Tonight I am Having a Panic Attack About Work

It's been a while since I've felt this anxious, especially considering how bad my depressive episode was from this past year. It's a feeling that I wish felt a little alien coming out of that dark cloud, but it's unmistakably familiar. Like my heart is racing, like I can't catch my breath.

I don't want to go to work tomorrow. I don't want to sit sequestered down in the dungeon we're relegated to in the basement of our building, surrounded by drywall and flourescent lighting, a whole quarter of a mile walk separated from other humans, with a peek at the outside through the windows on 1 of the 4 walls of our area. I don't want to be face to face with leaders who I feel are disappointed with me, and most of all, I'm dreading the possibility of getting reamed out by my grand-boss again.

I don't even know when I'm making a decision worthy of a "what's wrong with you" talk anymore. I feel like I can't relax, can't take time off, because if I do then I'm "leaving my team hanging." My team of 2: me and my boss, who doesn't pay much attention to me, to tasks, to decisions we've made... He literally told me the other day (intended as a joke, but it's never actually a joke), when I jogged his memory on an important task for our business partner, "that's why we keep you around." Just a living post-it note. That's my whole value.

This weekend I fell down the "death stairs" in my 110 year old house. They're steep, narrow, and covered in shag carpet, which gets slick when it's compressed from thousands of treads up and down. I was leaning over the banister hanging garland, I turned, and I just slipped. It all happened so fast and felt so out of control. I grabbed the railing but it didn't help me much. On the positive side, I was only a little more than halfway to the first floor. On the negative side, grabbing the railing did literally nothing to stop me or slow me down. With my arm extended, I still hit the stairs and then the floor at full impact. It was terrifying. My scream and the thuds must have sounded pretty bad, too; my husband threw the Christmas display he was assembling across the room and ran over to me.

I don't think I broke anything, luckily. But my right hip, opposite of the main impact I took, is still messed up. I have a good amount of pain and stiffness, and I can't really raise my knee to hip level right now. I have to lift my leg if i want to pull it up. Maybe I sprained it while trying to brace myself or slow down my fall, I guess. I just hope I didn't tear anything, and now that I'm in my 30s I worry that this fall is an injury that is going to be one of those that haunts me until I die. My "bad hip" for 50 more years.

Anyway, I stayed home today. I needed to rest. And I feel terrible about it, even though I still worked (just remote.) I'm terrified that I'm going to get yelled at, as if there's anything I could do to not get hurt. I'm sure I'd get more grace for an injury that put me in the hospital than relief that I had a relatively good outcome from a situation that could have killed me in different circumstances (god, I hate the physical mortality of being 30.)

I feel sick of gambling with my bodily life all of the time. The stress of this job will kill me, if not at least permanently disable me, and ignoring injuries or other body issues by still showing up and trying to "perform" as if nothing happened isn't doing me any favors, either. These are the grudges and ruminations, the anger and regret that I'll keep when I'm in the twilight hours of my life.

This is the debt I owe in exchange for breathing air, needing shelter and food in a corporate-run economy. And by all perspectives, this corporate gig is the good, easy life. The price of life for blue collar and "essential" workers is infinitely more steep and unforgiving.

I'm just so tired of it. This can't be it. I know for a fact that, despite the crazy looks I get from my fellow corporate drones, that this is not what I'm made or adapted for. That I'm supposed to be participating as a mortal, physical creature, part of this earth and ecosystem for my limited time; not as another natural thing that the "innovation" of man tries to control or stamp out.

For god's sake, I just need to get the hell out of here.

Well... Here We Are Again

There must just be something about standing on the precipice of a decade that triggers an existential crisis in me. It's been nearly 10 years, and here I am again.

It's like when I turned 30 I became unmoored. Maybe it's all the changes in my life. I'm married now. I suppose that's another form of "graduation," right? Graduating from being single? I have a house, I have a mid-level corporate job. Two cats, a fish, a butt-ton of plants.

I felt (fairly) steady with my sense of self in my 20s. At least, as much as a 20-something can feel steady. Of course I struggled with dating, and I was shaken pretty badly after I left a truly soul-rending work environment. I spent a little bit of time wondering about my worth, if I was cut out for communications or adult life. In the end, it only took a couple of months to right the ship and stabilize again. I suppose I'm impatient.

Otherwise, the majority of the decade felt pretty steady, pretty predictable, really. Even if it wasn't always happy, even when I had experiences that made me angry, or scared, I felt like I had a solid understanding of what I wanted my life to look like.

And now it's all changed.

Sure, the wedding stuff was stressful, but I still felt in my element. Even for a little bit afterward, life felt refreshed, invigorating. And then I got passed up for a promotion that I was 100% confident I would get. Like, not even considered. And it just kind of set off a nuclear bomb within my sense of self.

Up until that point, I'd been growing into a kind of confidence I'd never lived in before. And that confidence was being validated by the people around me. I felt like I had a good understanding of myself and my capabilities. I suppose it wasn't really confidence, if a passed-up promotion made me call all of my identity and faith in my capabilities into question. But I won't gaslight myself. It's pretty devastating to throw your hat in the ring for a job that you've done for three months by yourself, in addition to extra projects within the past year, only to be promptly dismissed. There was a chat, but honestly, I wasn't even interviewed.

To be passed up on something that didn't feel like a stretch in the least, why would I continue to put myself out there? Was something wrong with me? Maybe I'm not as capable as I thought. Maybe everyone who's told me I do a great job was lying to me. Maybe I've been lying to myself.

