Rebound

I’m feeling alone today, and more anxious than usual. In some ways that’s a rebound from yesterday, when I managed to let myself feel good about my place in the world for a few minutes ¹I spent 20 minutes laying out a case to Shanda wherein I represented my impact in an attempt to make my brain believe it wasn’t harmful. Then I separately sought her approval for feeling good about it, because the amount of good feels I think I’m entitled to is zero. Even for things I work hard at and that other people agree turn out well with … Continue reading. So of course today my brain needs to invent new reasons to be separate, and to tear holes in what I had tried to form into a source of strength against all the parts of my life that demand patience. But I can never seem to keep those pieces in the same box for long. My anxiety draws a line that puts me and my harms on one side and everyone else and my help on the other. I can throw help over the wall and maybe someone will be able to use it, but on this side of the membrane all I can see are the harms caused by my endless incompetent, inadequacy.

I’m also settling back to a more median position in some of my patience-based anxiety. Yesterday had lots of talking and good news and unexpected positive interactions. I had some significant worries but undertook an action other than patience to feel less trapped by them. And it was easy to feel all that as buoyancy and imagine my life in a different way. But of course the worries aren’t gone and will still demand much patience. The good news is amazing but still tied to much pain. And the silence feels extra strong today against the light of yesterday. In absolute terms today is close to a typical Sunday, but it’s several points down from the transient joy of relief and progress I felt yesterday.

Part of it is just going back to work. I’m on the queue and back for 5 regular days. The normal schedule should be a relief and should make it easier to work less than 40 hours – something that was hard last week. But it’s easy to feel like the disruption to schedule was at least a change from the hopeless progression of weeks where I have trouble making time for the parts I like and spend a lot of time worrying a out work or other things I don’t really care about. It’s easy to feel like I’m waiting for my life to get better, and like there’s just a wall of painful waiting between here and there. That was my life for a long time. In a few ways it still is. My goal is to make continuous improvements and like my life as they happen. Some days I can believe that’s happening. But today it feels like all I can do is endure and hope something gets better.

Part of that is Shanda still being a little separate. Lost in her own stress, distracted, trying to feel productive so you don’t feel drained. In pain and often ignoring it because you’re busy being distracted or productive or otherwise unable to engage with yourself. Noticing the pain, physical or emotional, and deciding it’s “just” X, and that if only X gets done or better the pain will stop, the anxiety will drain away, and you will feel better. But if course it’s not “just” any one thing, no amount of accomplishment will change the way you feel, and all the things you do in the mean time only push away the parts that will actually help. All of which is super hard for you too I’m sure, and not dissimilar from my own state. But it’s also sort of the worst mood for you to be in when I need the sort of support I do right now. and hard to talk to you about because you easily feel accused whenever the topic comes up. It’s getting better but it’s been happening for days and it’s not easy.

Had D&D today but with a fairly small group. Game play was sometimes frustrating with GM’s choice of a social-heavy story against their refusal to have sane social behavior. I realized this is one of the reasons it’s sometimes hard to play with them: they want story that demands a social world but only want combat to impact that world. We can maybe get back to something where I can feel good about being a terrorist again but right now it’s tough. I tried compensating with a character that really tries to sell “murder is always an option” but GM doesn’t like that either. So I had socializing today but it was constrained and somewhat frustrating. Closer to work than would be ideal. And I was already somewhat anxious before it started.

Then GM and the only other player stood in my driveway for literally hours after they “left”. Leaving was itself pretty slow – about 20 minutes of them standing by the door before they went outside – and then they camped just outside. They were there when we too Dog for a walk, already more than an hour after they went outside. They were there when we got back from the walk and shimmied past them to get back into our house. And they stayed there for a while longer after we closed the door on them a second time. Mostly it’s nothing; if I were in a better mood it wouldn’t bother me at all. But today it felt like punishment. Made me feel alone because it was social activity happening at me that I didn’t want to participate in.

I have feels about workplace abuses. It’s often something that gets at me, and lots of parts have come together recently to make it particularly oppressive. It’s easy to see the economic abuses, and how people who most need money are often worst treated by the supposed safe and mutually beneficial employment relationship. And more broadly to see how any type of vulnerability can make jobs dangerous. In theory most of those abuses are illegal but in practice they’re widely tolerated because the victim are encouraged not to see the harm, or even to be grateful for the “opportunity” to endure it.

