I thought I did it right…..

Right, so backstory; I’ve been working as an electrical apprentice for about three and a half months. I’m on my second project, which involves working overnight in a Walmart, a sort of super department store we’ve got around here. Everyone who works there hates it, it is a massive pit of misery. I had been told I wouldn’t be required to work overtime or weekends, and here I am doing both….  so going in I probably wasn’t in the best mindset.

Third day on the project, third night up straight. I got decent sleep, was able to focus enough to play my favorite game Satisfactory, and I was even able to eat something. These are all huge victories in my world.

I get into work, and right away the unpleasant things start. First, they lock the door I prefer to go in at least an hour early, meaning I had to walk four additional blocks to the one entrance still open. It’s Saturday night, the store is relatively busy. We have to work two hours with the customers still there, and it always sucks. We have the employees getting in our way, because that’s unavoidable, AND we have customers being like “but if I don’t get my kid these matchbox cars… you can see how this is more important than you hanging lights” Of course I’m being sarcastic, it’s just the attitude. No one has an important reason to be at Walmart, they could close two days a week and people would get by JUST FINE

So the guy I’ve been working under, the one that knows about all of my physical and mental obstacles doesn’t come in, because he’s a co owner, so he can do that.

The foreman is riding me, about my driving, about my slow speed, and about my work. I’m being accomodating and trying to meet the moment…. but it just isn’t enough. I start to have a panic attack, and so I sit, drink my coffee, try to pull it together.

The foreman yells at me to get back to it, so I walk out because I’m pissed off enough I’m about to say something really awful, or throw something. Maybe I should have done that? I don’t know, 20 years of anger management told me that collecting myself is the lesser of two evils between flying off the handle.

So the foreman tells me to take my tools and go home….. I call my co owner friend and tell him my side of things, and he says he’s going to have to talk to the foreman. Meanwhile, I’m shaking uncontrollably I’m so mad, so tired, so fed up with being treated this way.  I want to point out that even at this point, I’m willing to go back to work if things can be smoothed over. That’s a huge concession on my part, younger me would have driven off and said “fuck it”, again, maybe I should have.

I get the call back, I am to go home……. not clear at all if I’m fired or not…. and if I am it is a massive ADA violation at the very least.

Now I’m trying to pick up the pieces. I think I did what I could, but at the same time I can’t dismiss the feeling that I might have self sabotaged…. and if I did I don’t regret it.

questioned whether I was suicidal, and I think I was on the road to it. A bit more pressure, a bit more tired, a bit more pain and I could have been exquisitely suicidal, like clouds part, angels sing and I’m ready to die… and here the first bit of regret comes up, because feeling exquisitely suicidal is pleasurable, not good for me, and I feel like there’s only so many times it can happen before the dam breaks and I really do end it…..

Bad night, in short. Who knows where it will go, I sure don’t…. right now I’m burying myself in really stupid cartoons… because the world is just too fucking absurd.

Which is the case for suicide that Camus made in Myth of Sisyphus, countering it only with the idea that thumbing our nose at the proverbial creator. At the same time, I think God is somewhat on my side,  so how that plays out will be interesting as well.