Last week (today, as of writing this, I guess, but over a week ago as of this getting posted), I woke up incredibly peacefully. I’d gotten decent sleep and struggled to get out of bed because the temperature was perfect for staying beneath my blankets as I listened to the sound of the rain outside. It was, perhaps, the best morning I’d had in a while, especially because I was able to haul myself out of bed before long and get ready for work without too much of an issue. It was pleasant, that first hour and a half of my morning as I ate breakfast and got ready for work, but it quickly spiraled downhill from there. You see, when I went to go get into my car around half-past-eight, I discovered that my underground parking garage had flooded. Nothing terrible, or disastrous, mind you, but it was at least ankle-deep water that had backed up out of the drain and I don’t have shoes waterproof enough to handle something like that. So, I returned to my apartment and planned to work from home for an hour when I remembered a conversation my boss and I had a couple weeks prior during my yearly review. Apparently, people had been taking notice of how often I worked from home for a couple hours in the morning or how often I was gone part of the morning for doctor appointments–enough that they’d spoken to my boss about it. While my boss understood my reasons and knew I was getting my hours in and my work done, he suggested that I do what I could to cut down on how often it happened at least for a while. I didn’t say much in response because I was processing the fact that my coworkers formed opinions about how often I wasn’t present in the office but chose to speak with our manager about it rather than see if there was any kind of reason for my time away from the office. I didn’t exactly have the bandwidth to bring any of that up yet since I was still reeling from learning this and hadn’t gotten to the point of being able to express why it upset me so much.

So, rather than work for what would turn out to be the hour and a half it took for the rain to stop and the water to drain away, I just sat on my couch and dealt with the thought that had shown up in that moment: would me working from home for a bit become a conversation I’d have to have with my boss? I spent the full hour and a half turning that thought over in my mind and processing what it meant that at least some of my coworkers were so concerned with my habits that they’d speak to our boss about them but not so concerned that they’d check to see if there was a reason I was making the choices I was. Such as seeing my ophthalmologist a lot to take care of endless eye problems. Or trying to figure out antidepressants that would work. Or dealing with a weekly package that I needed to be around to receive so I could put it in the fridge since its contents would spoil if they sat in my mailroom for ten hours or so between being dropped off and me getting home my long work days. Or dealing with the knock-on effects of the medication I was on last year and how much work it’s taken to recover from the side effects of it. So, rather than be productive at all, I sat and spiraled about how this changed my attitude toward my coworkers and my job and then eventually left when I could get to my car without getting soaked.

I spent the day angry after that. I couldn’t shake the thoughts swirling around my head in regards to the fact that no one on the team gave enough of a shit to comment on how hard I worked on this project of ours but gave enough of a shit to express their concern to my boss that I might be cheating the system or something. I don’t know who did it and I know better than to ask my boss (he wouldn’t ever tell me), so all I can do is assume that it’s any of them and that I am being monitored for what my coworkers consider slip-ups despite my consistently above-average-at-worst performance. Who knows, it could have even been multiple of them, based on things my boss said during the reivew. I mean, all of this really casts the meeting to discuss workloads I had with my fellow testers a couple weeks back in a very different light, given that I strongly suspect at least one of those two coworkers said something to my boss. Maybe it was a comment in passing, maybe it came up at one of the numerous most-of-the-team lunches I don’t attend since I’m the only one on the team who still masks, or maybe it was a full-on complaint of some kind. I don’t know. All I know is I rescheduled a bunch of appointments to “better” times that are more spaced out so I wouldn’t be working from home as much before appointments that were whatever the soonest available time was since it’s not like stuff is particularly easy to schedule these days. I had to move an appointment out three months to find a time that was early enough for me to go to before work and some I will just have to keep as they are and not start work until later in the morning (and, of course, stay very late at the office as a result).

There’s not much chance of coming back from something like this. I don’t know if my boss realizes it, but I essentially can’t trust any of the people on my team. I’ve already been dealing with frustrations aimed at pretty much the whole team around not being taken seriously and people doubting my expertise, so this has basically sounded the death knell for whatever team spirit I had left. I mean, I’m writing this forty-eight hours away from our team dinner meant to celebrate the release of our project and all I can think about is how miserable it will feel to sit around with these people, making polite conversation and wondering which one of them has been complaining about me and the need for me to be caught up on what happened while I was out of the building. Because that’s the problem, of course: it’s inconvenient that I need to be caught up on what happened and that problem should be solved by me altering my behavior rather than, I don’t know, altering the way the team communicates so that people who aren’t physically present actually know what’s going on since we have three full-time remote coworkers who have frequently comment on how left-out they feel. Heaven forbid we take a step back, accurately diagnose a communication issue, and come up with a solution. No. Better to blame the person who worked so hard that their body needed a month to recover from the labor done at the tail-end of a 14-month-long course of a physical health-wrecking medication than to take even a moment to consider that maybe if anyone other than me told people stuff when they weren’t physically present in the building, we might all get along better.

So I’ve been angry all day. About this and other stuff going on that I’m not going to list since that would give things away about my personal life that I want to keep to myself. And I suspect that I’m going to be upset about this for a while since I don’t really see how I can go about addressing it without causing problems. I do not have the energy to correct any of these people about my pronouns, let alone deal with the emotionally complicated situation that would be trying to communicate the idea that maybe we need to share things with people who aren’t present rather than gripe about how that’s just the price they pay for remote working. Or handle the conversation around how I’ve actually got a really good reason for working from home all that time and maybe just don’t feel like telling my entire company (who’d be able to see my out-of-the-office message) about my personal health and medical issues. There’s no good outcomes here. No way this resolves well in a way that doesn’t come at the cost of relationships that will be altered anyway and far more emotional energy than I have to spare right now. So I’m just mad, keeping it to myself, and trying to shake myself out of this anger spiral so I can calm down and think about literally anything else. It’s not like dwelling on all this is doing anything for me, after all…