Looking from the outside now back into Cisco many things amaze me. It's strange how comfortable and at the very same time how stressful that place was; as if high stress was a natural state. It's strange how it felt like home and how I treated it like home, and also how I clung to it when I should have left. I should have left it many years before the shanking.
The reason I never left sooner was because it was a prison. It was a prison for my mind. By it's very nature a prison for your mind is invisible, you don't know that your thinking is limited by your environment because you're not able to experience life outside of that environment. But life inside Cisco was very limiting. It was a "failure is not an option" view that enshrines perfection, turns minor issues into major worries, and distracts from true opportunities. And it was insidious - that view of life had crept into my view of the world and personal life. The shanking came on my 11th year at Cisco after a great deal of career success.
I say shanking because it fits that urban dictionary word perfectly: out of the blue I was being stabbed with makeshift instruments by those around me who I thought I could trust . One day it was "good job" and literally the very next it was "you're going to be let go". The explanations were there but like I said they were "makeshift", as in so and so said this about you. Sometimes providence comes from the most unusual circumstances, because when you are shanked at the Cisco prison you don't die there, they just show you the door and you leave for good. I didn't realize that Cisco was my mind prison until a couple months after being on "the outside" when I noticed the quantity and quality of my thinking improving.
Now much more time has passed and I can see clearly that I had kept myself in that prison. While the actual act of being shanked at Cisco is never something that can be remembered fondly, I am very grateful that I escaped that prison... even if I needed help to do it.