On the Art of Dehumanization

I was "laid off" at my job on Friday. I have since been in varying states of depression, rage, and shock.

I am a survivor. The life I've led has beaten it into me, over and over. If I were not a survivor, I would have been washed away ages ago. There's an instinct in me to fight back, to not take "no" for an answer, and to stand up for myself. This instinct is heightened, strengthened, by the need to survive. If you don't fight back, you will fail, and sometimes failure means something as terrible and as real as death. And so when I say I am a survivor, I want you to understand that every fiber of my being screams at me to fight back when someone treats me like I am less than human. For ~36 hours now I have been feeling this, deep inside me, in every crevice of my heart and soul, to stand up, to lash out at the people who did this to me, to reassert to them and to everyone that I am a person, and that I deserve the right to live and breathe and function the same as everyone else on this earth.

In a company of 11 employees, they laid off 6 of us. They herded us into a room like cattle, told us we were no longer employed, and that we had to leave that day and never return. None of us knew anything about it. We were rejected even the privacy of our own grief, of our own suffering, forced to share it with 5 other human beings. In the span of a few minutes, layers upon layer of basic human decency was stripped away. We were reduced to objects, we were beaten with words, and we were defeated with a packet of papers and sent off to start over with nothing.

Out of all of this, there is one simple thought that repeats itself, over and over, in my head: there should be something I can do. I don't contest that I was laid off; sometimes stuff happens, and honestly I think the company is closing anyway. I am angry that I and my fellow coworkers have been forced into a position where we are less than human, and there is nothing we can do about it.

I have felt this way before, at the hands of real-world tyrants, liars, thieves, and criminals. And I have heard people say, even in the most recent experience, that this is to be expected. This is not true. The art of dehumanization is reserved for the realm of murderers, thieves, liars, criminals, and deceivers. When you strip someone of their basic rights as a person, you are destroying your own claim to humanity and becoming something monstrous, something evil, something that, in a just world, would be put out of its misery with an iron fist. We are human beings, and we always have a choice. If I want to cry in public or in private, I can. If I want to handle a shitty situation with grace, I can. If I want to be juvenile about it, that's my right. In the light of evidence to the contrary, I am going to stand up and assert that nobody, ever, can make me into something less than human without my express consent. This will not happen again; it is simply not an option, because I refuse to live in a world that allows people to be dehumanized.

And so I am going to walk away from this, and move on. This is the last time I will feel like this.

Are you with me???

PS: To whom it may concern: stop being a self-centered bitch. If you don't have anything nice to say, shut the hell up, or so help me, I'm going to return bitchiness for bitchiness, and I promise you I'll win that battle ><