Trying to Move Past the People That Hurt Us
We've all been there. We've all been hurt by someone else whether it's bullying, relationships, social media, work, or anything else. We've all had someone that's hurt us. If you haven't been in that situation, consider yourself extremely lucky, but remember that if you haven't, maybe you're the one hurting someone else.
If you read "Alias No. 4: The Robot Girl," you know a little bit about my past relationship with being hurt by others. If not, I suggest skimming it because I don't plan on mentioning it much here, but I do plan on building off of it in some ways.
One summer, I worked for a researcher in Electrical Engineering. The summer before that, my best friend at the time worked for him. I came in on Fridays when I didn't have to work at my other job to help out since they were doing robotics work. My best friend at the time (Don) didn't return after that summer, probably for the best.
I think in the first parts of my internship, my mentor thought that I was exactly like Don. We'd grown up in the same area, gone to all of the same schools, had been friends, and from what he knew of me, I was similar in some ways. However, he didn't really know me. I don't think he ever really figured out that I wasn't Don and that he couldn't treat me like I was.
From what I understand, he wanted me to be better. I fully agree with the idea of improvement, but I'm not Don. I don't react to things the same way he does and I don't have the same opinions he does. The more I grew up, the more I became different. I was more outgoing, more soft-spoken, and was going into Electrical Engineering instead of Mechanical Engineering. However, I hadn't been able to take any Electrical classes yet because of the way that the program was structured at my university. I don't know if my mentor realized that.
He didn't really give us much work to do most of the time. I wanted more to do, but I knew he was extremely busy and didn't want to bother him. One of my tasks at one point was essentially "teach a business major how to engineer," but other than that, I was mostly just supposed to keep the lab clean and do what he asked. While I had downtime, I tried to learn various Electrical concepts and be productive. When we went on jobs, I made sure that the drones were in working order and ready to go.
In the first few weeks, he'd asked me to cut something using a Dremel. I'd prepared it and got the tool out and asked if we had a face shield. This was less than a month after I'd gotten the stitches out from where I had an angle grinder blade shatter in my face, so kill me for being cautious. Despite knowing about the incident, he took this as me not wanting to use power tools and said in a snarky way that if I couldn't do it, he would. He proceeded to cut the piece without even using safety glasses.
We had to travel a lot to a site about an hour and a half away from our lab for an on-site experiment. Usually, we'd end up talking about something on the way there and the way back. Most of the time, it was either classes at our university or the racing team I was on. Over time, it became apparent that he wasn't really fond of our team, but didn't really understand that I didn't have any authority and would get overwritten by Don in about everything I said if it didn't pertain to Electrical work. One day, we missed our exit on the interstate and he spent the last thirty minutes of the drive bashing the team yet again. Another time, he ranted passive-aggressively about how he'd hoped that if we gained nothing else from that summer that we'd gained a sense of being able to take blame when things are our fault.
I didn't realize what he was referencing until a later situation. We'd done a few flights on our property and in two of them, one of our cameras didn't function properly. I'd been the one to set them up and had done everything the same way I'd been doing them all summer. To this day, I still don't know what happened. I guess we were in a rush and things hadn't been double-checked (we were fighting to get ahead of the wind and rain at the time). I already knew that he didn't really like me because of the way he emailed us when it didn't work. He made a typo in his email so we didn't even notice how passive-aggressive he was being in it. Essentially, he was blaming me for the entire thing and trying to say that I wasn't responsible enough to remember to turn the cameras on. I'd turned them on, but apparently didn't hit the right setting to make it record properly.
Later that summer, I was working on a design project to make a nameplate for some of the administrative people in that particular college. I'd actually tried to engineer something and learn from a previous experiment. I'd basically reassembled that CNC machine several times (once after he broke it by cutting one of the cables it used to maneuver on one of the axes) and had done several experiments to test the functionality of it. One of them involved text. I'd tried using a test print and knew that if the right bit wasn't in the machine, it would only carve certain parts of the cut. In designing this new piece, I was only supposed to spot check it, not redesign the entire thing. We'd looked at the fonts and I decided that a basic font would be more readable and the larger the strokes, the easier it would be to cut it. I'd been doing calligraphy and knew that more complex fonts required smaller pieces. We didn't want to go under a certain bit size because he didn't trust me to do things on the machine and had already dropped the smaller bit and broken it twice. The basic font didn't work unless we did it a certain way. We told him this and he kept asking if we'd tried a more complex one. I told him that we hadn't and explained why, but he didn't like that answer. He kept asking me the same exact question over and over again, getting louder every time and gave me no indication of why he didn't like my explanation. I got upset during this discussion because I had valid reasons for the design I chose and it wasn't even really my design to begin with. I was just supposed to make sure it worked. The other guy tried to make it work, but couldn't.
