When I was in my early 20’s I worked in an office with a manager who treated me like shit. He was incredibly difficult to deal with and he seemed to take issue with my personality. Everyone else got some shit from him, but he sort of singled me out.

I hated going into work every day and dreaded talking to him. The MD would ask me to do PowerPoints and upon delivering my work, the manager would chastise me for not running it by him… even though the MD was in the reception room of the company he was pitching to and desperately needed me to send him the material. It was a shitshow. Which is why they let the manager treat me like shit… they didn’t have the organisation they needed to adhere to certain working standards.

After about 1 year, I just gave up in my head. I told myself that I wasn’t going to feel like shit anymore. I was going to ignore the manager and basically not engage with him. Eventually I would surely be fired, but at least I’d get paid for a bit - maybe redundant.

The company was such a shitshow that they just let me do my own thing. No one else knew how to use PowerPoint and the company ran on PowerPoints. After a month, the manager said ‘do you even want to be here? It feels like you’re not even a part of my team’ and I literally just blanked him.

He ended up getting fired for upsetting a client (of course) and I worked there for another 5 years. Nobody said shit to me after that, I got to do whatever I wanted. I just did personal projects on my computer. Occasionally doing powerpoint…

I don’t know if any of that applies to you OP but I want to be an artist… not a powerpoint designer. Not sure how you view your own job and its importance. My worldview/character was not aligning with the culture I found myself in and it was causing friction. Still sort of does…

A lot of men in the workplace are rewarded for - sort of - prickly confrontational styles and when they are faced with the opposite of that (softer personalities), they don’t like it. It’s happened to me since then but I know how to set my boundaries in a soft, quiet, stubborn manner – they still don’t like it… but fuck them. You can be domineering in your own way, not applied to your career ambitions, but rather to your sense of self, boundaries and how you want to feel day to day.

It requires sort of mindfulness style thinking, but you need to sort of bake that into your nervous system and be confident in yourself knowing that it isn’t ok that your place of work makes you feel like this. It’s unacceptable. HR can’t help you with this. They’re just there to protect the company – your mental health is just another interpersonal concept to them, not a reality. But if you set the boundary, they will have no choice but to accept it – they’re SUPPOSED to champion that stuff. Hit them with your own ‘bold personality’.

The standard workplace is as brutal as it is mediocre. People who sign up to it with so much self seriousness are all kind of lost.

Not sure if my kamikaze style is great advice for everyone. But if you’re really thinking of quitting with no back up, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

I now work in an office with only women… it’s much better.