FURIOUS

I've presented myself here as a pretty idealistic person-- generally believing the best in people, thinking good things come to those who do good, and that the evil get their due in the end. Well, right now I am so disillusioned that I'm contemplating revising my entire universe.
What did I just find out, after being on the phone with the Department of Labor for an hour (after an entire week last week when they sweetly apologized in an automated voice for the fact that their system was "down")? That my former employer is contesting my unemployment benefits. That is just par for the course, right there.
I don't know how much more hostility, guile, and disgusting behavior I have to endure at the hands of these people. For almost a year and a half I was belittled and unappreciated. For six months of that time, I was downright abused. What do people say when I tell them what I suffered? "Wow, that sounds worse than The Devil Wears Prada." That's an understatement if I ever heard one. People do not deserve to have doors slammed in their faces. They do not deserve to be told they are stupid during department meetings. They do not deserve to do incredible work and be prevented from attending the meetings where the results would be presented, so that someone else could take the credit for my toil. They do not deserve to work their hardest, hours overtime, and have that all be for naught because of enduring prejudices against their personalities. And most of all, they do not deserve to have the people who could have stopped the abuse stand idly by and claim that they saw nothing and I was overreacting.
After what I endured for these months, another person might have said "Farewell, world." That is not who I am. I am someone who fights injustices, not someone who gives in to them. I was made to feel so bad about myself, to think that I was worthless, to be driven into depressive depths the like of which I have no verbal capacity to describe. And you know what I did about it? I showed them that something was very, very wrong, and instead of recognizing it, they shot the messenger.
I've talked to my parents about this, and they claim that they could see my employer had abusive tendencies from the first week I started working. If that's true, then I feel so stupid. I could have stopped all of this before it spiralled out of control and came back to eat me.
I feel like shriveling up into a ball. But ridiculously, something inside me is still cleaving to those ideals that the nice ones finish first. Something is harkening back to every fairy tale I've ever read and reminding me that the witch ends up incinerated or melted, while the heroine ends up dancing in a color-changing dress or finding her dreams in her own backyard. Stupid, stupid, idealistic me.