead. and I drank a Soy Hazelnut latte at a MacDonalds.

We buried my Dad on October 31st. Dad had already decided on some of arrangements to be made for his funeral. Amongst these were the two songs he wanted to have played at his service. Monty Python’s ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ was one of his choices, which I knew gave him a great amount of joy.

Dad loved music, some of the stuff you would expect for a man of his generation (like Queen) and a lot of stuff you wouldn’t (he loved the Triple J Unearthed CDs). You will never know my Dad, not many can really say they did. He was intensly private. He was really funny, but very cynical. He didn’t trust this government (a sentiment we share). He loved his wife and kids, and his 5 year old granddaughter. He thought his son and his daughter were the smartest and most capable people he knew. I thought the same of him. I love him. He was my Dad. He will never be replaced.

It is now a month since he passed. I am not sure how I should feel at this juncture but I know that it doesn’t seem any easier. The pain is as intense as the day he was diagnosed with that wretched illness. I want to lie down and cry. I want to scream into the wind that it isn’t fair and he doesn’t deserve this, but who did? Who does? Instead I will keep walking, one foot in front of the other. It’s what he wanted for me, for all of our family. It’s hard. It’s really fucking hard. Sometimes the pain is so raw it’s like a flesh wound or a bloody bone. There is a yawning chasm in my chest where he used to be, and I didn’t really know how bad that pain was until his death was imminent and then he was gone.

This is the second song my Dad chose to be played at his funeral. It was his message to us, and it is what I know I must do.

Goodbye Dad. I love you.

The emotional toll of the toxic workplace

This post is not in reference to any particular workplace or environment I have been in, but is an amalgamation of the experiences I have had across many different workplaces. While I reference The Thesis Whisperer as a blogger I admire, my post isn’t about academia or even university specifically (I have had a life outside of this place duh). Unfortunately I don’t have any concrete answers to provide, rather, this is a thinking-through of my own reactions to the experiences I have had. 

A toxic workplace can take many forms. What one person finds intolerable, another may experience as business-as-usual combative office politics. A Google search reveals that this notion of the toxic workplace has entered the lexicon of popular culture, has become a ‘thing’. Some checklists credit specific personalities and archetypes as being responsible for this particular phenomenon, others recognise the existence of more general behavioural patterns. In my experience it can be both: it can be because of the influence of a few ‘bad seeds’, or it can be a general environment of negativity and paranoia that takes its toll on everyone. Put simply, a toxic work environment is one in which you go home at the end of the day feeling at best unfulfilled and depressed, and at worst angry and anxious.  In my experience  these feelings creep up on you. At first you attribute your unhappiness to isolated incidences, or to particular people who you work with, however eventually you come to realise that these events aren’t isolated, but patterns of unhealthy behaviour that, if unchecked, can repeat themselves for months and years at a time and cause untold emotional suffering.

The Thesis Whisperer’s post ‘Academic assholes and the circle of niceness’ examines the phenomenon of toxic individuals (“assholes”) as present specifically within academia.  Citing Robert Sutton in his book ‘The No Asshole Rule’, TTW notes that being an asshole (arsehole?) is advantageous, and while workplace assholes may not be popular, they do end up being respected more, and their behaviour may even end up being emulated by the people who work underneath them. TTW continues:

Appearing clever is a route to power and promotion. If performing like an asshole in a public forum creates the perverse impression that you are more clever than others who do not, there is a clear incentive to behave this way.

The sad thing is, I have worked with far too many assholes to argue that this isn’t the case. I think everyone has. Being a jerk, perversely, pays off. I have worked for and with some of the most gorgeous, genuine, talented people you could imagine, but I have also worked for, and interacted with, some massive jerks. Jerks in high places. Jerks who don’t apologise, who never back down, and jerks who appear to all intents and purpose to be a success within their careers. Jerks who act like jerks so often that it has become normalised, background noise, part of ‘the-way-it-is’.

