Tag: thoughts

Prompt 23

How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?

When a toy is wound up, it has to be released to get it moved, or it will be broken without performing its feat of vitality. Likewise, when stress is raised to the highest on a mercury thermometer, my body shudders in a quiver, and my hand turns to a white slate, inhibiting my speech faculty, which results in murderous migraines. It’s a genuinely psychosomatic experience, which makes me dumbfounded and speechless by a poisoned arrow to the heart.

Such is my present status of mind. The stress from working under a manager who lacks experience in leadership, patience, understanding, and knowledge is so high that going to work every morning feels like a daily ritual of torment. She belittles my ability by magnifying the mistakes I make. She constantly intimidates me in such a toxic environment that I see no point in demonstrating my capabilities to the extent possible. However, this ordeal of mental torture can’t go on any longer because it affects my physical and mental health. I deserve respect and recognition. So, I have decided to bring this issue to my supervising attorney, as encouraged by my colleagues at work, who have also witnessed the mistreatment by my manager. I will tell him on Monday that we are incompatible with working because of personality issues, which prevent me from performing my work to the extent possible. Even if my voicing out will bring about a counteractive result, I must tell it to him in defense of my abused spirit.

Shakespeare said, “We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body.” That is what I am experiencing, and because of it, I have lost my motivation to do things I used to love doing, such as writing and reading. Even if I lose a job, I want to let my crying soul be heard and protect myself from her ongoing raving rants like a foaming rabid dog.

Prompt 22

What does freedom mean to you?

People think of freedom as a philosophical concept in belief when it is the fundamental right to exercise humanness, the state of being human. Freedom is not a prerogative of specific class or status or group, but a sovereign privilege of every human being to be who they are and to express themselves under the aegis of regard for individualities that can be at their most creative and effective when well-guarded by enlightened society with humanism.

Freedom to speak against injustice, freedom to keep one’s character, or freedom to think differently defines freedom in a civilized society characterized by low unemployment and high long-term employment rates. Unlike Europeans, Americans are unashamedly puritanical about the rights of at-will workers, meaning they are always expendable at the whims and caprice of tyrannical employers. Here in the States, an employer can let an employee go any time out of the blue. A yearly leave of absence with pay averages ten days, which can’t be used at once but sporadically. Would it be a bit of a stretch to see a feudalistic or ancient slavery system in today’s American employee-employer, which includes all those foreign-born doing business in the States, relationship?

Jean Jacque Rousseau lamented that we were born free but are in chains everywhere. Activists clamorously campaign for Freedom” to showcase their political causes in the media, but they may also have been perpetrators of someone’s freedom. Freedom is not a cause celebre but a fundamental right to practice a will to live. Abraham Lincoln called the “Jewel of Freedom in the Family of Liberty.” Ditto. Freedom is accessible only in a civilized society.