To My Broken Spirit

I see you.

I see all of you.

I see all those times you get up early and wonder how you are going to make it today. The worry you carry about keeping the bills paid while balancing a job that doesn’t fulfill you. The guilt you feel for needing to work late and missing time with your son. The big guilt when it’s been one of those work days and you literally have nothing left in your to even fake happy smile at something your son wants to show you from his day. I see all of that.

There are so many times I see my own spirit low, beaten down and deflated. So many things can happen in a day that take us down paths we never expected. A meeting at work where someone was pushing their agenda and ego overshadowing any form of collaboration and partnership. The deadline that came out of nowhere and pushes everything else out of the way to meet. The boss who doesn’t have your back on an important issue and leaves you to take a beating verbally. All of it ends up leaving us feeling exhausted, burned out, depressed, low on energy, over it. Our spirit sinking in grayness for once again not being able to shine and letting ourselves, our family, our employer down.

It is very difficult to not take things personally at work. We are told to grow a thick skin and let it roll of off us but sometimes that’s pretty hard. People seem to take on a evil villain mask when the come to work some days. You have to wonder if they are that way at home too and that is just how they are. I sincerely hope not because wow that would mean there are some seriously mean people in the world! The way we treat each other at work is incredibly mean at times and taking it through thick skin is just a politically correct way to say bullying and bad behavior is acceptable.

At a certain point in it you realize just how much it is impacting you not only physically with not sleeping or eating well, feeling stressed out and anxious but also how it affects your spirit. The part of you that fuels creativity, inspiration and motivation. It is incredibly hard to feel motivated about your work when you’ve spent the last hour being chewed on by people who are doing it out of meanness. There is a very big difference between constructive criticism and being disrespectful to someone. Too often in work those lines get blurred and there is a lot more abuse than any of us would accept anywhere else in our life. Yet we do here because of that paycheck. Oh the things we put up with for the sake of that!

The biggest sacrifice for it is usually our own spirit. The one that sees us dragging through our day holding back tears of hurt, anger, frustration. The very spirit we brought to that new job and was excited about being part of that team is now laying on the floor crumbled in a thousand pieces. When a job takes away your happiness and replaces it with never ending consuming of their toxic environment it is not a healthy place. It is also not worth the paycheck.

I get jobs are hard to come by, good jobs at least. It takes time and is super annoying to fill out all those online applications and submit your resume but the alternative is letting your spirit continue to die. I am not suggesting our spirit is more important than our bills but I’m saying they both matter. They both impact the quality of our life. If we only have the paycheck we only have money and what good is that if we have to use it al