Going postal in my mind

Just last week, a 48-year-old man who worked in the imaging department of a hospital outside Anchorage, Alaska walked into the hospital a day after being fired and shot his direct supervisor and another senior employee. One was killed, the other is still in critical condition. The man himself was shot dead at the scene by state police.<br><br>Most people don’t shoot their former bosses after being fired. It’s not a good career move.<br><br>But I think I know what that man was feeling, even though I don’t have any fantasies of picking up a rifle or hand-gun and heading back to my former workplace like this guy did.<br><br>In fact, maybe the morning this guy had on the day he woke up and did this started out just like mine did this morning.<br><br>Awaking out of a literal dream about getting fired (great, I couldn’t even get an escape in my dreams), I lay there on my back, my hands pressing hard against my eyes, my body clenched, feeling wretched. I couldn’t get control of my thoughts, my mind. I ricocheted through a volley of intense emotions, relentless. I felt unworthy, unwanted, unvalued, and a long list of other ‘un’s’.<br><br><span style="font-weight:bold;">Was this guy feeling this? Good chance he was.</span><br><br>Events kept replaying in my mind, over and over. I questioned scenes and meetings and encounters that had happened, looking for clues to understand the truth of why this happened. Nothing had been said leading up to my firing and my termination meeting had been mercilessly quick and vague to spare my boss the discomfort of the task.<br><br><span style="font-weight:bold;">Was this guy going through any of this? Probably.</span><br><br>I’d shift from the ‘un’ feelings to the anger feelings in micro-seconds. My mind searched for blame. And I found it. So many things done that felt questionable, unprofessional and even downright creepy.<br><br>Anger has an insidious way of turning to bitterness, and I watched it happen, as I began questioning the abilities and talents of those around me and in power. Scorn seeped in, and it became easy to find fault in so many places.<br><br><span style="font-weight:bold;">Would this guy find this familiar? I think so.</span><br><br>And I watched the mini-revenge fantasies hatch in my mind. I wanted to communicate, to someone, what I thought and perceived and the dismal way this had all been carried out. I wanted the people responsible to know, I wanted others to know.<br><br>I wanted to say what I really thought of the place, its dysfunction and the many ways it failed to live up to its hype. I wanted to point out the hypocrisy and the huge gap between intention and action. Like the little boy and the Emperor’s New Clothes, I wanted the truth named. And I could feel the seething inside me.<br><br>Then the anger and bitterness would quickly turn back on myself in a swirl of self-doubt, sadness and grief for being rejected by the very place or people I was flouting in my mind just moments ago.<br><br>And then there is the fear. The sheer terror of WTF am I going to do. The financial panic seeing the future close in as my mind finds the worst-case scenario like water to lower ground.<br><br><span style="font-weight:bold;">And the difference between my thought processes and the killer in Alaska? Just scale.</span><br><br>I’m writing a blog about it. He picked up a gun and did something horrific.<br><br>Ultimately, anger is a very effective antidote to self-loathing. And self-loathing can be so intolerable that for many it becomes far easier to turn the feelings outwards than inwards. Getting fired can lead to self-loathing at lightening speed.<br><br>The sum of my experiences on the planet mean I have ways to move out of self-loathing.  It takes work, conscious work to remind myself of where I’ve been before, and what I’m capable of. To interrupt the cycle. In fact, it’s bloody hard work to do.<br><br>But this guy didn’t have the same experiences. And it became bloody hard for him and those around him. Bloody in a horrific unthinkable way.<br><br>I don’t know anything about the circumstances of his getting fired. But I do know, generally speaking, that we don’t do a good job of informing people that their value to a company or organization has just disappeared.<br><br>And with the economy in the shape it is, we might want to start looking at this. And get better at it.<br>