Introduction to Incivil Service
Picture this:
You are a civil servant working in a large suburban public agency’s Human Resources department. You can barely contain your excitement when you start—eager to learn, to help. Alas, you are but an awkward bean, and you push through your social anxiety, misread all the social cues and interest, and engage directly with leadership (taboo!) and give opportunity after opportunity to address unseen bias in the workplace, to address systemic racism for real, to address toxic culture, all while working your day job—an off shoot of what you’ve been doing for twenty-five years give or take, and you are barely on the totem pole.
“Hi Gaslighting, It’s me, Civil Service.“
You start noticing patterns. In every situation, in every instance of asking probing questions, attempting to understand or shed light on questionable decisions, you would observe two realities: In private, you are supported and encouraged to dig in, to “poke the bear”. In public, you are assured that what you are experiencing is in your head and if you are such an expert, why don’t you have a to-do list or something actually useful. You have crossed paths with workplace madness syndrome, also known as gaslighting.
You have been sidelined, gaslit (gas-lighted?) and marginalized month after month for close to three years. You tried filing a complaint, only to learn that much of what you brought up to the investigating attorney was ignored by leadership, as it was not part of the very specific line of questioning. You continued to raise red flags and concerns, all the while begging for opportunities for advancement and pay increases. It got so bad, you were willing to transfer anywhere else just to escape, but you had become radioactive.
Neurodivergent Revert Tries Bravery
You begin mentally arming yourself with mantras for grounding and regularly remind yourself about your commitment to education and the years of hard work and experience earned outside of the public sector—maybe if you pushed enough, tried harder, applied for leadership roles (recently qualifying for Deputy Director, alas, I only placed 5th), perhaps someone would listen. After all, you are actually “the expert” of “the thing”: you work there and you happen to have been privileged to pursue a terminal degree in organization and leadership through the lens of Social Justice. You understand why it is the way it is because you’ve made a lifetime commitment to study the thing, to analyze it, and most of all, to make it accessible, whether or not anyone listens. It becomes exhausting, the code-switching, the shrinking. You take to documenting everything and it gets worse the closer you look. Like many who come to civil service because they believe in representative democracy, you are naive enough to think they actually care. “They” meaning the people who run the things, who have the meetings, who make the decisions—you know, the white people, the bourgeoisie. This becomes relevant very soon too...stay tuned for a lesson on the origins of “meritocracy”, or “how things are really done and why we repeat these patterns”—I’ll give you a hint…it’s white supremacy!
But in civil service, if you can’t tick it off a list, outsource it to someone who will give you a check list, complete it before you retire—or before you get the promotion you arranged—you leave it for the people who take over for you*. True story. And now you have returned to highschool, complete with the dumb blonde jokes—oh and retaliation via isolation, removal from projects, changes in assignments and schedules, all in the name of “exempt” status and entitlement. All this after going on emergency family care leave and acknowledging my relationship with Islam. It’s “Civil Service” meets “Burn Book”, but in this case, the stakes are much higher: it is how I support a family of four solo—and I can tell you, it’s hard to get by financially, let alone with any self-respect in what should be a noble career choice. And it’s not just me. I know you are out there.
This is Incivil Service.
