TL;DR I was honest about my Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at work and it backfired. I’m slow because my brain is constantly in fight or flight. I had a private conversation with my manager about it and she ratted me out.
(25F)I’ve always known I’m a little “slow,” and I never knew why. Objectively, it’s more than just smoking too much weed or lack of sleep. Something is very wrong. I almost always eventually lose favor due to my lack of speed in any job I’ve ever worked. Restaurants, retail, office work, etc. It doesn’t matter the field.
I’m currently working in health insurance and recently got licensed. It was time to move up in the world so I thought this would be one way of making it happen.
As you can imagine, it’s pretty fast paced. There are a lot of moving parts and there is always something to know. We are being entrusted with confidential information and you have to be very thorough and detail oriented. I am both of those things, but due to my chronic brain fog I take a little longer on certain tasks. I am mediocre at best once it comes to retaining information. I like my job and my boss and coworkers have let me know how much they like having me there, but over the last couple of weeks I have noticed “the shift.” Like I mentioned before, there comes a point when I start to notice that I’m being treated differently.
I get the feeling that my manager has to “hold my hand” when she asks me to take on certain tasks. She will give me a project, and repeatedly say, “okay, do you think you can do that?” in a sort of passive/babying tone. Nothing against her, of course. I like her and before I was hired she was and still does a vast majority of the work, so I do understand she has a lot on her mind. She moves faster than me and sometimes I’ll find myself repeating/asking the same question JUST TO MAKE SURE because in reality I don’t trust myself to retain the information. I take notes on everything. Even then, I still feel the need to make sure I have everything exactly right.
I requested a meeting with her last week to talk about my work performance. I knew she would be more upfront with me than my boss. He’s so nice and is always encouraging, but I needed some legitimate feedback. I told her this and she was open with me about how much I am struggling with the work. It wasn’t an easy conversation, but she was still encouraging and reassured me that this job isn’t easy, and the fact that I was hired later in the year puts us in a tough position because Open Enrollment is coming up in a couple of months. I took the feedback well and went about my day as usual. But then it started to get to me, and the next thing I knew my already triggered brain was on fire.
Now, my mental health journey only began a couple of years ago and I’ve barely skimmed the surface. Reflecting on the conversation with my manager, I did a little bit of research when I had downtime to find some answers. Turns out, people with MD and CPTSD (like myself) can experience chronic brain fog. (FYI I also have severe ADHD so there’s that too.)
For those of you who don’t know a whole lot about it, for instance, CPTSD will trigger a constant fight or flight response which can cause the brain to become physically inflamed thus enabling cognitive dissonance. I had no idea it was directly related to my diagnoses. It makes sense. I also find it funny (not really lol) that the majority of the abuse I experienced growing up was from my parents aggressively belittling and insulting my intelligence. It went on for years. The trauma I endured has now made me less intelligent because my brain is constantly at war with itself. My inability to produce results quickly in school, work, and my personal life has been a closeted insecurity of mine for years.
At the end of the day, my boss calls me into his office. Sure as shit, my manager is sitting right there. I already know how this is going to play out. Long story short, my boss was very professional but confronted me about the conversation I had with my manager earlier that day. I ended up telling my boss about my condition which was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. Because I was already triggered, I immediately began crying and it was so painful. As I mentioned earlier, my boss is nice but he is older and more detached once it comes to mental health and he didn’t realize that he was saying all the wrong things. “We all get depressed,” “I want results,” etc. This job is supposed to be a fresh start for me and now I’m being looked at like a crazy person for lack of a better word. My manager has done this before (telling my boss something that I want off the record for personal reasons) and she seriously crossed a boundary this time. I didn’t think I had to place that boundary. It was a private conversation. Now I feel as though I can’t go to her for anything.
I can’t take it anymore. I’m in therapy. I’m experimenting with medication which has been hard. I feel so completely overwhelmed and worthless in my professional life. It doesn’t seem to end. I have no plans to hurt myself, but this experience genuinely made me want to not be here on earth anymore.