Ongoing monitoring of my public breakdown that I’ve been having at work. It’s been as polite as I can be about it, and I guess I’ve been masking really really well. Normally staying centered and productive is a major point of pride, so you can imagine the associated shame that is automatic.
However, I broke down and told way more of the story to my boss, about how I’ve been struggling, which to be fair she knows half of already. She listened and helped me deal with my feelings of frustration and empathy burnout. She told me that there was a limit to how hard I could work……. no boss has ever said such a thing, not realistically. The closest was when I worked for the gas surveying company and they got really stressed about not letting us get heat stroke in the summer, because it messes you up.
I was vulnerable, and I started shaking even though I hadn’t had coffee or even as heavy of a medication regimin as it once was….. It hurt to open up that much, just a bit. I took it, that’s what I’m in this for; my development and earning a living. Someday to be just my development. That’s all I wanted in the end.
Well, I want my mind back, reading time, relaxation, more pleasure in life. It’s like all this hustle is to prove future critics wrong, oh no I’m not low in ambition, it took me decades to get enough of it out of my system to be ready to quit. I’d be a lot healthier if I was less ambitious, it would appear.
We’re just haggling down the final price, what the damage of three decades and lost people has to live up to so that it’s worth it. I know it’s going to be less than any of that was really worth. It’s haggling with your captor in my mind, does anyone ever haggle with Jigsaw in Saw?
Jigsaw saves some people, but only because their death didn’t work for him. I’d rather haggle with Jigsaw than my opposite; a conservative state which doesn’t think I’ve worked hard enough.
Oh I have not begun to work hard. What I’m done doing is working hard for less than minimum wage.
Strangely the supposed party focused on the individual, on the rights of the individual who happens to control local politics, is very much restricting my right to freedom of movement. It’s somewhere way back in British common law, if you restrict the movement of people such that they cannot move to where they would be more successful, you owe them a debt of care. It was applied in a clumsy way, but it’s centuries ahead of modern American attitudes.
You make the mess, you’re supposed to clean it up. That’s personal responsibility. If you can’t clean up the mess, you can at least let someone else try.