The light bulb goes off

I've been gone from my previous job for over a year -- and yet like a bitter divorce, I'm still not over the break-up, the disolution of my relationship with that place or the people I once thought of has my friends, as people I could trust. I could never put my finger on what happened -- suddenly things were just bad. And then someone sent me a story, one of those things that get passed through e-mail umpteen times. It was about knowing when you needed to find a new job. And low and behold, there in the middle of the list was this little gem, which sounded strangely familiar:

"It happens when the boss takes on a new favorite employee. Eventually that person gets layered in above you on the corporate ladder, intercepting your access to the boss, taking over plum projects and moving you out of the decision-making loop. Hollander describes this as 'death by a thousand cuts.' The change is subtle at first, but your loss of status compounds over time."

The hardest part -- and probably what took me so long to realize what was happening -- was that the new "favorite" was my closest friend at work. So unbeknownst to me, if I vented about our boss, or said something to her in confidence, she was was feeding that information to him.

But reading this description -- and realizing that I must not be the only one this has happened to -- gave me permission to move on. Am I still resentful? Sure. Am I still hurt? Absolutely? But I don't think about it as much anymore. I learned a painful, corporate lesson (even if it was in a not-for-profit organization), but still came out okay.