whats worse is that the good feeling I had was taken from me. I was using it in my work to get better. I was saying, hey, you set yourself a task of changing and you did, you'll do great at the new job.

I am continuously very grateful for the opportunity to post this here. I will continue the work i am doing to get better because that is the only honourable course of action. I do that work every day. But it would have been nice never to know the truth on this one, is all :)

And I imagine people reading this post and judging me.. surely, because this is something I do sometimes, especially when people are in difficult circumstances. Go ahead, I've surely brought this on myself in part. I am trying not to think negatively of other people, and the liars are surely tired and stressed and trying to avoid difficulty by telling a white lie. People counsel others to tell lies on ask metafilter work questions all the time.

Could it be that E's information is not up to date, i.e. that he didn't know your boss' opinion of you had improved recently?

FWIW I'm not in the camp that believes that lies are useful.

No, it was recent information, unfortunately.

The truth is burning on my tongue, I want to be brutally honest with these people but I can't because I can't burn bridges.

You don't have to let them know that you know, I think it would be perfectly appropriate to ask your current boss about your overall work performance, and if there are things that you could improve on, or skills you might learn. It's all part of you furthering your career, it shows that you clearly have ambition and want to improve skills/attitude/whatever and most of all you want to learn. Who doesn't love that? You can then bring a fresh plate to your new job and while figuring them out, make sure that you are perfect since you now know what tripped you up at the last job.

Whatever the boss says might feel like "well, maaan, why didn't you tell me earlier when I was working here!?" but whatever you do, do not interrupt or get defensive (though it will come so easy). Just write it down. Thank boss for input. Leave the notes alone for a few days until the emotion evaporates.

Later, return to notes, you can now look at them more objectivly and figure out what was really going on. It might not even be you but a chain of misunderstandings.
Is there room for improvement in the the way you communicate?
(here's something I'm terrible at and I found most things at worked got mucked up because people didn't understand me - I've worked very hard at improving how I communicate to co-workers even though I saw nothing wrong with how I said it in the first place. It was dogging me for years - I still keep a keen watch on how I say things at work. Seems when I speak it's a bit too flowery - at work I switch to army tone now: project X finished, input needed. meet at 16:00 hrs? to avoid any misunderstandings. This ticks everyone but the boss off.)
Or is there something else enterily? I don't know what your gig was like, and I don't think you are hard to understand (like me) in any way but the way to turn this into a positive instead of a negative that's just eating away at you is to get straight honest input from your boss. Not E - he probably doesn't know everything and you know how gossip travels at work don't you, he probably got lots of details wrong - maybe even the whole picture.

But what's the truth? I feel like I'm missing a big part of the picture here and everything I just said might be irrelevant since I missed that askme.

Maybe both things are true, but in some way that you are not privy to understanding, and that E. doesn't grasp either. Neither of you has the whole picture. Usually, no one does.

Almost nothing is ever completely True vs. Untrue. In any conversation I have with somebody, as long as I am speaking in a mostly unguarded way, I can say many things that, thinking it over later, are essentially untrue. Because what I emphasize at any given time has to do with what my feelings and point of view are at that very moment, and I'm just sort of talking about my own perception of reality in that limited 30-minute time period.

Talk to me one day, and you might get the impression that my neighbor is very irritating and, in fact, a "bad" neighbor. Untrue. Talk to me another day, and it may sound like she's a nearly perfect neighbor. Untrue. Neither is true. Both are true. Because it's all subjective according to my personal preferences and what I want to interact with at that moment. Some days I just want to be totally left alone, and I get irritated with someone dropping by to discuss this or that. Some days I feel more gregarious, and it's nice. Some days I'm feeling expansive and I'm fairly sympathetic to whatever troubles she is complaining about (she does this a lot), some days I want to scream quit yer whinin', and I'm relatively cold and unresponsive. But what's the truth? Am I sympathetic? Or cold? I'm both. Is she a good or bad neighbor? She's both. She's neither.

So it isn't always easy to identify the objective truth, even in things that seem much more cut and dried than what I have described here. Some people insist on judging truth only by their own perception of events, and some other people cannot seem to gauge their position except in relation to something unambiguously identified as Truth. Both of these points of view have obvious drawbacks, but of the two, the former is more likely to be convinced of his or her own righteousness, while the latter is more likely to constantly feel like they are on shifting sand, as you do right now.

Better by far is take some position in the middle, wherein one tries to accumulate as much information as possible and see all sides as objectively as possible, intellectually, but when setting a personal course chooses to sometimes deal with reality entirely subjectively, in a way that most nearly ensures their own success or progress. Naturally, personal ethics should not get pushed aside in this process, but in order to achieve your own goals, spending a great deal of time validating differing viewpoints and perceptions that block those goals is the very definition of counter-productive. Once you know that almost anything can be both true and false at the same time, you realize that Truth is often just the orientation one chooses to acknowledge.

Objectivity is a gift, but sometimes it needs to be relegated to foot soldier status instead of commanding the troops. Why are you choosing now to believe that the progress comment was false? Or that the idea that they planned to sack you is a more important truth? You were not happy in the job. This almost always goes both ways... it's rare to find people who are miserable in their work who are also found to be the best employees by their bosses. This doesn't even mean that they aren't doing a good job.

I don't think that your present fixation on truth is going to be revelatory. I know that you want to have some firm standard by which to assess yourself, but you aren't going to find that, as such. I think that it's important to examine first why you are so ready to accept what can be construed as negative information, and so doubtful of positive information about yourself. Why is it so easy for you to see everyone as liars, and so difficult for you to believe that when people comment favorably they are telling the truth? If you allow this choice that you are making right now of what to acknowledge as "true" to undermine your confidence in yourself in your new job, you are choosing to allow yourself to fail before you even really begin. Just as if somebody offered you two tickets, one that says "go forward" and one that says "go backwards", and you chose "backwards". You don't really want to go backwards, but it some ways it's easier to choose some arbitrary version of the Truth that says you can't go forward. We all suffer from that, trust me. And we all have to struggle against it.

