regression into the absurd, into rebellion

It isn’t a secret; I seem to take myself too seriously. On the other hand that makes much more sense when it is understood that my social ready personality was intended to be biting satire of the culture around me. I got so sarcastic that I started living in the world I had created. Another thing; our species is on average bad at understanding sarcasm, but perhaps more on that later.

20 years ago, if you can believe it, I was a lost and angry 13 year old. I was trying to find a place, and increasingly finding that the spaces for people like me are rare and sparsely distributed. So, I repressed the entire part of my personality that despised the culture that had failed to provide for me. I became, in this order;

A drama geek

A salesperson

A customer service representative

A field repair tech

and divorced; the first major crisis of my adult life. I descended down into the rabbit hole that is my massive cultural and literary understanding, and came back with a proposal; I’d play their game, but they had to provide me the resources and cultural clout that supposedly came from cooperating. That was the subtext for the second chapter; my twenties. I spent a year going to school. got roped into a job I learned to love but couldn’t afford to keep in mental health, spent a year and a half running from that as a field repair tech, it was a low customer contact position inspecting utilities and I loved it. Then, five years ago that company lost the contract that allowed me to work, transferred me to a department that forced me to do things so immoral that I ended up in the hospital after quitting.

Which preceded the final chapter up until a few months ago; bargaining part 2. I went back to school and really threw myself into my studies as hard as I ever had finishing my undergrad. For three years I carried a 4.0, served in various offices of school clubs, and performed nationally recognized research in a peer review journal. I presented my work at conference, came THIS close to winning state-wide quizbowl, and saw the club I serve in grow in membership and in scope. We had such a clear vision for it that we seriously discussed turning it into a non profit. Then I graduated.

I didn’t get into grad school, couldn’t even get a second glance from most of them. Which was the point that I began this decline, which has taken 20 months; first I tried to find work outside of the social sciences, with little luck. Then, begrudgingly I went for the highest salary someone with an undergraduate in Psychology can earn in my state, and was eventually hired, and a few months afterwards I was considering whether it would be easier to bargain with myself than with the world around me.

And that’s me today. Not working (for money or anyone else), not wanting to either. Suddenly in the middle of this crisis, after losing my therapist [long, boring story, TLDR; the agency that has provided my care for the last five years couldn’t give two shakes about providing employment stability for their employees.]

I joked over the past year; how the agency I worked for felt like rehab for workaholics. It completely poisoned work for me. Cool tangent;

Do you want to know the most effective tool we have against addiction? It’s a pill that makes addicts feel awful any time they consume what they used to be addicted to. Most addicts struggle to stay on it, and honestly I can’t blame them it is an inhumane way to deal with the problem.

That last job was it for me. By the time I quit I had decided that I would rather be homeless and without healthcare or steady food rather than under the thumb of some manipulative megalomaniacal employer. Not the easiest choice, but that’s what I’ve got figured out, today, three months to the day from the event that led to me resigning. Now the memory block is over that, and that’s okay with me. It was awful, such that it took all the anger management and coping skills I had to set down my work laptop and materials, and walk out of the building. I wanted to bury myself under the cruelty and indifference they subjected me to. I wanted to kill them, metaphorically, because at this point I realized that I’m the embodiment of death to any institution I touch. It makes so much more sense; realizing I hated them so when I started, much more than I do now. They don’t deserve my hate, or any feeling apart from somber disapproval. They utterly failed me, as a culture, and as a way of life.