Bracing

I'm sitting at my desk 62 minutes prior to work beginning on a Monday morning and I can feel anxiety within my chest. I can tell that my body is bracing. There isn't any specific thing driving my anxiety, meaning that I'm not dwelling on an upcoming meeting that I'm dreading, a project that I'm unsure how to complete, or a person with whom I'd prefer not to speak.

Instead, I can feel my body tightening in anticipation of entering an environment that doesn't respect me.

My job values me. I might even go so far as to say that my job values me pretty highly. But that's entirely different territory than respect. My job values me because I've shown myself to be an intelligent person capable of consistently outputting work of relatively high quality.

But my job does not respect me.

My job is perfectly OK to impose things on me nonconsensually. In fact, it is so OK with it that the question of consent never really crosses the mind of my job.

I'm realizing as I write this that "my job" is an abstraction and that I should be specific. "My job," is an idea, and everything that stems from it, both positive and negative, is perpetuated by real people.

But I also struggle with that specificity, because no one person has done or, I imagine, will do anything malicious to me. Instead, it's a group of people moving as a hivemind, somehow coordinated without a conductor. They have all internalized how they "should" be behaving and, as such, behave as the guards to their own prison.

And so it is difficult for me to lay this disrespect at the feet of any specific people with whom I work. Because these people, outside of the office, unquestionably view me as a full human upon whom they can't impose much of anything. There is no question in my mind that they view me as a full person worthy of care and consideration. But it's like both I and they are dehumanized as soon as we cross the threshold of our office. And, through that dehumanization, we lose our right to any resistance, any questioning, any consideration.

What this means is that I'm bracing myself for something that feels inescapable. I do not work in a toxic environment. It's difficult to imagine working alongside people more caring than the people amongst whom I find myself today.

But the inescapable nature of this force does not make it any easier to coexist alongside. In fact, I'd argue that it makes it more difficult to coexist alongside because it does not feel temporary. Instead, it feels endemic to our current, metastasized structure.

And so, I worry that I'll feel this anxiety, on and off, forever. Equally, I worry that the best that I can do is take refuge in a sheet of paper. I worry that refuge won't be enough.