For 15 years, I lived with a broken sink.
The sink was still whole when I was bullied and blocked from working by a university professor.
I could not get a job, no matter how hard I tried.
The sink first cracked right after my husband, and I parted ways with his family and stopped communicating because my in-laws had supported my brother-in-law and sinister-in-law (no misspelling here) in their efforts to push us into bankruptcy. They did this because they were threatened by my efforts to earn a graduate degree – a choice I made out of necessity. I wasn't allowed to speak at the dinner table because every time I opened my mouth, the screaming sinister-in-law would "go off."
The sink cracked more after I worked for two female consultants who both bullied me by making up stupid scenarios about why I did not deserve payment for my work.
To deal with the broken sink, I found a plastic dishpan used by waiters to bus dishes. My husband covered the enlarging crack with black duct tape. In other words, I covered up the fissure in my life just as bullying had caused me to act. I couldn't see the crack, but like my anger over being bullied, I knew it was there every time I removed the dish pan to clean it. The black tape showed every food particle and muck left behind from washing dishes. It became an unconscious symbol of the damage that bullying had caused in my life.
Like the family, the sink should not have cracked. We had purchased it new and inserted it ourselves. However, the sink – designed to help us keep our dishes clean – did not measure up to the job – just as the family sheltered the perpetrator of my ruined educational goals and ignored both my husband's and my pleas for help. Over time, the sink became a symbol of everything that was wrong with my life – the abuse and lack of support by the family, my inability to find new work, the destruction of a paid internship in my new field of work by my brother-in-law dumping an estate on me, the shrinking of my new work network due to the bullying of the female consultants and the Professor; the lack of money I had to fix the sink –or anything else in my life. At one point, I found myself conducting daily online surveys for quarters and collecting discarded cans on my daily walks. I had no other means to support myself, and spending hours submitting resumes only to be ghosted after the first interview where my references were vetted – left me feeling worse and worse.
After all, I had graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude. Even that hard-won accomplishment did not mean anything to potential employers after the Professor had her say. (And yes, I had been a witness to her passing on all kinds of comments about an individual worker beyond just confirming that someone had worked for her). I didn't have money to fight the retaliation, even if I could have found a lawyer to represent me.
Eventually, things changed. The Professor died at her desk, and the Huffington Post and the Clearing House for Public Integrity revealed her falsified statistics. I finally got a job that allowed me to overcome whatever negative comments were being told about me by the female consultants. The family stopped trying to hoover us back into the fold - even though they never apologized for, nor paid for, the extensive financial and educational damage they caused.
This last month, after finally paying down all my school debts (tripled by my in-laws), my husband and I finally fixed the broken sink. I realized that I had used that cracked sink to punish myself for being bullied, even though I knew I was ultimately not at fault for the bullying that had happened to me. I had used that sink as self-punishment. and suddenly, that symbol was gone.
I wrote a book titled "Ten Steps to Overcome Workplace Bullying." I've now decided there may be an eleventh step that arrives as we finally overcome the damage. After I was left to sort out the problems caused by multiple bullies, I had no choice but to find a new way forward. Thus, this step represents what finally pushes us to repair the abuse that was done while the abuser(s) continue to deny the damage they caused. This step enables us to resolve the anger within ourselves, even as it preserves our right not to forgive.
That made me wonder: Do we all carry a symbol of a broken sense of self with us long after we've been bullied out of our jobs and our ability to take care of ourselves?
Let me know in the comments below.