Get ready for a long one, it’s a wild ride.
4 years ago I got hired in a lab studying sex hormones in cancer, I was thrilled. My last job had traumatized me a bit and I was so excited about this opportunity as my boss seemed like an incredible person and one of the projects she wanted to explore was immune response in individuals on GAHT (I’m trans nonbinary and this was a dream project for me). I became an integral part of the lab, basically acting as the lab manager. For 2 years this was the perfect position; she was patient with me, helped me unlearn fear responses from my last job, gave me big experiments. I thought I was the luckiest person ever.
Now for the scene setting: Fast forward to 2024. Following the election she killed the GAHT project. We hadn’t been doing much with it anyways and I had been moved to a different focus but it hurt to hear the first thing she was willing to cut was my community. I moved on. In October I went through the starts of a 5 month long housing crisis that destroyed my mental health. The chaos of that hyperactivated my ADHD so I began pursuing a diagnosis so that I could get prescribed adderall. My wife and I ended up pursuing the purchase of a house but in that time my lease ended, the closing date got bumped back three times, my wife had to move across the country three months sooner than anticipated, and I ended up with nowhere to live for a month. Of course I ended up dropping balls in my work life, I was the most stressed I’d ever been. That said, in January my boss offered to pursue promoting me which I eagerly jumped on. Then April rolls around, we have the house, my life is settling, I have a month and a half of perfect performance… My new psych changes my meds because they don’t yet want to give me adderall. Over the course of a month I have a complete deterioration of my psyche. I had daily panic attacks, I ended up being unable to finish a sentence without shutting down and being physically unable to say the words I had in my head, I was dizzy and out of it. I was up front with my boss as I made a handful of mistakes but still managed to keep myself relatively on task. She was understanding. Finally, I made the decision to go back to my original meds and push for adderall. I recovered. I was a model employee. I had three months of exemplary performance. In June I asked about the promotion again and she said she’d go forward with it but that my institution made it a difficult process, to which I mentioned our new union was trying to streamline that process, she became hesitant.
In the following months, my boss suddenly began finding new and constant problems in my performance. She pulled me off projects, she sidelined me to administrative tasks, she stopped giving me experiments, she had our senior research associate watching me like a hawk. Any mistake, no matter how minuscule, became a huge deal. I began feeling like I could do nothing right, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. At one point I was accused of something I didn’t even do, at another I was blamed for a mistake in an experiment I was asked to perform for the research associate- it ended up not even being my fault and I was never given an apology. In December, my boss said “maybe your hands aren’t meant for science,” and put me on a performance improvement plan. My union began getting involved, seeing massive red flags in her behaviors. She emailed me about everything, as if to leave a paper trail, to which I constantly pushed back on, clarifying situations or even refuting the false accusations.
Last Friday (May 1st, ironically workers’ day), I came to work to find an email sent at 7PM the night before informing me she was cutting me to half time. She had left that morning for a no-contact relaxation retreat. She hadn’t even talked to me about this being a possibility. I was furious. She knew my finances have been tight enough I’ve been having to sacrifice groceries to pay for my cat, that I’ve been unable to pay for my medications frequently considering increasing copays. Cutting my hours will eradicate my ability to pay my mortgage. I can’t help but be furious that the comp biologist who makes nearly double what I do, produces less reliable data, and is ultimately mildly obsolete is still full time. I’m the only one being cut “for funding”. For years she’d constantly talk about how during covid when money was tight she’d never screw her employees, that she’d take a pay cut before cutting her people. She’d flaunted her many grants to other labs, bragging to every lab in the department about all the money the lab had to spend, hiring more people than ever.
Today I returned to lab with a new outlook: malicious compliance. I’ve been doing the job of a research associate for the pay of the lowest possible position in the lab. No more me covering for other people, no more me constantly answering questions for the senior research assistant making more than me and doing half what I do, no more going out of my way to aid the grad students, postdoc, and research associate. No more communicating with vendors and volunteering to teach, mentor, and do outreach. No more doing her clerical work (literally have rewritten and updated her CV five times). Congratulations bosswoman, I’m about to let the lab fall apart just by doing my job and you’re about to watch it. I’ve been job hunting but now I’m going to be soliciting other labs for opportunities.
TLDR; my boss has been committing psychological fucking warfare against me for almost a year and she’s about to discover what it looks like when you take one of your hardest working employees for granted.