Between having to adjust my expectations for myself and my job, having to onboard and train up my new manager, and coming down off of an intense, life-altering event two years in the making, I just kind of fell apart.

You know, even without those factors, I think it would still be reasonable if I did, anyway. I've struggled with depression for a lot of my life, so clinically and statistically, it's very likely it would come back. And the pandemic plus the domestic and world events of 2020 and 2021 seriously hurt everyone, not just me. And when the vaccine debuted, while the world and our psyches were scarred and reeling from previously-unfathomable change, fear, and loss, we just pushed it aside and went back to normal. As if we hadn't experienced terrible trauma, as if trauma is something you can just set aside afterward.

I was struggling with my sense of expectation and "normalcy," and so were a lot of people. And trying to pick up where we left off in 2019 just didn't make any sense. Nothing made sense. Life is just a big game of pretend. We're all animals made of flesh and blood and bone. Designed by nature to survive in earth and wind and rain and forests and plains and mountains. Yet here I sat on a video call in order to earn currency that exists only in the human mind and institutions, being asked to come up with a catchy phrase to change my perspective and help me ignore the very real problems of the world. To turn away from trauma and wounds and make my pain and its root cause disappear with a positive attitude.

"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% what you make of it." That's bullshit. My flesh and blood brain is tired. My bones and my organs hurt. I cannot create something out of nothing.

The stress of it all took a toll. My mind gave out under the weight, unable to try anymore. Try to eat, try to wake up, try to respond to an email or answer a question. Try to look after myself in any way, much less look after projects and responsibilities that didn't really directly impact me. I started having dizzy spells and heart palpitations. When my husband didn't make me food, I didn't eat.

I went on a very sudden medical leave. That, or my doctor would send me to the hospital. Even so, with 6-8 weeks of rest, I was partially admitted anyway. Maybe I'll dive deeper into that another time.

In truth, I'm not "better." Not in the way I'm expected to be, anyway. It's been 11 months.

Of course, I'm way better. I can function again. Live without my husband playing the role of aide. Feel actual emotions rather than feel the empty spot on the shelf where that emotion should be. My therapist knows how far I've come. My therapy group, too. My doctor, my close family, my husband.

But my depression lingers, even if only a little, in comparison to where I was. And this is where I have to re-sow my parsley. In my early 30s, coming out of events that have altered my life completely. I don't think I want the things that I wanted before. I don't know what I want. Or at least, whether or not what I want is even possible.

Dearest Reader, I originally stopped blogging because of the pressure I put on myself. My posts had to be insightful, thoughtful, show a side of vulnerability, but still present a positive image. And I had to post every week. So I did what all good perfectionists do and just quit altogether.

I'm not doing it for you this time. Sorry. I need to be my full self this time. Maybe you'll reject it, maybe it'll be ugly to you. Maybe something I say will make you mad at me. I can't be sorry about it. I need to stop hedging my language and massaging my image to be invulnerable. 

Or maybe you won't think less of me. Either way, the whole deal here is that I stop getting my sense of self from external validation.

I realize that's what I'm doing in this note to you, so I'm going to stop now. Go suck pond water, Dear Reader.

(This was in my drafts, unpublished. Originally from 2014)

Well, it's this September, and guess where I am! 21, unemployed, and still in my parents house. Awesome.

But, I've been living life to the fullest, right? Embracing risk, living life on the edge, being a general badass. You know, cool things to brag about in a blog post.

Nope. I tried to start a couch-to-5k running program and nearly died on the side of the road (literally laid down in the ditch because I thought I was going to pass out), spent 10 minutes at a local festival before nearly having a heatstroke and crawling home to sit under the fan for the rest of the day, and traveled across the country only to leave a friend's wedding early because I felt sick. Fascinating!

(Ok: I did actually do some fun things this summer. I went to a cousin's bachelorette party, attended 2 weddings, explored Seattle, hosted a garage sale, and went kind of crazy making baby stuff for an expecting friend.)

But you know, looking back at everything, I don't think I'm really built for a super-exciting, risk-taking crazy life. One of the more frequent activities from this summer was visits to the doctor. I spent a lot of my summer feeling pretty sick and trying to figure out what was going on. After a plethora of tests, we've made a diagnosis and, fortunately, it's nothing serious. I will, however, have to make some lifestyle modifications.

Most of these modifications aren't too bad. I mean, it's always hard to make changes to your lifestyle, but with my health, the benefits heavily outweigh the discomfort of change, and I will gladly make these changes. There is, of course, one change that's going to be less easy. My condition is heavily affected by my stress level.

Great.

If you know me or have read any of my blog posts at all, you know I'm not exactly a serene person. Type A all the way. I'm high-strung, kind of anxious, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform at a certain level that is remarkably hard to attain. I don't even think I can remember recent time when I haven't been stressed about something. In fact, right now, I am stressed about an upcoming check-up, still not having a job, my Pro Bono work, and lastly, I'm stressed about how I'm possibly going to control my stress level.

I guess I need to practice relinquishing control. I've posted about this before, I know. When you're stressed and feel like so many things are out of control (the job hunt, my health, feeling so far from any friends, etc.), your first instinct is to try to take control for yourself. This is bad. When you try to control everything, you don't actually change anything. In fact, things stay out of control, you just feel more personally responsible when things don't go how you think they should. Which makes you stressed.