Keep in mind, this was about two days before my internship was over. I was also going through a lot with my ex-boyfriend who was falling into his depression again and I was trying to keep him from being suicidal. On top of that, I'd been dealing with my parents fighting more and more every day.
After dealing with him all summer: every time he'd ignore my driving directions or opinions, every time he'd bash the club I participated in when I couldn't escape and already was trying not to be sick from riding in the truck, every time he'd blame me for something that wasn't really anyone's fault, every time he'd get mad because I didn't understand something and just sort of yell at me to try to make me understand (I'd have looked it up if I'd known what I needed to know that I didn't know), and everything else on top of that, I was dealing with this too. I was so tired that day and I eventually ended up breaking. I was louder than I intended to be (I didn't have in my hearing aid that day), but I asked, "What do you want me to say? No? I've explained to you exactly why I made the decisions I made and you won't accept them." He was already angry and snapped as well. I got yelled at more and we got sent "home" (I sat in the lab until it was time to leave that day, but the other guy went back to his office later because I refused to talk to him any more that day).
The next day, he called both of us into his office. Now, I understand meeting with me, but I don't understand dragging the other intern into the problem. He clearly didn't need to be there. My mentor complained at me and said that if I needed to leave, I could have just asked instead of getting angry. He doesn't realize that I didn't leave that day. He went on to blame me for so many things, some of them I didn't even realize he'd blamed me for. The things he blamed me for were no one's fault, but he didn't see it that way. He saw it as me trying to blame other people. In reality, I was thinking more along the lines of: I did the same thing I did every time, it didn't work, and we didn't realize it because we were in a rush. With one more day left in my internship, I was blackmailed into writing an apology letter to him, something I had to make a friend read several times because I wasn't sorry, I was angry at the way he'd treated me all summer.
He's talked to me once since then. He's been to this area twice since then. I don't particularly want to hear from him either. He basically tore me down on top of everything else that was going on in my life at the time. I felt awful and it gave me so much anxiety about my next internship. I was afraid that the same thing would happen. I was afraid that all bosses would be that way.
I am still afraid of it. My current boss isn't quick to trust me with tasks and I'm afraid that at the end of the semester, he will say that he expected me to take more initiative or blame me for things that go wrong. I almost decided not to intern because of it. However, I know that I have to move past it. If I don't, I'll never get anywhere.
I've been trying. I've tried to forget about what happened this summer. I've tried to convince myself that it was a one-time thing. I tried to endure it alone, but I couldn't. I've found that the only thing that's helped me move on is talking about it with people I trust and meeting people that I work with to help remind me that not every boss is like that. Not every boss is the inspiration of the motto: If that man can be successful, then so can I. I've slowly realized that. It's taken working for two other people to get to this point, but I'm getting better slowly.
The first step to recovery is to remove that person from your life. Lucky for me, the fact my internship ended did that for me. Not having to see the people that hurt you helps you move on. If you keep seeing them, you allow them to keep hurting you whether they're actively trying to or not. They might not do anything that day, but you will remember the things that happened and it could potentially bring back those feelings.
Journaling has also helped me. During that period, I wasn't journaling much because I was driving an hour one way and then dealing with so many other things on top of work. Since then, I've tried to explore what happened and figure out how to keep it from happening again. I've felt better about it over time, but it's still a slow process.
I've also tried to remove things that remind me of that time from my life, though it recently came back up when we were trying to come up with a plan to do surface mount boards. Overall, I don't really think about it when I can help it and that drastically improves things.
I think the best thing that I've done at this point is to concentrate on the good things in life and letting the other things fall into place. I've improved a lot since then. I've gotten over some of my anxiety and gotten a hold on some of my depression. I've been happier and I have a more solidified support network around me that cares about me. I'm trying to move past the people that hurt me, but it's a slow process, but at least I'm not giving up.
