With the warmth I had carried from school still fresh in my heart, I stepped straight into the rushing current of working life, hoping that sheer sincerity would help me carve out a place where I could belong. The excitement I felt about my first job was soon crushed by reality. My boss's grand plans always evaporated before they could be realized, and the promised career path never materialized. Whispered conversations lurked behind my desk, and the proposals I submitted would quietly have their authorship changed. Whenever something went wrong, my supervisor would casually shift the blame onto me, leaving me alone in the conference room to face the criticism. The hurt I replayed in my mind late at night, the tears I forced back during overtime, finally became too much to bear one evening after work. My fingers gripped my resignation letter until they turned white. As I turned away, tears fell onto the steps of the office building, carrying all the resentment I had never voiced as I said goodbye.
I thought a new job might bring stability, but instead I ran into even harsher treatment. The office lights stayed on until well past midnight. I kept typing until my fingertips went numb, afraid to stop. When my mother fell ill and I asked for time off to take her to the doctor, all I got was a cold reply: "Don't talk about leave until the project is finished." The next day, I quietly left, carrying all my exhaustion with me.
In the years that followed, I moved from one workplace to another. I saw plenty of fake flattery and deliberate exclusion, endured hunger and cold after working until the early hours, and stayed silent when others took credit for my work. Little by little, the edges I had once possessed were worn away, and I swallowed unspoken grievances until it became a habit. The sighs buried in piles of files and the lonely lamp in my late-night rental room gradually gathered into a fog that would not lift from my heart. I once thought I could weather every storm, but I never imagined that the chill accumulated over years of ups and downs at work would eventually crush the heart that had once been full of hope, leaving me to die in misery and sigh wistfully over the "ideal workplace" I had never found.
