There’s a fire burning deep in my core these days…an anger I feel sitting in my chest. Have you ever seen videos of the sun’s surface and watched as the energy building up inside the atoms spontaneously explodes? The solar flares that look beautiful but carry a deadly power; that power burns inside of my body. The pressure of that energy is building up, layering on top of itself in only the way anger can. I can feel it inside, waiting for release.

I will keep repeating myself until the day I die: I hate anger.

It has its purpose – a time and place – but I refuse to believe it belongs so regularly inside of me. What most people see in my everyday life is that I’m patient and level-headed. I am the voice of reason in many situations and only speak up when things are about to go too far. But what’s hidden from their view is how quick to anger I actually am.

Small things frustrate me instantly. I’m so patient outwardly because I am acutely aware of how internally impatient I am. My thoughts and first reactions jump to anger any chance they can.

I’ve only become very good at catching these feelings and changing my reactions before other people have the chance to see. But more often than I’d like to admit, it starts as a flash of raging energy.

I don’t let it get out of control, though. I’ve lived through a household where every word was laced with passive anger and have seen what it can do to bystanders. If you’ve ever watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, you’ll remember when Aang hurt Katara with his firebending because he couldn’t control it at first. He refused to fire bend for a while after that, afraid of its power. That’s what anger is to me: purposeful but gets out of control too easily. The older I get, the more I’m learning that’s true.

I keep a tight lid on it. I don’t need myself screwing up aspects of my life because I got a little hot-headed in the moment.

But I’m an Aries – this isn’t always easy for me. Or rather, being hot-headed does come easily to me; too easily at times.

And despite my best efforts, there are just some situations and people who bring out that worse side of me.

I happen to work with one of those people.

Growing up in the household I did, I learned how to work well with difficult personalities. This skill has served me repeatedly in the various places I’ve been employed. But despite this practice I’ve had, sometimes I can’t ignore certain patterns of behavior.

Here are some things I have zero tolerance for:

• Being mean for the sake of being mean
• Bullshitters/gas-lighters/liars
• People who think everyone else is beneath them
• Those who cannot admit to their own shortcomings or mistakes
• People who are always first to point fingers when something goes wrong
• People who treat everyone differently depending on the situation or person

If you have any of these traits, you and I will not get along long term.

Though typically I only ever meet people with one or two of these habits, how lucky would it be for me to work with someone who currently embodies all 6.

The biggest of these that I cannot get over, nor do I forget, is someone who treats everyone differently around them.

What do I mean by this? I mean someone who shifts their attitude and actions to portray themselves, and sometimes others, a specific way around who they’re talking to. They do this typically to benefit their own image.

Someone who goes and complains about one department to another, claiming the staff in the prior department are incompetent.

Someone who is so controlling, they go behind their coworker’s back to change their work because he thinks he knows better. But when confronted by management about it, suddenly has no idea what he did was wrong – he was “just doing his job,” after all.

Someone who acts cheery to those whose favor he needs, and within the next hour is bringing someone close to tears either out of frustration or because of his harsh words.

Someone who changes materials out constantly, affecting the pricing of the goods and services we sell, but when confronted by the owner he spins the story and claims, “look how much money I’m saving,” knowing damn well that isn’t the point of everyone’s frustration (nor is it evenly accurate all the time).

What do I hate most about this kind of person? Because I get along well with difficult people, he and I work fine face-to-face. But behind the scenes, I spend all day listening to how ill-mannered and inconsiderate he was to everyone else. The fact that people like him think we won’t talk to each other and that he has the ability to control what everyone thinks boils my blood.

The cherry on top of it all: management knows what’s going on with him, and they haven’t acted yet. I can’t say definitively that they never will, but it’s been years I’ve worked the same job, and they have continued to let this asshole run rampant throughout the office doing whatever he pleases. Only the occasional “serious talk” or slap on the wrist has ever been brought about; a meager repercussion that he overlooks the next day as he continues to lay waste to his coworkers’ mental states.

And I’ve tried to talk to our managers about it; we’ve all tried.

We’ve kept a record of all the times he’s screwed us over.

We’ve brought receipts for the times he’s promised deadlines that he made no effort to meet and tried to later claim never existed.

We’ve brought immediate attention to falsities he’s claimed by pointing out time stamps, dates, and times we gave approvals or denied certain actions being done on our orders.

We’ve done everything in our power to reason with management and make them understand how toxic he’s been.

Management has done nothing.

Though that’s not entirely true, I suppose.

They’ve had “talks” with him. The outcome of those talks usually is them coming back to us and explaining how we misunderstood the situation and how he “really had the best intentions and thought he was being helpful.”

Someone who has the best intentions doesn’t do something you specifically asked them not to do right after you’ve asked them not to do it.

Someone who has the best intentions (and is a manager of a department himself, mind you) does not turn around and start throwing his team members under the bus when something goes wrong.

Someone who has the best intentions does not steal company time and lie on his timesheet or covers for his friends who work under him in the same department every time they screw up at their job.

Oh…were those company secrets, though? Should I not have said anything about that, lest one of my coworkers finds this blog, recognizes me, and shares this entry with our whole staff? Did I put my position at risk by telling the truth? Maybe…

Does it seem like I fucking care?

The truth is I know more secrets about this place and how it runs than I probably should. I’ve always been a collector of secrets, not because I ask for them but because I’m trusted with them. And yes, maybe it seems counterintuitive for me to talk about how good I am at keeping information private while giving you knowledge about someone I work with…but sometimes people leave you no choice.

I’m telling management we’re all at the end of our ropes and shouldn’t have to keep putting up with this behavior.

Management keeps telling us that we need to stick it out because there’s a possibility one day that it could get better. They claim they have changes in the works that will fix things.

