Julie Benesh

(How to be) Dismissed

Embrace the irony of working in HR. And it’s not like you never Let Anyone Go yourself. It’s a sword you have swung and a stab that you knew you would likely experience on the other end. But still.

Right before it happens, many years after your divorce, your ex-husband says, “I think I was literally crazy, mentally ill, to ever want to divorce you.” His revelation is your cozy realization. Wrap yourself up in sorrow, not sorry.

The new SVP is light on facts, and loose with words, in retrospect, a harbinger of a new breed of leaders to come. And she is offended by you—thinks your print jackets and casual surroundings signify a disorderly and possibly disordered mind. Whereas you consider more sterile environs a sign of an emptier, less active brain.

She meets your unemployed successor at a conference, falls in employment love, and before you know it, she’s in and you are out. That relationship doesn’t last, but neither did your ex’s exit affair.

Like that, this is not simple rejection, because it is not impersonal, and it is not even abandonment because you are the one being made to leave. It is banishment. (Them, banishing you? But you have been lately miserable sacrificing everything putting up with them!)

The years intervening the two evictions are challenging, surprising, empowering. But the sense of being a misunderstood, misfit loser weighs you down again as if it is your fate, always has been and would be and nothing else counted.

“Eat” “lunch” with her (your meal a large iced tea) and take the names and phone numbers she offers. When she asks what you worry about say your reputation and any perception anyone might have about your performance or contribution which could affect your future employment. She says, “Oh, of course it’s not that!” Listen, disassociatively. While she tells your colleagues, in front of you, at a meeting that you are “creative,” but “we really don’t need creativity around here, we need standardization.” Look down at your hands expecting to find them paint-spattered, fingers emanating melody, but no.

In a year or so her admin assistant will leave their ID badge on their desk and never come back and a former colleague will say, “Maybe now the CEO will know how awful she is!” And you will burst into tears.

Get the six months’ notice you request because people in your field are taking forever to find jobs (sometimes, so far, literally), and given your 14 years of perfect performance evaluations and sticking it out during a financial turnaround encompassing half of that time they could hardly say no.

Stuff books and shoes into a backpack to take home night after night for 120 nights, a decade and a half’s accumulation. Keep busy with your one silly project and your beloved (to varying degrees) staff of seven.

Smirk when one of the Operations VPs marvels at your behavior, remarking: “If I were you, I’d be running down the halls stabbing people,” to your boss, the good one, the one who hired you (the one who kept trying over the years to get you to promise not to leave before her retirement, the one who did indeed increase your salary when you get two other offers), who replies: “That’s why you won’t get six months of notice.”

Her response to your fate? “It would be unprofessional of me to defy her. I don’t know why she wants to get rid of you. Maybe to hurt me, so I will retire sooner. Maybe you don’t wear enough suits.” How many suits were enough? Were print jackets worn with black dress pants really not suit-equivalent, sufficiently suitably, suit-y?

Consider this: Your peer similarly targeted for dismissal (Xed off the org chart, announcements made, left out of meetings) is protected by her immediate supervisor and, through a series of bureaucratic maneuvers, is still here years later. Which of you is better off? (You know you Should Believe, without hesitation, that you are.)

Shamelessly ask your closer colleagues for a yoga package from the spa around the corner from my house and get 15 expensive classes. You’ll continue to be paid for six months and fantasies of double-dipping income streams compete with those of bankruptcy and ruin. 

Walk out carrying the remains of your good-bye party that you accidentally-on-purpose may have over-ordered: pierogis, quesadillas, egg rolls, bread, crackers and a ton of cheese; brownies and lemon squares, and a box of cosmo cocktail tea that the little IT guy gave you, saying you seemed like that kind of gal, plus the journal with your staff’s words of appreciation, encouragement, and hopes for the future.

Try to imagine an alternate universe where you exist un-banished, wending like water, adjusting to every bend, segueing elegantly or assertively or dramatically; self-possessed, from one set of circumstances to the next. After all, you have indeed left a situation or two, a person or two; you have that capacity within you.

But that permanently un-banished person is not you. You don’t know her at all. You are someone else entirely. You don’t even speak the same language.

Julie Benesh has been published in Tin House Magazine, Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Gulf Stream, Berkeley Fiction Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and other places. Her work has earned an Illinois Arts Council Grant and a Pushcart nomination. Julie has an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, lives in Chicago with two cats and a lot of books, and works a day job as a professor and at a school of psychology.

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