Right Now, I’m Bittersweet

Loosely inspired by a Madison Beer song title — and a true story of mine. Should you discover any identities, please don’t harass anyone alluded to here.

By Snarky LisaPublished about 4 hours ago • 3 min read

To someone I won’t ever send this to,

Hey. How’s it going?

I’ve seen the recent informal press reports on you. The ones where you’ve come in arguing your dubiously constructed points, thinking you could win even when it was blatantly obvious you couldn’t. The ones where you’ve tried to awkwardly fix what was left of that manager role you worked so hard for. Heck, I’ve even seen the ones where you weren’t directly present.

Honestly, I’m still surprised this all happened. Even after all these weeks, where you’ve been carefully settling into the lower position designated to you by the powers above after your heights of comfort, it continues to baffle me that you even ended up seriously questioned in public in the first place.

Sure, you’ve faced your fair share of detractors over the year and a half that you have ruled your place. Your rule did have a rocky start, after all, and the main reason you were allowed to stay at first was people’s desperation for a replacement after the longtime woman in charge had suddenly disappeared.

Given your main rivals went insane and the world you were all in was surely starting to favour those of your background more, keeping you around was more than necessary. Besides, it wasn’t like you had zero leadership experience before you got the role anyways.

In spite of our rather tumultuous history together, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that you haven’t done any good for that cohort of yours which I once hung around in. You’ve managed public relations well for months, keeping scandals which could have absolutely destroyed the reputation of the place you presided over from going over the rug.

You’ve been very good at building connections with important people, whether you really liked them deep down or not. You’ve even helped resolve situations much of HR couldn’t, giving people the closure they needed.

In general, your personality just did not give off the sense that you’d dramatically crumble under the weight of your own rule someday, what with your intellect and polished interests.

However, I guess power got to your head in the end, didn’t it? That desperation to keep what you had — and gain some more. The bias against your enemies, little suppressed to help ensure your tethers to potential power loss were few.

Sometimes I want to ask you how it feels being where I was once designated as — kicked to the bottom, with no way out but perhaps surrendering.

I mean, we ended up there for very different reasons and from very different positions. You were always more well-connected and powerful than I was, even before your predecessor left. The stuff against me was also rather unfounded, whereas others’ grievances against you now are…well, the opposite. That’s not even getting into your role in my troubles.

But there’s one striking parallel that has still gotten me — the presence of false accusations in both of our situations. Whereas I was falsely accused of being dishonest when it came to powerful people, you were the very creator of false accusations against the once revered in your recent woes — the latter of which you faced the consequences for.

Maybe I should be happier that you’ve finally gotten your comeuppance — even if never truly for what you’ve done to me. But even though I still don’t like you, I’m not.

Yes, you were rather bold for something you should have been far less proud of doing. But at the end of the day, I just see a guy who, despite faking things elegantly for months, has been seriously emotionally screwed by his ever-increasing responsibilities.

Perhaps you were doomed from the start. After all, you were put in charge of a hotbed of burnout and dubiously treated mental health issues.

But maybe, just maybe, this forced resignation will make you see things in a different light. Maybe even my stuff — however unlikely that is.

I’m not placing any bets, though.