That Shelter Dog Energy
Somebody once told me I reacted to my new job like a shelter dog.
At the time, I thought it was a hilariously dark way of explaining exactly what was going on. I laughed, and then promptly made no changes to myself, my life, or my thinking.
At the time I had just started a new job, having left one where the environment was… off. Expectations didn’t line up with reality. Metrics were skewed by work that wasn’t being tracked properly.
Eventually I left, and landed somewhere that was, by comparison, mind numbingly normal. Reasonable expectations. Time to ramp up. No one hovering over my shoulder waiting for me to fail. People who were friendly, managers who were mentors, who took the time to train, to check in, to make sure I was comfortable and help where they could.
And I couldn’t relax.
I kept waiting for the moment where everything would snap back to reality. The sudden shift in expectations. The conversation about performance. The realization that I had somehow missed something obvious and was about to pay for it.
It never came.
From the outside, I was doing fine, probably better than fine. But internally, I was still operating like I was in that old environment. Every task felt urgent, every mistake felt bigger than it was, and I was constantly trying to stay ahead of something that wasn’t actually there.
At the four-month mark, my supervisor sat down with me, informally, just to check in like he normally did, and asked how I thought I was doing. As I braced for the incoming shoe, I told him I thought I could be doing better, that I knew there was a lot left to learn, that I was doing my best to keep up, and I appreciated the chance they took on me, and if they let me stay I’d get where I needed to be.
He looked at me in shock.
After a moment, he said calmly that they didn’t expect me to even be out of training for a few more months, that I was operating at the level of someone who’d been there for at least a year, and that I was doing great.
That’s where the “shelter dog” comment came in.
If you’ve ever seen a dog pulled out of a bad situation and brought into a safe home, there’s often a period where it just doesn’t trust it. It flinches at normal movement, expects punishment where there isn’t any, overreacts to small things because, at some point, those reactions made sense.
I’ve been thinking about that again recently, because I can see the same pattern starting to show up in my life again. Once again, I’m in a good place. The people I work with are solid, the expectations are clear, and by any reasonable measure, things are fine. Hell, I was awarded “Employee of the Month” after being there a grand total of two whole months. Any outside observer would conclude that I’m thriving.
And yet there’s still that voice in the back of my head, the one that says they hate me, that I’m not doing enough, that I need to get on this task now, or build that process, or finish an entire training program, or rein in that other co-worker, or- or- or- ad nauseum.
Just an unending, baseless attack on the self. Because if I don’t shape up, they’ll realize I’m not actually living up to expectations, that I’m falling behind.
That kind of conditioning doesn’t stay neatly contained to one part of your life. When you move out of a toxic environment, whether that’s a job, a home, or a relationship, the learned behaviors, the survival skills, don’t reset. They follow you around like some kind of insidious auditor, quietly flipping through every moment of your life and marking it “insufficient” in red ink while muttering that everyone hates you and are waiting for you to slip up, because you will, you always do.
The worst part is, you might not know to take that step back and examine what’s going on, what you’re doing to yourself. That this pressure has no source, this constant sense that something is wrong, even when it isn’t, has no real basis in reality, that you’re harming yourself in the long run. Robbing yourself of enjoying accomplishments, of basking in the downtime you’ve earned, or just enjoying a silent, sunny, Sunday afternoon.
From the outside, it can look like a high performance drive, a desire to be good at your job, to perform at 100% because it’s what you expect of yourself. That you’re a real baller, shot caller, 20” blades on the Impala.
And sometimes it is. Sometimes a drive is just a drive, it’s not that deep.
But sometimes it isn’t.
Recognizing it for what it is doesn’t magically fix anything, it’s not a silver bullet, and those don’t work on tulpas anyway. But at least it’s a break point, a chance to step back and ask if things are actually on fire or if we’re just reacting to the echoes of a smoke alarm left behind several buildings ago.
And, maybe, that’s the first step.
“Enough is enough. I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane.”
-Neville Flynn, Snakes on a Plane
