don’t r*****g but I’m going to talk about my year. one warning under the cut
brief warning for brief talk regarding non-shojo-manga slapping of self and emotional reaction
I had a rough year. I spent the first two-thirds of it gainfully employed but noticing myself staying up later to delay tomorrow coming because I dreading waking up to go to work. It was a boring, isolated office job at a family business. It wasn’t super welcoming, and I was given very little guidance. I’d had a supervisor change and a rough spot in the fall of last year, where I genuinely thought they’d fire me. They didn’t. I was forced back to the office in June, and things got worse from there.
The day after I finished GAA2-4 and went ‘man I wish I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow so I can play the final case’, I got fired an hour after I got into work the next day. My immediate supervisor didn’t even bother coming into the office to be in the room. Was I mentally over the job and looking for other work? Yes. Did I want it to end like that? No.
And then I got fired in September with no PIP, just after my two year anniversary, no talking-to about progress in six months time, after being told that no, I wouldn’t get a raise this year, and after my (in hindsight) obvious replacement had been there two weeks. I never got a formal reason why they fired me beyond ‘performance’ but I’d known for a year that my new supervisor didn’t like me, and I guess they gave up on telling me off. Or something. I can’t give a clear answer. I’d say it wasn’t entirely my fault, but I’m not free of blame. It made everything rather confusing, mentally. It came out of the blue, though.
I hadn’t gotten fired before, so I was shaken. Really shaken. I was depressed before, but now i was /depressed/ depressed. Was it a company that continually frustrated me in multiple ways? Yes. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
And turns out I’d given myself an overuse injury brought about by two years of almost constant computer, video-game and phone use. But that’s not what it felt like. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was I was playing clicky action video games, which I told myself I wasn’t going to play, to distract me from my self-harm thoughts. I played until my wrists hurt, and I didn’t rest after I hurt myself. I kept going after I said I wouldn’t, and it got worse. And then I did it again. And then I hated myself more. Getting fired was almost a relief because, damn, using a mouse was painful and I had to swap hands every half an hour and then I gave my non-mouse hand an overuse injury trying to compensate. So, in that way, getting fired was a relief. But my self-loathing increased! I’m still dealing with it, four months later, but I have been resting and stretching and doing my exercises. (And that’s helped a bit with the self-loathing.)
I also started having intrusive thoughts on harming myself, even before i got fired. Which really scared me, as that’s not something I’d really had to deal with before, and not at a frequency like this. I acted on them twice by slapping myself. Once on my face, once on my stomach. It didn’t help either time, I just felt even worse and sobbed even more. I’d felt I deserved it, for messing up my wrists even more by being so stupid. It hurt, and I deserved to hurt.
(I did, incidentally, did have a very nice two-week vacation during that month when things seemed to be looking up, and had another nice weekend trip a month or two after, but this year was marked, mostly, by Depression. Pandemic depression, health depression, spiraling from minor health issues that I obsess over, I-Got-Fired Depression, Aimless ‘I Don’t-Have-A-Career and why would anyone hire me when they can get an ingenue straight out of college and my old job gave me virtually no useful transferable skills’ Depression, General Loneliness Depression)
Still dealing with the depression and the wrist issues, but I’ve been feeling a bit lighter over the past few days, a bit more hopeful. I still don’t have a map for my future, and if I think about my future career, or current lack thereof, I start having a very negative pointy feeling in my chest. (And my wrist pains in my house hand sure didn’t help my brief ‘what if I learn to code’ foray because...it hurt to code.) It also took me very little time to drift back into my previous unemployment sleep habits of ‘stay up til 2am, tell myself I’ll wake up early and fix my sleep schedule, wake up the next morning at 8, go back to sleep until 11, feel bad.’
But I’ve realized I had issues on a more obvious, less simmering level ever since I was talking to one of my mother’s friends on vacation, they asked me what my college major was, and I immediately started crying. I know it’s bull but the pervasive societal hammering of ‘a woman’s worth decreases every time she ages, shouldn’t you have been doing more with your life?’ gets to me.
so when I said that fic writing made me feel happy like nothing else did, I wasn’t kidding. My self-esteem isn’t too great right now, but it’s not any worse than it was when I was at that job I grew to loathe. I don’t know what I’m going to do, not really. I’m not happy with my current array of base level office and customer service jobs, and my wrists still aren’t up to a full eight-hour work day. I’m overdoing it, even now, so I’ll call it here. Ow. I’ve done too much these past few days going “I’m fine!” and I am until I stop and I’m not. Don’t give yourself overuse injuries, friends. Mine’s minor, all things considered, but it’s aggravating and easily aggravated. (And a constant reminder of my unintentional self harm to avoid harming myself)
I’m just going through it, folks. I’ve been feeling better the past few days, even if that’s a low bar. (Time to go ice my wrist bc it is throbbing.
