Credit where credit is due – the super-catchy blog post title comes from Taylor Swift and her song “Bad Blood”, which, as you will soon see, could also just as easily have been another perfect title, albeit somewhat less subtle … But, anyway, I digress …
I haven’t blogged in a long time – around eighteen months, in fact. Trust me when I say it’s not because I didn’t want to, or because I felt like I had nothing to say. I’ve been silently screaming blog posts the whole time, but there’s been a brick wall between my thoughts and my keyboard. Lately, though, I find it crashing down. It finally feels right to grab the proverbial sledgehammer and, with the cathartic power of words, declare “It’s demo day” on the paralysing nightmare I allowed someone else to construct around me.
A couple of weeks ago, I came face-to-face with the bully who, a year ago, had me suicidal. This person’s actions caused me such intense psychological torment that I actually believed I was better off dead. It hurts to publicly acknowledge the depth of my depression during that time, but then I remember that keeping it bottled up helps no one – least of all me. And so, here we are …
The definition of a bully is something with which I think we’re all familiar – someone who uses strength or influence to intimidate others. As a teacher, it’s something we’re trained to be on the look-out for between our students. The one aspect of bullying that never seems to be covered in our training, though, is workplace bullying – what happens when the bully is a colleague? Or, even worse, a manager? Humanrights.gov.au, in their factsheet on workplace bullying, defines the concept as “verbal, physical, social or psychological abuse by your employer (or manager), another person or group of people at work”. Some of the examples of how workers are bullied include “playing mind games, ganging up on you, or other types of psychological harassment … giving you impossible jobs that can’t be done in the given time or with the resources provided …[and] deliberately changing your work hours or schedule to make it difficult for you”. I won’t go into the fine details of exactly what I experienced at the hands of this person, but let’s just say what I went through wasn’t a once-off. Anyone in my close personal circle will attest to that, and I don’t need to tell the gory details to make my point. All you need to know is that my experience ended with me being black-listed, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
At the risk of boring you, the same factsheet I referenced above lists some of the effects of workplace bullying. As we can all probably guess, these include being less successful and less confident in your job, feeling scared, stressed, anxious or depressed, having your life outside of work affected (especially relationships), wanting to stay away from the workplace, feeling like you’re unable to trust your employer or the people you work with (that was a huge one for me!), a lack confidence and happiness about yourself and your work, and physical signs of stress ( the sleep problems they mention was one I suffered from terribly at times). For me, it was a case of tick, tick, tick to all of those, and also to the idea that maybe, just maybe, I was the root cause of the problem, and that maybe everyone would be better off if I wasn’t around.
I’d be kidding myself and the world if I said that relief teaching was a walk in the park. There are moments when you look at the work you’re meant to cover with the class and think, “Shit, I haven’t got a bloody clue!”, but you don’t ever let the students know that – instead, you learn to confidently sprout phrases like, “Let’s just check that in the textbook / with Google!” The idea that relief teaching is nothing more than glorified baby-sitting is one of the biggest misconceptions I’ve come across. In fact, I would argue that relief teachers, especially those of us who actively pursue it full-time, have a well-honed set of skills which make us valuable members of a school community. We have to be quick on our feet, a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to basic knowledge in a myriad of subject areas (or at least fake it ’til you make it!), predict (mis)behaviour and deal with it before it escalates, and very quickly win the trust of the students in our care. We deal with students who don’t want to work and students who want to stop others from working (yes, there’s a difference), students who challenge our authority because we’re not their regular teacher, and the perception that we are, somehow, second-class citizens in the teaching world. In some cases, we are seen as disposable, to be discarded at a moment’s notice without rhyme or reason. This is where I thought I was different – that I’d hit the relief teaching jackpot. How wrong, ultimately, I was …
I’d been at the same school for thirteen years before things went pear-shaped. I’d done about nine years of classroom teaching there before transitioning to full-time relief teaching. My colleagues seemed to fully support my transition and I felt like I was given the opportunity to grow as a teacher. I found my niche, and the feedback I got from those around me indicated that I was doing a good (great, even?) job under, at times, very tough circumstances. I worked almost every day, was requested by colleagues when they knew they would be absent, and told by many that they knew their classes were in good hands if I was in charge. Why wouldn’t I believe what I was told? Six years of that couldn’t have been a lie, right?
The other reason I believed these people? They were my family. My entire working life had been spent with them – some longer than others, sure, but they had been an important part of my world for thirteen years. Yep, thirteen years – a third of my life. They had watched me – helped me – grow from a timid, green, completely-overwhelmed-by-the-learning-curve newbie to a place where I was confident in myself and my skill set. They were there for me through many things, as I was for them, and I thought the bonds of shared experience might count for something. And don’t get me started on loyalty – surely thirteen years of blood, sweat and tears was worth something?
Ha …
Almost a year ago, I finally had the truth – or some of it, at least – revealed. For reasons unknown to me, the bully I mentioned – the same bully who left me unable to trust my colleagues, the same bully who undermined my integrity in the classroom, and the same bully who caused me to cry so hard I was in physical pain – decided they no longer wanted me working at their school. The kicker is, though, that they made the decision nearly nine months earlier – but “forgot” to tell me. For nine months, I was strung along, made to believe that it was the doing of another person temporarily in the relief coordinator position (gosh, being unable to use actual names makes this hard!), and with the bully pretending to be sympathetic to my plight. The bully even went so far as to lie to my face and feign absolutely no knowledge of the situation when I brought it up.