Written: 26 March 2018
If you read "Alias No. 4: The Robot Girl," you know a little bit about my past relationship with being hurt by others. If not, I suggest skimming it because I don't plan on mentioning it much here, but I do plan on building off of it in some ways.
One summer, I worked for a researcher in Electrical Engineering. The summer before that, my best friend at the time worked for him. I came in on Fridays when I didn't have to work at my other job to help out since they were doing robotics work. My best friend at the time (Don) didn't return after that summer, probably for the best.
I think in the first parts of my internship, my mentor thought that I was exactly like Don. We'd grown up in the same area, gone to all of the same schools, had been friends, and from what he knew of me, I was similar in some ways. However, he didn't really know me. I don't think he ever really figured out that I wasn't Don and that he couldn't treat me like I was.
From what I understand, he wanted me to be better. I fully agree with the idea of improvement, but I'm not Don. I don't react to things the same way he does and I don't have the same opinions he does. The more I grew up, the more I became different. I was more outgoing, more soft-spoken, and was going into Electrical Engineering instead of Mechanical Engineering. However, I hadn't been able to take any Electrical classes yet because of the way that the program was structured at my university. I don't know if my mentor realized that.
He didn't really give us much work to do most of the time. I wanted more to do, but I knew he was extremely busy and didn't want to bother him. One of my tasks at one point was essentially "teach a business major how to engineer," but other than that, I was mostly just supposed to keep the lab clean and do what he asked. While I had downtime, I tried to learn various Electrical concepts and be productive. When we went on jobs, I made sure that the drones were in working order and ready to go.In the first few weeks, he'd asked me to cut something using a Dremel. I'd prepared it and got the tool out and asked if we had a face shield. This was less than a month after I'd gotten the stitches out from where I had an angle grinder blade shatter in my face, so kill me for being cautious. Despite knowing about the incident, he took this as me not wanting to use power tools and said in a snarky way that if I couldn't do it, he would. He proceeded to cut the piece without even using safety glasses.
We had to travel a lot to a site about an hour and a half away from our lab for an on-site experiment. Usually, we'd end up talking about something on the way there and the way back. Most of the time, it was either classes at our university or the racing team I was on. Over time, it became apparent that he wasn't really fond of our team, but didn't really understand that I didn't have any authority and would get overwritten by Don in about everything I said if it didn't pertain to Electrical work. One day, we missed our exit on the interstate and he spent the last thirty minutes of the drive bashing the team yet again. Another time, he ranted passive-aggressively about how he'd hoped that if we gained nothing else from that summer that we'd gained a sense of being able to take blame when things are our fault.
I didn't realize what he was referencing until a later situation. We'd done a few flights on our property and in two of them, one of our cameras didn't function properly. I'd been the one to set them up and had done everything the same way I'd been doing them all summer. To this day, I still don't know what happened. I guess we were in a rush and things hadn't been double-checked (we were fighting to get ahead of the wind and rain at the time). I already knew that he didn't really like me because of the way he emailed us when it didn't work. He made a typo in his email so we didn't even notice how passive-aggressive he was being in it. Essentially, he was blaming me for the entire thing and trying to say that I wasn't responsible enough to remember to turn the cameras on. I'd turned them on, but apparently didn't hit the right setting to make it record properly.Later that summer, I was working on a design project to make a nameplate for some of the administrative people in that particular college. I'd actually tried to engineer something and learn from a previous experiment. I'd basically reassembled that CNC machine several times (once after he broke it by cutting one of the cables it used to maneuver on one of the axes) and had done several experiments to test the functionality of it. One of them involved text. I'd tried using a test print and knew that if the right bit wasn't in the machine, it would only carve certain parts of the cut. In designing this new piece, I was only supposed to spot check it, not redesign the entire thing. We'd looked at the fonts and I decided that a basic font would be more readable and the larger the strokes, the easier it would be to cut it. I'd been doing calligraphy and knew that more complex fonts required smaller pieces. We didn't want to go under a certain bit size because he didn't trust me to do things on the machine and had already dropped the smaller bit and broken it twice. The basic font didn't work unless we did it a certain way. We told him this and he kept asking if we'd tried a more complex one. I told him that we hadn't and explained why, but he didn't like that answer. He kept asking me the same exact question over and over again, getting louder every time and gave me no indication of why he didn't like my explanation. I got upset during this discussion because I had valid reasons for the design I chose and it wasn't even really my design to begin with. I was just supposed to make sure it worked. The other guy tried to make it work, but couldn't.
