An Acceptable Loss
Am I playing the victim?
I woke up around 6:30 am. The clear sounds of thunder and rain were echoing outside the open window and that strange feeling you hear when the power is no longer working was on. I rolled over in bed and rubbed my eyes with enough pressure to remove the annoyance. And, once again, the night was filled with the thinking of things I didn’t need to think about. The past few months were like this.
It was the beginning of summer, the girls were home, and my wife had just left for work. I walked into the bathroom and flipped the light switch on. Oh, yeah. No power. I pulled out my beard trimmer, set the guard to 5, and pushed it up my face. When I pulled it away, there lay a strip where the hair was much lower than I had planned. I looked at the trimmer setting and noticed I had not set it to 5. It was set to 1.
The last straw had been met.
I started texting my wife those angry texts you send when you're mostly frustrated with everything and need someone to react to them. Thankfully, she reacted. We had been talking prior about a short-term rental we were going to invest in—I said something that she misinterpreted to be something I didn’t mean to say and I also never implied it to sound like what she didn’t want it to sound like. Whatever, I didn’t care. She was going to take the brunt of my frustration. She took it well, and I texted her an apology, including how I ran the beard trimmer up my face which started the aggravation.
I was also in the middle of losing my job as a surgical technologist. I had been through an 18-month program to further my career but this program had squeezed every ounce of inspiration and joy from my body, but slowly, like an IV drip in reverse. It was the middle of June in 2023 when I emailed my then-manager:
I’m writing this now to get it off of my chest before I start my vacation tomorrow. I have been mentally drained from the frustration of this program and how, I feel, management isn’t working with me to further my career. I feel I am being held back even more so when three [insert career role here] are being put ahead of me while I am being placated and I'm told that "I’ll get there eventually.” I am finding myself getting into mood swings and I am simply not happy, at all, with my work. Initially, I was very eager to become a [insert better career role here] but now I feel indifferent toward it. I have two interviews scheduled outside of [insert non-profit corporation here] when I am off of my vacation.
I did have two interviews, but I never followed up on them. At that time, I was depressed.
After I finished the program, I became a surgical technologist by the beginning of 2024. On January 17, one leader gave me a feedback evaluation:
[Aaron] has endured and made it through a difficult program. Whichever location he decides to take a position with will benefit from his new skills very much. If not with an ambulatory surgical center, they will be lucky to have him! He is knowledgeable in the clinical duties he performs and is dependable in completing his assignments […] When assistance is needed, he seeks help from his uplines. Thanks Aaron, for a great 2023; I appreciate your hard work, patience, and dedication to the ST Apprenticeship program, our department and customers! We're very fortunate to have you a part of our team!!!
Early in March, I was released from orientation. As time progressed, I began to struggle; I had trouble finding confidence in my role while also understanding and putting into practice each of the skills for the separate surgeons and surgeries I was a part of. This included arthroscopy, colorectal, laparoscopy, orthopedic, vascular, cystoscopy, plastic, breast, gynecological, hysteroscopy, etc. I was so overwhelmed that I became hyper-focused on each task; I wouldn’t react to my coworkers as they laughed and bantered. I wanted to be a part of that but hoped it would come in time; I wanted to belong.
On March 24, I got a merit compensation increase—the most money I’ve ever made. While I was still plugging away, trying to gain confidence, this raise in pay put the outlook on my work in a better place.
Then, May 6 rolled around, and I realized I had forgotten to hand in my orientation checklist to my educator. This paperwork recognized the clinical knowledge, technical skills, critical thinking, and communication that a surgical technologist should know and understand. I brought it to a peer to sign me off on each task. After it was signed I sent it to our educator via fax. That was that. By the following week, this peer started to shadow me and gave me the same orientation checklist, but with nothing checked off. I didn’t understand why, it confused me, and furthered the idea that I didn’t belong. It was tense, uncomfortable, and aggravating. By the end of the week, I told my leader I had no passion—but, looking back, it was no passion for the working environment. I asked if I could be placed in another location with similar pay, but unforeseen circumstances occurred; circumstances where I thought I was doing the right thing, but I learned that I wasn’t. I spiraled; I asked to be put on personal leave. One could say I was bullied out, but it’s all hindsight now.
While I was on leave I sent my leaders an email asking them to send me documentation of the mistakes I made that warranted me unfit to do my duties. They didn’t respond. A week later, I asked again. When I did receive it, it had spelling errors and looked to be done quickly, typed up as a Word document, off the cuff. I felt some things were true, some things were not. All mistakes seemed to be a part of a corporate learned learning curve—something I didn’t feel I needed to be ahead of, but I hold no authority in this corporation, nor with its keepers. I was told I plateaued; time is money.
This was a little over a month after I received my merit increase. All of this mixed communication was giving me mixed signals.
I feel like a casualty; collateral damage; an acceptable loss; I am the unwanted fallout from an action. Maybe it was me; I was at fault and I’m now playing the victim to a problem I created. Maybe, I should take this as a sacrifice and walk away. Gingerly.
Whatever. Fuck that damn beard trimmer, anyway.
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