That’s all well and good, but there is a cost to fostering this environment. It is true that in some workplaces the people who act like jerks may appear to rise to the top, but the flip side is that good, kind, talented people will be lost. TTW notes:

He [Sutton] clearly shows that there are real costs to organisations for putting up with asshole behaviour. Put simply, the nice clever people leave. […] It’s a vicious cycle which means people who are more comfortable being an asshole easily outnumber those who find this behaviour obnoxious.

My post isn’t about academia specifically. As a long-term casual my interactions with academia have only ever happened from the fringes. I have made my opinions on the treatment of casuals abundantly clear. However toxicity is something I have known to permeate the cultures of environments as diverse as the retail sector and the corporate sector. I have worked at, and left, my own share of toxic workplaces and situations. I have stayed up all night worrying about work. I have cried to colleagues about unfair treatment and conditions. I have taken stress leave from work because the situation had become so untenable. I have had my concerns about a potentially dangerous situation dismissed by a superior who really should have known better. I have worked alone in a cubicle or an office and felt angry, alone, and having no idea what recourse I had, if any. I have rarely, if ever, stood up for myself. These experiences have come to have an emotional toll on me. I enter into these situations in good faith, and remain in them for far too long for many reasons. I think part of me doesn’t want to believe that the people who are nice to my face, are perhaps not as well-meaning when I am not around. I also form loyalties to colleagues in the workplace, where I will feel a sense of obligation to the individuals I work with. Mostly I make it about me. If only I was more assertive/less sensitive/better at handling complex situations/thicker skinned I would be able to cope better in these situations. So I return to the scene-of-the-toxic-crime, day after day, silently hoping that things will get better, all the time knowing full well that they won’t.

With the transition into full-time employment, comes the risk of encountering this toxicity. This makes me question my own abilities. It isn’t the work I question. I am fully aware that I am smart and driven and capable. It is the navigation of office politics that makes me feel entirely out of my depth. I am already someone who speaks in the passive voice. My emails are peppered with “if it’s OK” and “would you be able to’s”. Having come up against these kind of environment and conditions in the past has made me question my ability to be the career person I would like to transition into.  My daughter is going to school next year, casual employment is becoming increasingly tedious and demeaning, I want to start being paid for public holidays and sick days, which seems like a small ask and yet seems to be the hardest thing to transition to with my background as a long-term casual.

This blog post may read as if I am not capable, but I am thinking about it from another perspective. It isn’t that there is something wrong with me, it is that there is something wrong with workplaces that reward negative and intimidating behaviours, and that leave the people who work hard and contribute feeling unacknowledged. I refuse to compete with my colleagues, I am perfectly capable of being diplomatic because I posit it as being fucking nice and talking to everyone as I would want to be spoken to. I am more than capable of responding well to criticism as no one could ever be more critical of me than I am of myself. When I have come up against these situations in the past I have talked a big game when I am at home with my husband about how I am going to stick-it-to-the-man, but at the end of the day I will back down, eventually walk away, as I figure my mental health and emotional stability is worth more to me than aspiring to a ‘career’ in a place that makes my colleagues and I unwell, rewards arsehole-ish behaviour, and fosters unhealthy interactions between peers.

As I said in my introduction, I am unable to offer any advice on how to navigate toxic workplaces as I am unsure of how to address these issues myself. This year is the year of the assertive Smart Casual, so I am turning a critical eye to my experiences within the workplace, and asking myself what place I see for myself in the future. I know I want to write. I know I want to work in an environment which fosters teamwork and collaboration, and doesn’t operate on a platform of competition. I know I will not tolerate intimidation tactics and make them about my perceived sensitivity. The Thesis Whisperer offers the suggestion of instigating a “circle of niceness” within the worklace: a space where colleagues can come together to “be[..] together and talk[..] about ideas with honesty and openness” (sic). I think this is an idea that can be useful outside of the academy, as the asshole phenomenon is definitely not university specific. I want that, I think most people want that. It is an idea I am going to bring with me to my current situation, and to any future employment situations I enter into.

If you need a nice Smart Casual at your workplace let me know.