I’m off for a few days, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2018.
A reader writes:
I have an ongoing concern that has a lot to do with mental health but also has to do with work. I am seeing a therapist regularly to deal with the mental health aspect but I’m hoping to get insight from you on the work piece of it.
I’m about seven years into my professional career and have intense anxiety daily about my performance. I was always a high performer and have been promoted many times. About two years ago, I left my previous position for a new position that was more money and allowed me to get back into a particular industry. Shortly before I started the job, I lost 160 pounds and found a new confidence I never had before. However, shortly after I started the job, things in my life took a bad turn … I had four deaths in my family, including two people who I was very close with, and my long-term relationship with my live-in SO ended. Because of splitting up our things and having to pay for the apartment myself, I also began to have significant financial issues too. The stress of all the change, especially the negative things, aggravated my already existing mental health issues, after having been relatively stable for about six years.
I’m not trying to make excuses, just trying to explain the “perfect storm” that developed that caused me to act on some of the impulsiveness that is common in those with my mental health issues. To add to all of the personal things going on, my new job had a culture that was extremely different than my previous workplace. For once, I wasn’t the youngest person — almost everyone working there was in their early 20s to mid 30s, many were “young professional” types who were unmarried and had no children. The culture ended up being one that centered around a lot of joking around, close friendships outside of work, happy hours and other alcohol fueled events, and romantic relationships. I was newly single and newly thin and confident — the environment was awesome! I was making friends, going out, having a great time!
However, as the negative things in my life started happening, I got deeper and deeper into the drinking with work friends and things quickly became unprofessional (not just for me, but for the sake of this post I’m going to focus on my behavior). I don’t want to be graphic but I think it’s important to give you an idea of exactly how inappropriate things became, because it’s necessary context. Some highlights include: giving one of the managers oral sex in the parking lot, getting black-out drunk in front of the director at a happy hour, attending my boss’s family functions, having a tumultuous and abusive five-month relationship with a different manager, making out with one of the facilities guys in a conference room at work, doing shots with my boss’s husband, sleeping with a supervisor that my best friend at work also slept with and ruining that friendship forever, getting hammered on lunch with a supervisor and returning to work drunk, heavy petting with a senior manager at a work function in front of multiple coworkers, smoking weed with coworkers and giving oral sex to another manager, who is now my current boyfriend, in my office. I became known amongst the management team as the happy hour go-to and a partier and people were constantly asking me to go out drinking with them. For additional context, I work in human resources so this kind of behavior is especially egregious.
It got to the point that I was drinking heavily 4-5 nights a week and I could no longer maintain my responsibilities. I started coming in late and skipping work frequently and became very depressed about my situation and especially guilty about my actions. Eventually, through therapy and substance abuse treatment, I was able to begin to piece things back together. It quickly became clear that I needed to get out of that work environment, both for my mental health and the sake of my career. So, I started a new job about six months ago. My behavior at my previous employer wasn’t known by those giving a reference so I didn’t have any difficultly landing a new job, even one that ended up being a promotion with more responsibility and a significant pay bump.
I’ve come far in my treatment but it’s a process. Since I’ve started this job, I haven’t done anything even remotely unprofessional. In fact, I probably come off a little cold sometimes because I’m so afraid of even making friends here at all. The worst part though is that I went from a high performer who was confident in her abilities to an average performer with crippling anxiety. Every day I wake up thinking about the horrible things I did and how I don’t deserve this job. I am so deeply ashamed of myself and feel guilty daily. I feel like I so thoroughly messed up at my last employer that I didn’t earn this. I’ve lost all confidence in my judgment and my abilities and I second-guess every single thing I do. I’m constantly worried I’ve made a mistake, even on mundane things. It’s similar to the feelings I’ve seen others describe about imposter syndrome except … maybe I really am an imposter? What kind of HR professional does the things I did? I’m considering backing out of this field all together and trying something new because I feel like I don’t deserve to do this anymore. Am I off-base or is there any coming back from this?
It sounds like you have come back from this.
Everywhere except your own mind, at least. (And to be fair, probably in the minds of people from your old job — although it’s likely that no individual person there knows the full list you presented here.)
And for what it’s worth, you must have done a good enough job there to land yourself the position you have now. I’m not saying that your extracurricular behavior there doesn’t matter. It does matter — but clearly you have enough strengths that didn’t have any trouble landing a great new job. That says something.
Everyone has a past. Some people’s pasts are weirder/more troubling/more embarrassing/harder to explain than others. We still all have them, and I suspect you’d be surprised by the weird/embarrassing stuff that people you really respect have in their pasts.
Luckily, we all have presents too, and our current-day selves have control over those.
It sounds like you’re dealing with an enormous amount of shame. Shame can be useful when it causes us to reassess our behavior and resolve to change it. But shame isn’t useful when it just hangs around making us feel horrible. It sounds like you have resolved to change your behavior — and have done that successfully — but you’re still mired in the shame and it’s paralyzing you.
If you accept that mental illnesses are diseases like any other, and I hope you do, then maybe it would help to put this in different terms. Imagine you know someone with a physical ailment that exhausted her and destroyed her focus at work, and while she fought the disease she ended up performing horribly for a year. And then she recovered, got the disease under control, started a new job, and went back to performing at her normal high level. Would you think, “She performed so badly while she was sick that she doesn’t deserve her new job and she should change fields because she can never be trusted again”? Or would you think, “She had an awful year, I’m so glad she’s recovered and is back to herself and back to being great at what she does”?
I know that when we’re talking about life choices, it can feel like the analogy doesn’t quite hold up, and that losing focus at work is different from oral sex in the parking lot. And sure, they’re different. But that difference is where so much of the shame and stigma around mental health comes from, and it’s cruel and damaging to people — as it’s currently being cruel and damaging to you.
You were sick. It affected the way you acted. You got it under control, and you’re working with a professional to keep it that way. You’re doing all the right things here (although if you haven’t yet apologized to anyone at your last job who deserves it, that might be worth doing too). You’re allowed to forgive yourself and move forward. I hope you will.
