Open Letter to My Coworkers

If you've been following my blog, you know that one of my coworkers committed suicide almost two weeks ago. In the days following his death, I started writing this "letter" to my coworkers. At the time, I didn't know whether I would ever share it with them. I didn't know if I wrote it for them, for me, or for no one. But for that week, we all pulled together. We all had our tears, and we all offered shoulders to cry on. We became closer, and I really started to feel like this was a safe place to be, a place that I was proud to call my work home.

Little did I know that when I bucked up and went to work after the funeral that that would be the last shift I would ever work at my job. I can't decide if it's just ironic, bad luck, or some kind of joke. The timing couldn't have been more tragic. I was laid off. And what's more sad is that I wasn't surprised by it. I think a part of me knew it was only a matter of time. A part of me knows that I am replaceable and only as valuable as how much money I can make for someone else. (This is the part where people that know and love me are yelling at the screen for me to stop putting myself down! But the truth is, although we like to say everyone is of infinite worth, our society has a shitty way of showing it!)

But I think the message I wanted to say is still relevant even if I don't have any coworkers anymore. The message being essentially that you see the people you work with everyday- probably more than your own family. We need to be there for each other, all differences set aside. I'm sick of adding to the list of people I knew who committed suicide. My intention was to work on my "letter" more before it being read by others, but after losing my job....I can't say my heart is into making any improvements to it:


"Whether you have worked here for two weeks or you were around in the ancient days when this store opened, before eBooks and WiFi existed, you are part of our family. If you need to cry, we will let you, and we won't judge you. Just like family, we will probably hold grudges, we'll get pissed off at each other, and annoyed. Sometimes it's hard to let people in or ask for help. As someone who has struggled with depression and multiple suicide attempts, hospitalizations, therapy, and medication cocktails, I personally know that it's very hard to trust anyone with that kind of crap. We'd like to think that we live in a world where people are accepting and understanding about people from all sorts of walks of life and backgrounds, but the world still has a ways to go. When I came back to work for The Barn, I had lost my job as a successful x-ray tech not once, but twice. I didn't even see it coming. I had grown up with the message beaten down my throat that you do not ever let on to anyone if you struggle with mental illness, because you might lose your job; someone might use it against you. For the first time ever, I did open up about it at my x-ray job. I thought things were different now. I openly communicated every step of my journey to my management team so they could work with me and my medical commitments, but even so, I still lost my job (twice). My wall came back up. When I came back to The Barn after that, I was skeptical. I was really vague about the circumstances of my return, and I was not about to trust anyone with my struggles. If I had to get time off work for a medical reason, or if I just up and didn't come to work for a few days because I had literally overdosed over the weekend, I skipped the details and downplayed everything. I was so afraid I would lose my job again. Little by little, the wall began to crumble as management worked with me to schedule shifts around my many therapy and med check appointments. They even asked how things were going periodically. It was weird. A good weird, but I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I figured it was only a matter of time before something bad would happen; this nice act had to be up at some point, right? Well, three years later, I am still here. Sure, I probably have some beef with some of you, and maybe you have some annoyances with me, but in light of what our Barn family has gone through lately, it's all just a bunch of bullshit, isn't it? Damn rewards card percentages and email collections and nasty bathroom cleanings and pricing gripes- it's all just stuff. It doesn't even matter. You matter. I matter. We all matter. We are more than just employees and customers- we are a family and a community. We care about each other and we look out for each other. So if you need something, tell someone. Maybe you'll be thinking, "Well, I don't know this person very well," or "They won't care about what I have going on," or "If I show any weakness or, heaven forbid I cry in front of someone, I will be so mortified!" just get that junk out of your head. We've all cried in the bathroom or the break room, so there's nothing to be ashamed of. We've all got our shit to carry. And maybe, like me, you are thinking, "Fuck! I knew he had some bad stuff going on in his head, but I just didn't know what to do!" or "I wanted to say something, but I didn't know how!" Well, you aren't alone. There is a lot of that guilt thing going around. "He died because I was too worried about saving my own face, cuz I was too chicken to say anything?!" No, you are not alone. We've all got those crazy ass nasty thoughts going through our heads, but they ain't true."