Work Mode Maze – The Daily Screed

I continue to not do very well. Last week I didn’t eat at all one day, didn’t eat until after I fled in another. For even longer I have been unable eat with anyone or to feel safe about any plan for food. I’ve also been having trouble wearing clothes or caring about being cold or comfortable.

Also M wants my help on a couple of fronts but balks when I provide actual attention, Ben imagines wanting to know me but rejects my experience both past and present, and L has been for some reason hidden from my view. None of which are likely to be resolved anytime soon. A year ago I had good hope for making a change with L, but today I don’t even know how to figure out what’s happening, let alone to improve it, and L’s parents are still finding new barriers. There’s literally nothing to do about Ben – they still aren’t willing to establish safe communication – but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to stop feeling responsible for them ¹I have sort of come to terms with the idea that I had to flee and abandon them. I can deal with never going back to free them, because they were gone long before I could have. I can even accept that reconciliation still feels like a good goal to them, though I wouldn’t have that even if it were available. But I still think about what I could … Continue reading. M will probably let me in eventually, or at least that’s what I tell myself, but until then it’s mixed messages and unending space while the tension builds.

I haven’t figured out how to do day job with switching. I can do okay just handling meetings and light comms, but when I have to do actual work it’s the same old story. I can get into a work mode and in that mode work is easy enough – not exactly enjoyable but tolerable and with room for frustration and focused effort. Unfortunately that mode has 0% care for every other aspect of my existence.

It’s a problem to switch into work mode. It’s a mode where I do not have concerns about things like food or clothes or depression or people or dogs. It’s just me and the work, hyper-focused for hours. To get there I have to decide that I can stop caring about everything else for a while, which is sometimes fearful and often coercive.

Once I’m there work is easy (or at least not hard in the same way) but there’s no way back out, sometimes not even when I’m done with all my tasks. If I let myself become Person with Job even for half an hour it might take me the rest of the day to recover. Until then it’s very difficult for me to manage the rest of my life, even my own body. When things get bad enough I can come back, but sometimes not until I get to seriously considering “I could just flee” while I wander outside. Other days I can choose to stop working (when I notice and conditions are right) but it still takes hours to find myself again, and I’m just sad and lost while that happens.

I’m also trying to look at the ways getting up can be so hard for me. There are lots of historical reasons for it to be upsetting, but I’m trying to look at the difference between leave and work, since I didn’t feel this way when early as often while on leave. I’m almost immediately in a self-coercion mode whenever I wake up and for any reason feel like I “must” get up to do something (like work or an appointment). If I don’t indulge that impulse staying awake seems almost impossible. I can get from this mode to work mode directly, but doing that means I don’t even get the PIC version of morning self-care and as usual I can get stuck in work mode for hours once it starts.

I can’t see how it works yet, but I do see how I am under non-trivial distress while it’s happening. I’m at least partly I’m triggered, by the alarm or any of 20 other things from my past, but there’s more to it than that. If I get up for a minute and come back to bed I often could cry at the relief of laying down. Deciding I don’t have to do whatever I had planned is a relief too, but even in that case more sleep is almost all I can imagine doing instead, regardless of how much I’ve had. There’s something else happening, beyond anxiety about the day or lack of sleep or emotional flashback, but I can’t see what it is yet.

I did get the projector updated somewhere in tlmy recent mess. With a permanent shelf it’s now much easier and with a few more feet of throw it can fill the whole screen ²To within the limits of this prototype system. The screen is built to match the aspect ratio of the wall, not the image, and we’re still at 100% zoom, but it’s as good as you might hope from this setup.. It finally feels done enough to think about what a slightly more engineered version would look like. I think version next is a wood frame – maybe dual layer if it doesn’t seem too complicated to manufacture – that would make it both more flat and better for attaching things. I’d like to get at least the center channel speaker mounted under the screen, and I’d could really use a flat black surround to frame the image. It’s also pretty close to the frame design the glass version will use, so I can work out bugs with that. It might also let me test mounting and spring-loading on a medium-weight frame, as I work up to a giant sheet of overhead glass.

More than a year ago both the street-based car rental companies in town shut down. Eventually we moved closer to a traditional care rental shop – I can walk there now – but that requires about 36 hours of advanced notice and a whole side errand to go get and drop off a car. Recently a new brand of street rental started service in my area and it has made certain types of errands much more accessible.

I had gotten used to only having the bus for spontaneous trip and to only having a car when we needed to transport things and had advanced notice. But it’s nice to just be able to go grab a car again. I would have not eaten on at least one more day without one. I would still be waiting on materials for the projector shelf. I would have had to make several bus trips to get Shanda’s birthday stuffs. Generally I like not having a car. They’re expensive and I don’t like driving and I don’t like it as backup housing. But I’m glad to have options again.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

Stars for Later[+]

Stars for Later
↑1	I have sort of come to terms with the idea that I had to flee and abandon them. I can deal with never going back to free them, because they were gone long before I could have. I can even accept that reconciliation still feels like a good goal to them, though I wouldn’t have that even if it were available. But I still think about what I could have done – could still do – to free them once I had other resources. I still think about how I could have been a better parent and given them a better chance.
↑2	To within the limits of this prototype system. The screen is built to match the aspect ratio of the wall, not the image, and we’re still at 100% zoom, but it’s as good as you might hope from this setup.