Upon checking my phone this afternoon, I saw that a friend from my old company had texted me to say that he’d just put in his two weeks’ notice. This friend and I originally met while working in the same department, for the same bosses that had once driven us both to seek employment elsewhere. When we worked for the same company, we’d IM one another throughout the day with “CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE THIS THING THAT HAPPENED” messages, and since I’ve moved, we occasionally text about people he sees or shit that happens at work. So when I read this afternoon’s text about how he felt “like a million bucks,” I completely understood.

Let me say this: my new company isn’t perfect. There’s a shit ton of paper waste and about six different systems to perform a dozen different processes to get the same result. Also, I have two especially odd new coworkers – one nicknamed The Cryptkeeper because she looks like it and keeps clown figurines and true crime novels at her desk, and another nicknamed Uncle Fester because he reminds me of him only with slightly more hair – and a boss who for some reason can’t stand to hear the sound of a phone vibrating in the next room.

BUT at this job, no one treats me like a child. No one talks down to or through me, and I haven’t had that hair trigger reaction I developed to tell when everyone is plotting to get me fired. Nothing like what happened at the old job, which my friend described today via text: “That was the biggest thing depressing me. Some illiterate 50-year-old is treating me like a kindergartener and I want to tell her to fuck off but have to find creative ways of doing it.”

When I look back on the time I spent with my old company, honestly, I can’t believe I lasted that long. Although there are some decent managers and plenty of talented people there, overall, the checks and balances system is missing, and there are far too many idiotic, sycophantic lunatics in charge and far too many pandering, incompetent assholes around to flatter them. Trying to cope with that and being ignored, insulted, or psychologically manipulated on a daily basis is the most degrading dumbshittery I’ve ever experienced, and that includes making minimum wage in food service when I was in high school.

So no, my new job isn’t perfect, but it’s amazing that simply being treated like a goddamn grownup for a change is enough to make me feel like I’m not completely worthless to my employer. It’s amazing that I come home without feeling as though I’ve been beaten with lead pipes all day. It’s amazing that as a 30-year-old woman, I no longer have to seriously consider the likelihood that I will suffer a stress-related stroke any day now.

It also helps that on a clear day, I can see the Olympics and the Cascades on my drive home, and that once sunrise happens before 6:30am, I’ll be able to see Mt. Rainier on my morning commute. Ask me how I’m feeling when the sun is out and traffic is light, and I’m apt to reply “Majestic as FUCK.”