In the course of an average day at work, I encounter an obscene amount of bigotry.
Not from my co-workers... They're awesome. And I actually love my job (except for the bigot part).
Our readers though... Some of them are fucking evil. Since I admin our social media, I see racist homophobic misogynistic rubbish day in and day out. The letters to the editor come to me, so I also get it on paper or in emails. It's getting harder and harder to leave it at work. I come home and I just fume.
Today I got a letter (more like a 10 page dissertation) from some jackass schooling us on how the economy got to where it is. In this letter, he feels it necessary to point out that if business men didn't buy expensive vehicles for their "ugly fat wives" and instead invested the money wisely in their companies, they wouldn't default on loans.
What.
The.
Shit.
He complained about fat women a couple more times in the letter and I stopped reading after the second page. I took it to the editor. She literally gasped when she got to the "ugly fat wives" part and in an act of generous kindness, she excused me from having to respond.
It's no secret I can be misanthropic (I have a hunch it's common among agoraphobics) and situations like this are exacerbating my condition. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from locking myself away like a hermit but being smacked upside the head repeatedly with the disdain so many people have when it comes to fatness (or gayness, or colorness, or femaleness)... it isn't doing me any good.
How to lock it away when I go home at night? Short of literally putting my work-brain in my desk drawer and taking my home-brain out of my purse and poking it through my ear, how do I erase these experiences from my mind when I'm not on the clock?
Tips to share? How to compartmentalize the icky parts?
The boss said I can't bring my cats to the office nor am I permitted to spike my coffee with Kahlua. Any other suggestions would be faboo, though.
Not from my co-workers... They're awesome. And I actually love my job (except for the bigot part).
Our readers though... Some of them are fucking evil. Since I admin our social media, I see racist homophobic misogynistic rubbish day in and day out. The letters to the editor come to me, so I also get it on paper or in emails. It's getting harder and harder to leave it at work. I come home and I just fume.
Today I got a letter (more like a 10 page dissertation) from some jackass schooling us on how the economy got to where it is. In this letter, he feels it necessary to point out that if business men didn't buy expensive vehicles for their "ugly fat wives" and instead invested the money wisely in their companies, they wouldn't default on loans.
What.
The.
Shit.
He complained about fat women a couple more times in the letter and I stopped reading after the second page. I took it to the editor. She literally gasped when she got to the "ugly fat wives" part and in an act of generous kindness, she excused me from having to respond.
It's no secret I can be misanthropic (I have a hunch it's common among agoraphobics) and situations like this are exacerbating my condition. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from locking myself away like a hermit but being smacked upside the head repeatedly with the disdain so many people have when it comes to fatness (or gayness, or colorness, or femaleness)... it isn't doing me any good.
How to lock it away when I go home at night? Short of literally putting my work-brain in my desk drawer and taking my home-brain out of my purse and poking it through my ear, how do I erase these experiences from my mind when I'm not on the clock?
Tips to share? How to compartmentalize the icky parts?
The boss said I can't bring my cats to the office nor am I permitted to spike my coffee with Kahlua. Any other suggestions would be faboo, though.
