Ode to Chuck

You are a piece of shit

If I had to decide what hurt the most, it wasn’t losing the job.
It was that you weren’t honest with me.

Whatever your reasons were for deciding to kick me to the curb after seven years of what I considered outstanding support, you didn’t tell me directly. Apparently you felt comfortable telling your boss — but not me.

Trish said you’d been complaining to Mitch about me for a year.
A full year where you never once had the courage to tell me what your issue was.

At the time, you had a pyramid of four thousand people under you — and you couldn’t have one uncomfortable conversation with your assistant? Or was it that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and you needed to make it look like I was so you could give my job to your girlfriend?

Because you actually told me — to my face — that I “didn’t do anything wrong.”
This was after you asked me to teach her everything I knew so she could do my job, not just “fill in” when I was out.

I wondered if I should have seen the writing on the wall. I even asked your Chief of Staff — who was either in the dark or sworn to secrecy. I don’t know why she was so loyal to you, but watching what you did to me should have woken her the fuck up.

In the same conversation where you told me I was no longer going to be your EA, you said you wanted Ditz and me to be “close.” As if training my replacement in secret for six months and then handing everything over meant we’d now be skipping down the hall together in matching Team A-hole shirts.

When this happened, I went to Trish — my friend and mentor of fifteen years at that fucked-up company — and she told me to support the other people I had and keep my head down. She also claimed she had no clue what happened. This is the bitch who sent me the sympathy card.

What I didn’t know then was that she knew from the beginning and chose not to tell me.
Another betrayal. Another lesson in loyalty.

When I expressed my disgust at you suddenly setting up weekly meetings with your new EA — meetings you had refused to have with me — my access was taken away immediately. One word, and this is what happens. If I wasn’t willing to shut my mouth and take it, I was no longer allowed access at all.

So I was supposed to pretend I was fine.
Pretend I hadn’t just been demoted, humiliated, essentially fired without being formally let go.

Oh right — because you said, “I would never fire you.”
That was a fucking lie.

As soon as the EA layoffs happened, you couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. You chose Eva as Ditz’s backup even though you had told me multiple times she was a terrible EA. There were four EAs in that office. I was the only one who didn’t get a job. The three who stayed had less tenure combined than I did. But no, you’d NEVER fire me.

And if you gave me a reference for the New York job, you didn’t give a single shit whether I actually got it. I’m sure the NY manager told you about HR screwing up and forcing them to give the job to an EA supporting a partner at your level in another group — but you didn’t tell me that either. You just said, “Nice guy, he says he knows you.”

Wow.

After seven years of supporting you — of helping you get where you are whether you admit it or not — you made sure everyone landed safely except the one person who had your back the entire time.

So here it is. Finally. Cleanly.

You are a coward.
You have no loyalty.
You lie for your own purposes and don’t care who it affects.
You are a bad leader.
You are manipulative and devious.
You used my loyalty against me.
You made me doubt my competence — and I hate you for that.
You betrayed me.
You chose everyone over me after seven years of my support.

You don’t get to define my competence.
You don’t get to rewrite my contribution.
You don’t get to decide what seven years of loyalty meant.

You took a job from me.
You did not take my integrity.

And I am done carrying the cost of your cowardice.

I can want justice without organizing my life around it.

I am a person who needs to understand. My brain doesn’t let go without coherence. That’s why, decades later, I still think about the accident — my mother, my baby brother, the aftermath that never made sense.

I’m actually fine with growth. I believe experiences shape us, and I’m grateful to be where I am now.

But when crucial information is missing — when the story has no logic, no truth, no ending — my mind keeps circling. Not out of obsession, but out of unfinished meaning.

Living in the waiting is what hurts.

So this is my new approach:

Curiosity without obsession.
Openness without vigilance.
Truth without tethering.

And you also can go fuck yourself.