Workplace Bullying Changed the Way I Walk Into Rooms, and I Hate That It Still Has That Much Power

Dear Delyara, It did not only hurt me at the time. It rewrote me. The little humiliations, the exclusions, the tone, the careful public corrections, the feeling of being watched more harshly than others — all of it taught my body something I still haven’t fully unlearned. I enter rooms differently now. More careful. More ready to edit myself. More likely to hear threat in authority, to second-guess my own tone, to check whether I have made myself too visible too soon. That is what bullying at work stole. Not only peace in those months. A certain ease in my own professional body. And people don’t always understand that. They think once the job changes or the person leaves, the problem becomes history. It doesn’t. History keeps walking into present rooms through posture, caution, and how quickly the nervous system moves toward defence. I am angry that something so ugly got to live that deep in me.