How did I not see the writing on the wall, you ask? I ask myself the same question sometimes. As time went on and the work dwindled, everyone around me told me to hang in there, that it would get better when the regular relief coordinator returned. These people were my family and privately expressed their dismay, even outrage, that I was stuck in limbo – again, why would I not believe them? I clung to their reassurances, but doubt was creeping in. Not doubt in their words, but doubt in myself …
I must be a really bad relief teacher if I’m not being hired.
My classroom skills must suck.
I’m clearly useless at this whole teaching thing.
From there, it’s not a huge leap …
If I’m that useless at teaching – the one thing I thought I was good at – then I must be useless at lots of other things, too.
I must be useless at everything.
Why do people bother with me?
Contact with my work family became non-existent (for the most part). That led to …
They don’t even notice I’m not around.
Would they notice if I never came back?
Would ANYONE notice if I just disappeared one day?
Would they actually be better off if I wasn’t here anymore?
And, in my head, sometimes the answer to that last question was, “Yes”.
The longer I went without regular work – without the validation of that part of who I am – and the longer I went without contact from my work family – which drove home the feeling that I wasn’t worth much to them – the more depressed I became. I was probably a right royal bitch to live with – stressed, miserable, and snappy over the smallest thing. Though I tried to be positive in front of others, secretly I was strung out over the possibility that I’d been black-listed and would never work again. If the thing that largely dictated who I was in the eyes of the world and those around me was stripped from me, then just who was I? Without a sense of identity, I might as well not even exist.
All of this, because of the actions of a bully.
Because of a bully, I felt like my life was worth nothing.
Because of a bully, I entertained the thought of ending that life, purely to spare others the trouble of dealing with me.
The one thing that stopped me from doing something stupid was that, just before all this came to a head, I had a breast cancer scare. We’re talking all the tests, all the stress of waiting for that yay or nay, and all the relief that comes with a clean bill of health. Coming out the other side of that with a solid hold on life kept me from doing something stupid. It left me gasping for air in a way that I never had before, and hope never to again.
When I finally was told the truth, that I had indeed been black-listed, I was devastated. Completely, utterly, bawling-like-a-baby devastated. Only one person finally had the decency to actively seek the truth, and then the integrity to tell me … One person. When that person asked for a reason why, none was forthcoming. The gist of the reply was, “If she wants to know, she can ask …” Childish? Perhaps. A final act of bullying? Well, …
I was given the opportunity to go and say my goodbyes to my work family the following day. Imagine my surprise when, upon hearing the circumstances of my farewells, I was taken aside by several colleagues and told of similar incidents they’d experienced over the years. Why was I only hearing about these things for the first time, just as they were hearing about my experiences for the first time? I suspect it comes back to the culture of bullying and the way those of us who are bullied are intimidated into keeping it quiet for fear of further repercussions, but if I’d known I wasn’t alone, maybe I wouldn’t have reached the depths of absolute despair that I did.
The concept of who we are is often inextricably linked to what we are to others. I thought I meant something to those I used to work with, those who made up a large portion of my world, those who had expressed my value to them. They helped create who I was, in the sense that you believe what is mirrored back to you by others. If others tell you you’re kind, then that becomes a quality about yourself that you express. If others see you as good at what you do, and tell you that, then you believe it. I had no reason to not believe that I was a part of the team at my old school … and then I wasn’t anymore. My mirror was gone. I no longer had a touchstone for what I was to others, nothing from all that I had once known to guide me through the storm. My work colleagues, for the most part, vanished from my life overnight. No contact, no checking in, nothing. I still can’t decide if it’s because I was suddenly persona non grata, the cautionary tale, or if it’s because I just never meant anything in the first place? The lack of contact tells me it’s the latter. All I know is this – my landscape has definitely changed over the last year …
The journey to finding another relief teaching gig was not easy. Sure, on the surface it looks like it was – I applied to another school, they gave me an opportunity a few days later, and I’m about to celebrate my one-year anniversary with them in a few weeks. Scratch a little deeper, and you would have seen the mess I was – and still am at times. For the first six months, I lived in fear – fear that the bully had made calls to my new school to bad-mouth me, fear that my new colleagues were only pretending to like me, fear that I really was a bad relief teacher and fear that this new school would work that out sooner rather than later. It has taken a long time to rebuild my shattered confidence and restore my faith in my skills as a relief teacher. I’m doing better, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have moments when all that hard work unravels. Just when I think I’ve got my mojo back, something happens that takes me right back to where I was a year ago. At times, I am still that abused animal who flinches at the sound of a raised or frustrated voice. At times, I am still that battered soul who will do anything to please. I have a hard time trusting my colleagues now, and even though I now have friends in my new world, and (I think) the support of those in management, I still sometimes question if they genuinely like having me around, or if this world will one day come crashing down, too. I hate that my thoughts wander to those places sometimes, but it’s who I am …
And so, now that “demo day” is complete, I’m in tears, I’m worried about how this will be received by some (if anybody even reads it!), but I’m not worried about burning bridges from my past. They feel well and truly long gone … There are people, some of whom used to be the mirrors I mentioned, who may see this and say, “Well, she’s making the choice to let this dictate who she is”, and they’re entitled to that opinion. Clearly, my level of “enlightenment” doesn’t match theirs, and probably never will. But, I know there are others, those who have become my new mirrors through this, whose input matters more. And, while band-aids certainly don’t fix bullet holes, love and care sure go a long way towards healing the wounds …
Here's what I really think ... 
