I know this isn't a suicide support group, and please don't worry about that – I have a therapy appointment this week, a good support system, and coping skills. But I could use some advice or perspective about what to do about working.
Here's the situation:
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I'm currently in the end stages of interviewing for a role at the preeminent company in my field – it's like Google or Tesla but for what I do. It would be less work, more resources and support to do my job well, better benefits, and a sizeable raise. But I never let myself hang my hat on an interview; I don't want to get disappointed.
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I have been bullied at work for months by a manager who didn't jibe with my personality and proceeded to undercut my expertise, passive aggressively attack me in front of other people, write me up unnecessarily, commit bigoted microaggressions, surveil all of my role-related communication with all of my colleagues (I'm a senior manager, this shouldn't be necessary), and generally control the narrative about me to my detriment, and then she fucked off and found a new job, leaving me and the single other person on our team to deal with the upper management she quit over.
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The company… Jesus christ I don't even know how to sum it up. It's so bad. It's so horribly mismanaged. They have made all work just absolutely excruciating to get through.
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The interim manager on my team has no expertise in what my team does, which is highly technical. She doesn't see this as a problem. She keeps imposing impossible, layering deadlines on us and on me in particular, and she's picked up the old manager's bad habit of passive aggressively attacking me during meetings.
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Every time I raise my concerns about how bloated our processes are and the fact that we are operating way outside of industry norm, the reaction I get is that I'm being offensive and unnecessarily critical. Keep in mind that they created my team in October of last year and my single remaining colleague isnt new to the company but is new to my field, so I am the only person at my company who has industry insider perspective on what is normal.
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Because of all of this my relationships at work are just fucked and my (current) manager – like the last one – says shit about me that is demonstrably untrue all the time. I'm constantly fighting against her perception of me.
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I have attempted to explain to this interim manager that I am having extreme and severe mental health issues and her response has been to get annoyed and tell me to talk to HR about taking time off (more about that below; TL;DR I don't have much time I can take off).
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I am suicidal at work every day. It has slowly escalated over the past three months. I've been having a severe, urgent mental health crisis and I've been showing up regardless because I got top surgery in February and it ate up all my PTO and sick leave. I have about 20 hours of PTO saved up now, but I don't want to take it for fear that I won't get this new job and things will get worse and I'll have to take the PTO to cover a hospitalization.
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I can't afford to quit and I can't afford to take unpaid FMLA.
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I took a few days off last week and the company did nothing to support my absence. I wound up having to work extra hours to meet a(n artificial) deadline and I wound up back at square one emotionally. The company has done nothing to support my team through absences, so if I take time off again it's going to be the same story.
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I asked my former manager for reasonable accommodations for mental health related disabilities (ADHD and PTSD). She kept saying we'd get to planning it in our next 1:1 over and over and then she left.
So: How do I go into work tomorrow? And the day after that?
Do I bring up my mental state to anyone in leadership? Do I ask HR for help? Do I bother with any of it?
I can't emotionally handle more than one application process at a time right now, but if I don't get this new job I will continue applying. I just want some insight about what the fuck to do about having to work through all of this.
I do have a skip level tomorrow. I don't necessarily trust my boss's boss but I'm starting to feel like escalating upward is one of the few options available.