The Tortured Employees Department

Lesson 3: I Knew You Were Trouble (Corporate Edition)

Taylor Swift once sang, “It isn’t right to be scared every day of a love affair.”

She meant romance, obviously. But frankly, the lyric applies just as neatly to that job that has you staring at your laptop like it's a text from your ex. The one who still thinks they deserve closure.

Here's what Tay Tay can teach us about our relationship with work and why your nervous system is usually the first to realise, I knew you were trouble. 

#1 Fear and Anxiety are not a KPI

If your job gives you a daily knot in the stomach, that's your body filing a complaint. 

A healthy role can stretch you, challenge you and occasionally make you mutter darkly into your coffee.

But if existential Sunday night dread is now your resting state, something is wrong.

Work is not meant to feel like hostage negotiations before 9am or slowly dismantle your nervous system in the name of professional development. 

If your job is making anxiety feel like part of the dress code, it may be time to stop calling it normal and start calling it what it is. 

#2 Toxic Jobs Aren’t Character Building

There is a strange badge of honour culture around enduring awful workplaces, as if staying proves grit. 

Apparently, whoever can absorb the most unreasonable workloads, passive aggressive Teams messages and low grade psychological warfare while still staggering into Monday upright with a keep cup and a smile that says Thriving!, is crowned the resilience champion. 

Yeah, nah. 

That's not resilience.  

That's just someone confusing damage for stamina. 

Staying in a toxic job because you think leaving means failure, is the workplace equivalent of staying with a terrible boyfriend/girlfriend and deciding the solution is... self improvement.  

Otherwise known as becoming A Completely Different Person™.

Suddenly, you're less outspoken. Less visible. Less difficult.  

You second guess perfectly reasonable reactions.  

You apologise for essentially existing.  

And you convince yourself that if you were just calmer, more accommodating, thicker skinned, less "a lot", the toxicity would somehow vanish as if by magic. 

It won't. 

Because the problem was never that you failed to become the perfect employee. The problem is that toxic systems do not become healthy just because one person gets better at enduring them. Some workplaces are just bad relationships but with payslips. 

In both romance and work, leaving something that is quietly dismantling your sanity is not failure. Sometimes it is simply skipping to the next track before this one ruins the whole album. 

#3 If It Feels Off, It Probably Is

The tricky thing about instincts is that they rarely show up with hard evidence. 

They show up as discomfort without a neat explanation. A strange heaviness before meetings. A sense that something is off, even when nothing has happened that would hold up in HR. And because there is no smoking gun, we override ourselves. We tell ourselves we are imagining it.  That we need more proof. 

That unless someone throws a stapler in a meeting or sends an email in full caps lock, it probably doesn't count as a real problem. 

But instincts are not designed to build a legal case. 

They're there to keep you safe, by noticing patterns before your rational brain has finished making excuses for them. 

So when something feels off, pay attention. Trust that your internal warning system is already three steps ahead, while the rest of you is still trying to explain away what it already knows. 

Taylor did not build an empire by second guessing her instincts and neither should you. 

Work should challenge you, not feel like psychological warfare with a salary attached. 

When something feels off, trust your instincts- they’re picking up signals long before your rational brain can make excuses for them. 

Because resilience is not endlessly tolerating dysfunction in the name of professionalism. No decent job should have a KPI of self-abandonment.