Today I put together feelings about Kerblam! and economics and servitude and law and travel and power and other people’s jobs and the perception of safety. One of the ways I can be trapped by work is my feeling that it’s the one thing that can save me from certain survival fears. That if I comply with all the rules and tolerate all the abuse and do everything that is asked of me I can maybe someday be safe against homelessness or Mother or other pieces of pain. That the credentials and good faith and effort will buy me enough respect to not be abused in other contexts. It’s not that I can’t see the problems, just that I am choosing to put up with them because they make me feel safe. You know, typical abuse victim behavior.

It’s not a thing I can entirely avoid, the abuses of employment, but I could at least peel it away from my other abuse. I could see how a job will never make me safe in the ways I feel unsafe. I could see how the escape from home that work offered me years ago isn’t a thing I need or want anymore, and wasn’t that good even when I did need it. I did some of this when I peeled away from the path that had more stock grants, deciding I was rich enough and that being more rich wouldn’t make me safer, so it wasn’t worth the other costs (like my time or the stress I have about controlling money). And my level of compliance has been consistently declining since like 6th grade. But it’s still easy for me to feel like job is the place I can be sure actually needs me next week, that keeps me from running away. To feel like work is the place where we can fake the right amount of social care to not have to deal with the sort of things that made my childhood “home” unbearable. To feel like having a job will keep me from not having anyplace to be inside or any way to buy food.

A job can give me those things. But I don’t need a place with running water so I can bathe in the sink, or enough money to have some meals, or enough care to not be relentlessly belittled, or enough utility for someone to notice when I’m gone. Not anymore. Neither do you, BTW, though I understand why it seems hard to give up. Why compliance seems safe and the abuses seem tolerable and risking a job merely for some other thing you want seems unwise. And I don’t exactly know where to draw the line, since jobs are hard to do without in the current world and they all require some compliance.

But I know a job will never relieve my survival fears, and that not having one won’t make me unsafe in the way I imagine from my childhood. I know that lots of jobs exist, I can have them when I want them, and many of them will let me eat and pay rent. The rest of my life uses money to do things I want, and I like having that option because some things are hard to do without out. But a job isn’t the thing that stands between me and the terrible life I had before jobs. It’s just the thing that was one step better, and I should treat it that way until and unless is proves otherwise.

I also should work on figuring out how to better tolerate something that makes money. Because I personally have let the better parts of job slip away from me. I let the constrained social system and oppressive power structure push me into avoidance, and that’s no good. I hope that will be easier now that I see some of the reasons why. I don’t have to feel like all bad things are the same, and I don’t have to use all my old abuse coping skills just to deal with a day job. I can have new ones that deal with the actual problems at a much lower cost ²I mean, presumably. I don’t have even an idea how that might work but I’m trying to be optimistic about knowing a new thing. Ask me again in 3 months.. And I’m downright excited to apply my non-compliance to make work better for other people ³This is a thing I’ve done before but have sort of lost in recent years. It’s a thing that scares me in a way that non-compliance usually does not. But now I see why I’m afraid – survival and escape afraid – and I should be able to reconcile my mixed feels and get back to doing good by making bad people angry. Which I quite like when I do … Continue reading. To apply the safety I know how to share to help other people out of the survival job trap that we’re in.

I should also do something about feeling alone. The idea that I have to wait for other people to be ready for me is wrong, or so I’m told. In theory I’m allowed to reach out to people not just when they need help but when I do. In practice I wait even for my wife, let alone anyone else. It makes me an expert and waiting and nudging but it’s not great when my needs are high. I used to tell Shanda to signal intent not motion when driving, and I could apply the same rule to myself – even if I don’t expect immediate accommodation I could at least let people know that I’m waiting. It’s not quite the same as expecting help, but it’s much more effective than just going along with the flow until an opening naturally appears.

And I should poke all the people I mentioned before, I’m case they’re waiting for their own opening. Maybe one of them will talk to me about Russia Doll, which was one of the things that made me feel better connected yesterday, and which I’d love to share.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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