Keep in mind, this was about two days before my internship was over. I was also going through a lot with my ex-boyfriend who was falling into his depression again and I was trying to keep him from being suicidal. On top of that, I'd been dealing with my parents fighting more and more every day.
After dealing with him all summer: every time he'd ignore my driving directions or opinions, every time he'd bash the club I participated in when I couldn't escape and already was trying not to be sick from riding in the truck, every time he'd blame me for something that wasn't really anyone's fault, every time he'd get mad because I didn't understand something and just sort of yell at me to try to make me understand (I'd have looked it up if I'd known what I needed to know that I didn't know), and everything else on top of that, I was dealing with this too. I was so tired that day and I eventually ended up breaking. I was louder than I intended to be (I didn't have in my hearing aid that day), but I asked, "What do you want me to say? No? I've explained to you exactly why I made the decisions I made and you won't accept them." He was already angry and snapped as well. I got yelled at more and we got sent "home" (I sat in the lab until it was time to leave that day, but the other guy went back to his office later because I refused to talk to him any more that day).
The next day, he called both of us into his office. Now, I understand meeting with me, but I don't understand dragging the other intern into the problem. He clearly didn't need to be there. My mentor complained at me and said that if I needed to leave, I could have just asked instead of getting angry. He doesn't realize that I didn't leave that day. He went on to blame me for so many things, some of them I didn't even realize he'd blamed me for. The things he blamed me for were no one's fault, but he didn't see it that way. He saw it as me trying to blame other people. In reality, I was thinking more along the lines of: I did the same thing I did every time, it didn't work, and we didn't realize it because we were in a rush. With one more day left in my internship, I was blackmailed into writing an apology letter to him, something I had to make a friend read several times because I wasn't sorry, I was angry at the way he'd treated me all summer.
He's talked to me once since then. He's been to this area twice since then. I don't particularly want to hear from him either. He basically tore me down on top of everything else that was going on in my life at the time. I felt awful and it gave me so much anxiety about my next internship. I was afraid that the same thing would happen. I was afraid that all bosses would be that way.
I am still afraid of it. My current boss isn't quick to trust me with tasks and I'm afraid that at the end of the semester, he will say that he expected me to take more initiative or blame me for things that go wrong. I almost decided not to intern because of it. However, I know that I have to move past it. If I don't, I'll never get anywhere.
I've been trying. I've tried to forget about what happened this summer. I've tried to convince myself that it was a one-time thing. I tried to endure it alone, but I couldn't. I've found that the only thing that's helped me move on is talking about it with people I trust and meeting people that I work with to help remind me that not every boss is like that. Not every boss is the inspiration of the motto: If that man can be successful, then so can I. I've slowly realized that. It's taken working for two other people to get to this point, but I'm getting better slowly.The first step to recovery is to remove that person from your life. Lucky for me, the fact my internship ended did that for me. Not having to see the people that hurt you helps you move on. If you keep seeing them, you allow them to keep hurting you whether they're actively trying to or not. They might not do anything that day, but you will remember the things that happened and it could potentially bring back those feelings.
Journaling has also helped me. During that period, I wasn't journaling much because I was driving an hour one way and then dealing with so many other things on top of work. Since then, I've tried to explore what happened and figure out how to keep it from happening again. I've felt better about it over time, but it's still a slow process.I've also tried to remove things that remind me of that time from my life, though it recently came back up when we were trying to come up with a plan to do surface mount boards. Overall, I don't really think about it when I can help it and that drastically improves things.
I think the best thing that I've done at this point is to concentrate on the good things in life and letting the other things fall into place. I've improved a lot since then. I've gotten over some of my anxiety and gotten a hold on some of my depression. I've been happier and I have a more solidified support network around me that cares about me. I'm trying to move past the people that hurt me, but it's a slow process, but at least I'm not giving up.
Written: 26 March 2018