That sounds nice in the moment; maybe it cools down a fire or two for the day. But when you’re good at pattern recognition like I am, you sit back and recalculate. You start to look at the history of times you were told “things are going to change soon – hold tight,” and you see how most of those “changes” never happened. The few that did work for a little bit, but then eventually became moot because people like him will always find a way to continue to act the way they do.

When it was recognized by our manager that I stopped believing them when they promised action because they rarely deliver, they tried a new tactic with me. By appealing to my strong empathy, they thought they could cool down my frustration, which in turn may help me negate others’ anger as well. They’d sit me down and feed me lines they think are new information to me about how people who act like he does only do so because they have such a low self-image of themselves. They only behave this way because they hate themselves somehow, or because they’re hurting. And I agree; I believe that most cases where someone is treating other people this way can relate back to some area in their own life that is chaotic and causing them pain.

What I also believe is that despite the circumstance one may find themselves in, they can choose how they act in their daily life and how they’re going to treat others.

Management is sitting down with someone who has complex PTSD from her childhood, who suffers from anxiety and depression daily, who is constantly stressed about the state of the country and what it means for her future, and is asking her to have grace for someone else who is experiencing similar things yet choosing to take it out on the people around him.

In fact, they are asking our entire office, who are all suffering with similar grievances these days, to just let him run around and be the way he is.

They want us to minimize our experience and emotions so someone who can’t control his own can be more comfortable.

Explain to me how that makes sense?

Explain to me what we are left to trust?

When our boss’ promises of change stop feeling like hope and start becoming repeated requests for patience…

When employees are frustrated to the point of needing to go home for the day to protect their mental well-being from a singular person…

When everyone in the place is suffering because someone has decided the way he’ll cope with difficult things is to do whatever the hell he wants without care of the way it affects his coworkers, as long as he can get away with it…

What are we left to rely on?

Management can’t or won’t protect us from him.

He has little to no regard for the way he treats others.

I told my boss one time, “Someone is going to quit because of him one day.” I just didn’t know it would be me considering that option so soon. Though, the fact that I felt open enough to say that should have been my first clue that I am done accepting excuses for why I should put up with him.

And if you think my reconsidering my employment is a steep step to take because I don’t like a guy I work with, let me remind you about those secrets I know…

Because this isn’t the only thing that’s challenging about this workplace.

An accumulation of bad decisions over the years from higher-ups has made our work life more difficult than it should be.

Instead of anyone taking accountability for the mistakes that have been made, the responsibility is turned around on the employees.

The pressure created by someone who didn’t know what they were doing at the time has been placed on our shoulders to bear and fix. Every achievement is overshadowed by the phrase, “it’s not enough,” as we’re constantly reminded of how much harder we need to work because somehow, all our office’s money keeps disappearing.

There is talk about my pay, and how the way I’ll be compensated in the future may possibly change into a new system that neither makes sense from the employees’ standpoint nor would compensate me fairly. But I can see why it appeals to management – it gives them more money to work with.

And need I repeat, all of these have been issues since I first started here 4 years ago.

They have not been fairly addressed, and they have only worsened with time.

I tried to do this the right way. For the last few months or so, I have nearly begged management to open their eyes and see that I am at my wit’s end. I have spoken so freely about my frustrations that they’ve started to get the hint, yet they refuse to do anything substantial. One of my managers even told me he mentioned to someone else that it’s a possibility they’ll lose me in the next six months if things don’t change – I didn’t deny it.

I wanted to reassure him in the moment, but the part of my brain that’s tired of not protecting myself stopped me.

Then I started considering what that might be like: to look elsewhere for a solution and leave this place I poured so much time and energy into.

Then, I started looking.

See, the thing about my anger is I never truly explode. I may have those moments of small bursts of pent-up energy, like the solar flares. But when my anger reaches a no-turning-back point, it won’t be loud. It will be quiet and decisive. They may not even know what’s wrong because for a while it will just look like the things that had bothered me have passed me by.

I’ll stop complaining to my managers so much about the things going on.

I’ll stop rejecting help when work falls onto my lap that I don’t have the capacity for.

I’ll be completely agreeable.

Completely professional.

My personality will become muddled at the office, and I will be the picture-perfect employee.

I’ll put in my two weeks and continue the last of my work in guilty bliss, knowing I’m leaving that place that only talked about change but refused to follow through with it.

I will do what I can to leave my affairs in order and prepare my team while management scrambles to make sense of this sudden turn of events. They may pull me aside for a chat; may even offer me that raise they told me wasn’t possible right now. They’ll offer more remote days; more PTO…anything they can think of to not lose me.

But by that time, it will be too late.

Because I don’t leave without a plan, and I will have already had a better position lined up weeks ago.

I will not be leaving empty-handed.

In fact, I’ll be leaving with the added knowledge that either:

1. This place could have done everything for me that it said it couldn’t before now that I’m leaving. They didn’t prioritize me then, but suddenly, they can because they knew how important I was all along and didn’t want to fully value me until it was possible they might lose me.
2. This place can’t do anything else for me, in which case, my stay here has run its course anyway.

Maybe I’ve gained all the knowledge I’ve meant to at this shop, and it is ultimately time for me to move on. I’ve made friendships I know will last outside of here and important business skills I’ve learned over the years…maybe this is the Universe’s “tough love” way of telling me it’s time to leave.

And maybe this is where I learn anger isn’t all bad, after all.

If it’s pushed me to this point of being ready to act to better myself and not keep me held down by places that don’t truly value me, maybe it was my missing piece all along.

Maybe anger is just a friend with a wicked disguise.

Just don’t get too comfortable here, friend – there’s no room for you here long-term…