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Leave If You Don’t Like It

Juliane Bergmann
7 min readNov 19, 2022

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Book Project Week Four Update

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

What I learned this week: Repressing anger is keeping me from valuing myself

It’s always pissed me off when people say, ‘leave if you don’t like it,’ whether it’s a relationship, or a job, or a situation. As if that’s so fucking easy. Who are all these people who can so quickly cut their losses and move on? Not me.

It’s painful to hear others devalue me, when it happens. It throws me off. It’s hard to come back to center and recreate a realistic view of myself.

Leave if you don’t like it is a sentence without empathy and humanity. It’s always more complicated than that. Sometimes there is no new job waiting, no easy way to get out of the relationship, no safety net to catch you.

This year, I’ve felt undervalued in a work context. The idea that when this happens in a work situation, it’s not personal, it’s just business, is bullshit. We’re all people. We deal with each other as humans, not as anonymous parts of a business.

I was told that if I didn’t like it, I could leave. I didn’t hear it as well-meaning advice, but spite. However, the statement itself was true, although it wasn’t easy to act on, practically or emotionally.

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Juliane Bergmann
Juliane Bergmann

Written by Juliane Bergmann

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