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I don't have a particularly stressful job, by choice and design. It's not super well paying, but I'm ok with that trade off for the time being. I deliver pizzas. Due to a near miss traffic incident with a brain-dead truck driver last night and the GPS order tracking program, the system cancelled my employment status automatically. It didn't come to anyone's attention until tonight when I tried to start my shift and couldn't. Once I explained to the managers the situation they unsuspended me on the system with no strikes against me.
Despite this, despite generally being treated ok by most managers and employees, or for the most part not being bothered by what anyone thinks of me when it doesn't relate to my job status, I was immediately thrown back into childhood, where things I did where sometimes fine and sometimes would provoke anger and punishment, where I couldn't know when I'd be breaking rules I'd never been aware of. Of so many jobs where I'd rub supervisors the wrong way or be ostracized. Of other jobs where I'd make dumb mistakes and react to them, to be told by well meaning managers that "Maybe this job just isn't for you", adding just another thing to the list of things I wasn't capable of. Of the time sharing an apartment with someone who in the good times was one of the best mates I've ever had, but in manic psychotic states was like bargaining with a demon, where I had to be aware of every mannerism change, of any sign at all times that things were about to change for the worse. Of the constant isolation, rejection, judgement and frustration at my existence, real or projected that I've had in my life.
At first, I wanted to run, like I have many times when fighting wouldn't get me anywhere. I resisted, fighting with myself in a state between dissociation and fear response. I stuck it out, because I felt I have to try hold onto something and not just give it up because I have history to show me why leaving is safest. I got through a few hours ok, then at a certain point I realised that nothing happening around me was real. There were other people all going about things as though it was, but I could clearly see the fakeness of everything. I wanted to scream at them, to throw things and expose the facade, make them see the truth. Maybe just make them acknowledge that I was real, to prove my existence.
I managed to tell the girl washing dishes that I wasn't feeling well and asked if I could take her place while she did the other jobs. I knew dishes, I could do dishes. She agreed, not expressing her thoughts, but I saw them, I saw her mentally roll her eyes and just go with the request rather than fight the issue. As I washed up, I felt the scalding water on my hands, kept telling myself that even if it wasn't real, I could do dishes. I watched the surroundings, I questioned reality and I told myself that a fake reality that I'm in still has consequences as long as I'm there. Once I had a few minutes left of my rostered shift I was done, I couldn't be bothered humouring it anymore. My managers have been told I have PTSD, so they might think I'm a nuisance from time to time, but I'd like to see them do anything about it.
Once I left some more things happened that I won't get into now, as that's a whole lot of other backstory, but it brought me back jarringly. I was dazed, exhausted, but back inside myself. I gave a bare bones numb explanation to my parents and they tried to understand from within their frame of reference, but that's all I need from them.
Now I'm sitting outside in the cold, chain smoking and wondering how to proceed from here, thinking back on the tepid attempts at getting therapy in the past, in dealing with doctors and marvelling at how it supposedly takes intelligence to get a medical degree and yet these people are so incapable of comprehending what someone says outside of very basic concepts. The psychiatrists who could tell you more medication names than they could supposedly human traits and feelings. The fact that maybe I'm gaslighting myself into thinking I have actual problems and I'm not just being difficult because I refuse to accept that I'm really just stupid and can't see that everyone else has it figured out and if I could just get over myself I could follow their lead and have a life worth anything.
If I was born a generation or two earlier I may have received the benefits of a lobotomy, severing that pesky, disruptive annoying frontal lobe, I may have felt peace, blissful numbness and have been given reasonable expectations for contributing to society.
I'll leave it here, nothing I have to say at this point will have any real worth or merit, I'm going into speculative fantasy that isn't helpful or productive, it's only self indulgent. All of this was, talking into the void, but I know better than to *** into it as well. Or at least am trying to learn that lesson.
Farewell, void, or anyone who happens to come across this and for some reason read through it. I'm going to expand my search for making sense of myself.
