WE ARE ARYA STARK; WE ARE LEGION
I have always maintained that I could never be just another name, another face, in any company that I would ever work for. To be just another person, to blend in wherever, the woman without a name, without a face, like Arya Stark in Game of Thrones.
I often wonder where Game of Thrones was going with the Arya plot. Noble born girl hell bent on revenge for the death of her parents, she became an accomplished killer, but had also gotten caught up in this sort of cult in which she is asked to become “no one” — to leave her old identity (her original identity) behind and instead have the capability of wearing any number of masks and appearing like any number of different people, a lethal assassin. Repeatedly she is asked what her name is, and repeatedly she must answer “a girl has no name” as part of her further depersonalisation.
Word of interest: Depersonalisation.
I don’t know what “going to work” or “having a job” means in other parts of the world, I don’t know what is expected of the people. In my parts, going to work used to mean and must still mean for most: donning a number of masks, an instant depersonalisation. Most companies have been built in such a way that you cannot possibly have an opinion of your own. You cannot come to work having your own unique genius. You have to blend, become what “they” want you to be. They generally say to you without putting it in these exact words: Dammit, read through the SOPs and take a hint. That’s what we are paying you for.
But really, how much is worth an abandonment of true self on the job? How do people even go to work and not apply their unique mixes to solving everyday problems? How can a company develop a culture and omit individuality? How many companies even have cultures, or have and genuinely go by it?
I remember working for a hospitality company in the past where they claimed to be “in love” with my way of doing things, my out-of-the-box type approach to problem solving. They ooohed and aaahed me into a nice position with solid benefits but it wasn’t long before their fangs started to show. Turned out that in reality, though they preached change, they eventually wanted me to “blend”.
Get Sonia What-Will-Happen’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
No changes please.
We like things the way they were.
Girl, forget all we said during your interview and orientation — breathe our version of air and better be grateful for it.
With their necks so stiff and high up in the air, they couldn’t see what their modus operandi was doing to their staff. Because they had taken away our rights to think and function according to ourselves and for their good, there was a general lackadaisical attitude in the air and nobody cared about self development or company growth. We did not take pride in our jobs. For most people, it was always just as long as the pay kept coming. I woke up one morning and I could not breathe. That was the day I resigned.
[Dramatic pause]
Unfortunately, I will not be the last person to experience that — what with the “military regime” way these companies are run. Sometimes, I wonder if that hasn’t even contributed to the disappointing economy that we now find ourselves struggling with. Corrupt and atrocious leaders aside, surely real profit cannot be made because real potential is not yet tapped into because real potential is kept deep inside, bottled away, because companies do not know how to tap into it or because the powers that be are scared of sparks of greatness that do not originate from them. So we are reduced to Arya Stark-ing our way through our jobs, all of us nameless and faceless, corporate assassins, killing the vision, disrupting the mission — oblivious.
So again, for me, being just another nameless and faceless person in an organisation, does not cut it. I have to be allowed to wear my own unique identity, my own “face’’. I have to be allowed to channel my grey matter, consult the higher powers of my God given mental faculties. I have to FIT IN not BLEND IN, I am a person not colours in a Monet painting. My voice has to be heard. I have to contribute to the inner workings of things, be in the mind of the powers that be, absorb their vision, see it, breathe it, live it, become it. That is the only way I know to do my job, where my satisfaction stems from. Take that away and the magic is gone. Waking up earlier than early everyday, chugging it through the horrendous traffic, gladiating through life as an adulting adult in a mad era, it has to be worth it.
No Arya Stark-ing for me.
No Siree!
