The bags you're still carrying to work 🤯

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

I have always had a physical reaction to toxic workplaces. My shoulders hunched up near my ears. My jaw is in a perpetual clench. At one job, someone put up a sticky note that said "UNCLENCH YOUR JAW" in large letters. At least I wasn't the only one.

Over time, those reactions became my new normal. When I'd get laid off — and it happened nine times — it would take weeks to get my body's normal posture back. Sometimes I'd start a new job while my body was still trying to unravel the trauma from the last one.

I've been a bag lady, dragging my workplace trauma from job to job like overstuffed luggage. Each toxic experience added another bag — one filled with hypervigilance, another with people-pleasing behaviors, yet another packed with the exhausting need to document everything because trust had been weaponized against me. When the jobs got more senior, the bags were still there but they just got fancier designer labels.

At some point I started taking inventory of what I was carrying. Not the dramatic stuff — the everyday habits that feel normal because you've been hauling them around so long.

Here are some of the bags I recognized:

The "Never Speak First" Bag. I used to wait in meetings to see which way the wind was blowing before offering opinions. This kept me safe in political environments but made me invisible in collaborative ones. Teaching forced me to speak first constantly — presenting concepts, asking questions, guiding discussions. That practice helped me repack this bag with confidence rather than fear.

The "Triple-Check Everything" Bag. Hypervigilance made me obsessively review my work, emails, even casual Slack messages, looking for ammunition someone could use against me. The vigilance had value — I definitely caught mistakes. But the anxiety behind it was exhausting. I kept the thoroughness and discarded the fear.

The "Assume Good Intent" Bag. This one still feels uncomfortable sometimes. In healthy workplaces, most confusion is actually just confusion, not manipulation. Most mistakes are actually just mistakes, not sabotage. This bag is light, but I have to consciously choose to carry it because my instinct is still to reach for the old bags.

The "Document Everything" Bag. Documenting has saved my butt quite a few times, especially when I was dealing with a client who liked to send me tasks and apologies for her behavior by text message and who also called us contractors in meetings by the name of our company, not by our actual names. You’ll have to read the book for that story 🙂

Recovery isn't about becoming the person you were before toxic workplaces affected you. That person is gone, and that's okay. But you can become someone who's learned hard lessons without being broken by them. Someone who can spot dysfunction early, and someone who values themselves enough to demand better.

I still catch myself reaching for old bags sometimes. A vague email from a manager, and suddenly I'm drafting a defensive response in my head before I even check whether one is needed. But now I notice. I can pause and ask: is this response for what's actually happening right now, or am I responding to a past ghost?

Which bag are you still carrying? I wrote about all of them in my book Bad Fit, but right now I just want to hear yours. Hit reply.

— Mary

---

This newsletter is drawn from Bad Fit, my memoir-in-progress about being a creative professional in environments that weren't built for creative professionals.

If someone forwarded this to you: check out my archive and subscribe here.

---