Employee leaves job of 5 years with no fanfare, regrets spending years in a toxic environment: 'I left like a ghost'

The way you leave a job can reveal a lot about your workplace.

When you're leaving a job, there should be some amount of fanfare to it, especially if you've worked there for a long time. You've given so many of your precious hours to that place, and odds are you're never returning again. Your company should show you some level of respect and roll out the red carpet just a little. Even if that just means a cake and a card. That would be enough. But the employee in this story found out the hard way that they weren't as appreciated as they thought. After years of putting in work and not getting respected for it, they finally had enough and moved on to a new position. But upon leaving, they didn't feel as much relief as they thought they would. They wondered if they were in the right field to begin with. 

When you work somewhere, the bare minimum you want is respect. You want to feel like you're being listened to and like your ideas are being honored. You don't want to feel belittled, disrespected, and generally uncared for. But some environments just have a way of being toxic, and it doesn't take a lot to bring that out of them. Hopefully, if you have a horror story, you don't have a horror story for long, and you manage to get yourself out of there. But it can take a lot of effort to leave a job, and you might not have the energy to fight against your surroundings.