Because your boss is a bully

Your boss never misses an opportunity to make you feel bad about yourself.

He dismisses everything you say as unintelligent, uninformed or irrelevant.

He derides everything you do as crappy, clumsy or crass.

He pounces on your every perceived misstep, gleefully reporting any mistake he imagines you to have made to anyone who’ll listen.

He’s careful never to be unambigiously brutal. He’s a master of the innuendo he can claim you took the wrong way, the cutting comment he can pass off as a joke, the muttering under the breath that everyone laughs at but no one can be sure they heard right, the facial expression whose meaning everyone knows but no one can report.

You suffer his contempt hour after hour, day after day.

It grinds you down.

You know that you shouldn’t feel bad about yourself, but you do.