Gaslighter

(The Chicks)

Last week, I came face-to-face (literally) with probably the worst six months of my life.

When I was 23, I worked for a person who was, I later came to realize, an abusive boss. I was out to dinner the other night, happily eating seafood with two friends when, walking up the wooden deck stairs behind them, I saw that boss.

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I got home from dinner that night and did two things: searched her name in my inbox and Googled “behaviors of an abusive boss”.

These were both ways of checking myself. Was I remembering this correctly? Do my memories line up with the language I’ve been using?

Yes, and yes. In fact, the emails were worse than I’d remembered. (The very last one cracked me up though. The subject line is “NDA” and it says “A reminder, for your records”, attaching the NDA I’d signed. Lol.)

Of Forbes’ “10 signs you work for an abusive boss”, she had consistently done eight.