Maintaining perspective is important. It's not like you've been struck by space madness or are a superhero who can never have sex. Leave behind your behind and go forward.

I'm trying taz for sure. I keep telling myself I am good and capable and if I work hard I'll be fine. It would just be easier if people didn't lie to my face, is all. I am sure you understand how offensive this is.

Are you insisting that it's necessarily a lie that your boss saw marked improvement? You felt improvement, she said she saw improvement. Makes sense to me that there was probably improvement. It remains true that she might have sacked you anyway, for any number of reasons. Or are you talking about something else? I think I'm confused.

You're right maybe both are true. I just feel like I am utterly alone and can';t trust anybody :( I will give it many months to consider, and hopefully this is just depression talking but I don't think my husband is really on board either.

This is depression talking. Grace, you need to be seeing someone about this if you aren't. You probably don't feel like your husband is on board because he's not seeing everything with the same slant you are, and your slant at the moment is skewed towards the worst, so it's good that he probably doesn't agree that everyone is lying to you and thinking you aren't any good.

Yeah I'm with taz here, it's probably depression talking a single negative comment should not totally outweigh a single positive comment. Maybe cancel each other out but as taz says, it's actually quite likely that both comments are true! In which case, still YEAY marked improvement!

Unfortunately people lying to your face is a fact of life. And I've learned over the years quite often lies are not necessarily malicious in intent, but rather out of convenience or politeness. Sometimes you can build a whole backstory of deliberate and substantial intent about something somebody told you while it had left their head seconds after saying it. You've got to try to keep a level head when you evaluate what you've been told by both parties and try to separate emotion from it for a few moments. Even if the facts don't seem right to you, is there still anything to be learned? Is there a thinly veiled message of something you need to improve on? Compare that to your own honest assessment of your work and see if there's something you can take away to improve on.

I don't know the exact situation and they could both actually be very bad people with a personal vendetta against you, but I doubt it. If they're talking with you and giving you feedback, it sounds like they have a personal investment in you at some level, and maybe they have something to offer you. Their word isn't gospel, you need to sort out what's important and applicable.

But the most important thing I can see is that you make sure you're being honest with yourself about all of this and try to remove yourself emotionally for a few minutes and look at the facts. Whether you realize it or not, you most likely know at what level you're working and where you need to improve. It's not fun looking at your weaknesses, but it can be very beneficial. But it also sounds like you're letting depression take over, which can cloud your judgment even more.

And so I don't come across like an uncaring bastard, I also want to admit that I have labored over remarks about my work before. Some of them I still go back to years later and get agitated. I have 15+ years of stellar reviews at my job, yet a casual remark by a coworker (or an "I heard so-and-so said that you..." type comment) can make me question everything else. Logically it makes no sense, but there's such a desire to be perceived as working well that it sometimes seems to override your own satisfaction from doing the quality of work you know you're actually doing.

As said above, I would make sure that you talk to your boss again and ask pointblank about your performance. Say that you feel you've made improvements and you'd like to continue down that path and you'd like his/her advice. Quite often that will lower their guard when they know that you value their opinion and you might get some honest feedback. As said above, don't interupt and don't be defensive, just take it as input to process and learn from. It'll be hard to do if you disagree, but it will be good to hear, although maybe not at that moment. And ask follow up questions if you feel that you need more information.

Good luck, it sounds like you need a boost and I hope you can get it. The fact that you're talking about it and wanting to improve puts you a little ahead of so many others. But it also sounds like need to talk about this with others, both the work related issues and the issues of depression, which can make this whole journey even harder. You're on the right path, I hope it smooths out for you soon and you can enjoy the view.

whats worse is that the good feeling I had was taken from me. I was using it in my work to get better.

That's only true if you let them take it away. Really. I struggled with this for a long time, using the "Higher ups" opinions of me shape my self-worth. It wasn't until I divorced my self-esteem from what they thought of me personally (professionally was a bit harder, but possible as I tracked and measured my successes and failures) that I was able to look objectively at my accomplishments and say "Hey, I did a good job there, and if they don't think so, I can back it up."

I was saying, hey, you set yourself a task of changing and you did, you'll do great at the new job.

Keep saying that.

It might help to get an objective review from the boss - no "X felt like you did Y", but "you got this done, you successfully did Z on short notice" that sort of thing. If it ever wanders off into perceptions, it's about them, and not you.

Repeat after me: perception is not reality. Perception is how one person deals with reality. Others' perceptions are not your reality.

Who was it that got an awards banquet recently after she stopped being a doormat for people and standing up and being assertive and setting bounbaries? Ah, yes. Here it is.

I just feel like all this perception changing is a tall order for me without any effective support. I am STILL on the therapist waiting list sigh.. the person I was seeing moved to london...

I feel like that line, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad" is relevant here somehow. And I think part of that is because, like taz said, "truth" is kind of like a bunny rabbit, it's always jumping around, and it can contradict itself (ok, so I lost the bunny comparison, I don't know if bunnies contradict themselves). I agree with the others who say to forget what E said and not get anymore information from him (it doesn't sound like the information he's going to tell you is going to help you in any constructive way) and work on getting this information straight from your boss.

Taz, when you write your book about Truth, sign me up for an autographed first edition. Thanks.

Thanks, everyone. What I take away from this thread is I will remember the positive comments that were made - they were made for a reason, she didn't make them for her health.