To The Intellectuals

I’m on this site because my stress has overwhelmed my ability to cope to the point of complete breakdown, at least three times now. Sometimes I think that I stay because it’s anonymous and I have thoughts that could ruin my life/career. I also identify with people here more than in the waking world… so that’s a thing. Despair is easy to understand compared to contentedness.

My first breakdown was in late high school. I didn’t realize it as a breakdown at the time, but comparing with other experiences I think that was the first one. It’s the first time I seriously thought about killing myself. I ended up dropping out of school, getting my GED and eventually ended up working a series of bad jobs, I wasn’t ready for college at that point… I don’t think I had the willpower to die at 17.

The second one came 5 years later after my divorce. She cheated on me, my career imploded, and I really thought life was over. Again, over and over I thought about ending it. Somehow the world allowed me to drop out of ordinary life for a year and a half, support showed up for food and rent. So I didn’t die. Eventually I got back on my feet and completed a decent year-two at college. Then I got a really good job, in my field of psychology, and held it for 18 months until the job stopped being what I needed it to be. After a mini breakdown over that I somehow ended up as a contractor for a natural gas utility.

Which brings us to breakdown three. I was on that contract for a year. It was a really good year, and I wanted it to go on forever. There was a future there, retirement exists for those people, as well as decent pay, health insurance and other benefits. The work was enjoyable, in a pure kind of way I still don’t think can be replaced. Then the contract ended. My company couldn’t negotiate another year, so they shifted me to a different contract. Well, it wasn’t that simple, first they offered to lay me off, which they should have done. Then they kept me out of work for almost two months waiting for news.

Then I was put on a project that was designed to fail. This is probably the first time I’m telling anyone outside of people that were there the whole story. I had a previous supervisor who was a jerk to everyone consistantly, but effective and consistant with his demands. When I was shifted to being under the new supervisor I thought he was nice. He would say how impressed he was with me (he should be, looking back, I had endured severe conditions and still put out decent production numbers.) Other days he would be passive agressive, or make unreasonable demands.

*sigh* No way to explain this without specifics. The new contract was inspecting miles of line for leaks of natural gas. I’d been working doing natural gas inspections for some time, and most of us were very methodical about our jobs. I was, to the extreme. My personal hobby at work was to try and figure out ways to be efficient and safe. God, I was a nerd, probably still am. I would work out algorithms for production per hour, trying to maximize productivity. This wasn’t part of my job description, in my mind I was saving lives.

Every meeting we would be shown videos of natural gas explosions caused by lazy inspectors. It’s more common than you think and if you aren’t depressed now go look at that. It’s very much a socio-economic experiment, the gas company and contractors know who their bad inspectors are and those people get the worst parts of town. You know, the kind where they won’t get sued.

My new boss wanted me to blow past leaks. He gave us a week and a half of training where the job required two months to get fully certified. Then he put us on the job of getting into locked gates. He set unrealistic production numbers and humiliated those that wouldn’t hit those numbers. Which meant that we were going to lose our jobs, because missing a leak intentionally meant prison time, and not obeying the boss meant being fired.

I kept threatening to call the authorities, which I did mid breakdown. I doubt anything was done, it’s a really corrupt system. I went into a breakdown which I can’t remember…. I was wandering the streets rambling nonsense. Literally. Oh, and I had disability insurance which refused to pay out when the company hospitalized me….
So since then I spent a year and a half getting back on my feet, then the past two years having success in school. As far as getting better? It’s a pipe dream at best.
My conclusion to all of this is that there is no one in this world who will look out for me apart from family. The government is currently being run by for profit businesses who care about money over people.

It’s just a bad time to be a human. Good time to be a company though, especially if you can con politicians into thinking you create jobs and then lay off the people you employ as you use the money to modernize. The jobs I used to do won’t be there in a few years. We were replaced by machines.

Sometimes, and keep this under your hat; I think about using/gaining the skills to lead a revolution against the people doing this to the working class. It would probably be nonviolent…. probably…. There hasn’t been this level of unrest in over one hundred years. I grew up watching my parents fight this thing, and now most of my life has been that as well. I’ll keep fighting until there isn’t fight left to either find a place in this corrupt world or at the very least expose the corruption when I go.