Survived a Workplace That Slowly Destroyed Me

My name is Ozz

The closest version of my real name I’m willing to use here. Everything else in this story is true — the shame, the humiliation, the collapse, the claws I had to grow just to survive. From 2017 to 2023, I worked at one of the largest auto factories in the Midwest — the kind where the fluorescent lights feel like interrogation lamps and the noise never lets your nervous system rest. I started out quiet. I didn’t realize that in a place like that, quiet makes you a target. In 2019, a handful of my coworkers — not all, but enough — decided I wasn’t a person, just a piece of entertainment. A pressure release valve. A body to point jokes at. Someone they could poke at until they saw something break. It started small, the kind of harassment nobody stands up for because it “doesn’t look that serious” from the outside. But inside? It was acid. Comments turned into taunts. Taunts turned into humiliation. Before I knew it, walking into work felt like walking into an arena where I didn’t know if I’d come out with my dignity intact.

They came out with a bright idea to call me crazy and ran with it. Only they didn't know anything about me at the time. So they dug deep, digitally breached my accounts, socially hacked their ways into my life until they found out everything about me.

That's when the harassment started, the verbal harassment, the assault, the other awful things only monsters do.

They chipped away at me in ways that don’t leave bruises, but leave holes. Small holes at first — the kind you can ignore if you keep busy enough. But over time, the holes spread. They became cracks. The cracks became fractures. And eventually, the fractures became a collapse. By late 2020, I didn’t feel human anymore. By 2021, I felt like a shell they had hollowed out with their words and their cruelty. I ended up hospitalized. Not because I was weak, but because I was alone in a place where you’re not allowed to show pain. The factory eats the sensitive alive. It didn’t matter that I was doing my job. It didn’t matter that I stayed quiet. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t causing problems. When a group decides you’re the one they want to break, they break you slowly — one humiliation at a time until you’re not sure what’s real anymore. Management looked the other way. HR shrugged. The system turned its back. I became “the problem” because I reacted to the abuse instead of absorbing it quietly. In 2023, they discarded me. Covered it up with bureaucratic words like “internal error.” A clean way to throw out something they’d already cracked. But here’s the part they didn’t expect: I built myself back from the ground up. I got evaluated. Professionals looked at me from every angle — psychiatrists, psychologists, standardized testing. They expected to find something broken. Instead, they found someone sane. Stable. Healthy. Mentally intact in spite of everything that was done to him. Every rumor they built against me collapsed in a single moment: I was cleared. I was healthy. I was stronger than the version of me they tried to create. I locked down my privacy. Closed every door they once reached through. Deleted every account tied to that chapter of my life. Removed every crack they used to get into my world. And then? I survived. Fully. Completely. Quietly. I don’t need revenge. I don’t need justice. I don’t need apologies. But if any of you ever stumble across this — and you recognize yourselves in the way I describe these years — I hope you feel even one second of the shame you weaponized against me. I hope the smallest part of your mind whispers the truth you tried to bury. I hope the guilt sticks to your ribs the way your cruelty stuck to me for years. You didn’t break me. You didn’t define me. You didn’t get the ending you wanted. I walked through the darkness you created — and somehow came out rebuilt, reborn, and unrecognizable to the version of me you tried to erase. That’s the part of the story you never predicted. I’m still here