BFI. (2017, July 14). This Week: Homosexuals (1964) – extract [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 26, 2024 from https://youtu.be/6PBZQJb_7QI
I saw this video recently from the British Film Institute, and it was weirdly validating. It was originally recorded in 1964, when apparently it was illegal to be gay in Britain. So they interview this gay guy, and it’s set up so you can only see his silhouette. And the interviewer asks, “Well why can’t you just not tell anyone you’re gay?” and the guy says it’s not that simple. He has to be extremely vigilant all the time, even when talking about ordinary topics. He gives the example that he has to pretend he assumes he’ll one day marry a woman and have kids, because if he lets on that he’s going to be single for the rest of his life, people will become suspicious.
This is pretty much how my experience has been with PTSD. You’d think you could just leave it out. People say, “Just talk about the activity you’re doing and don’t talk about yourself or your life.” But it’s hard, because I didn’t have ordinary childhood experiences that most people my age can relate to. Which would be fine, except I also haven’t had ordinary adult experiences. I don’t have a family, I live alone, there are years of my life when I wasn’t working and can’t give any account for where I was or what I was doing (because I was in the funny farm, okay??). It’s not possible to explain why I have a master’s degree and am working an entry-level job. It’s not possible really to self-disclose at all, which makes it much more difficult to make friends, because usually when people meet a new acquaintance, they engage in small talk. Nothing crazy, just typical conversations about who they live with and what they do for a living. Meanwhile, I’m here planning in advance what “safe topics” I can bring up without people finding out my dark secret that my brain is still different from what it would have been if it hadn’t been for severe chronic trauma for most of my life. I feel like I’m in the Witness Protection Program. It’s exhausting, and often unsustainable. I live my life terrified that one day I’ll snap.
Well, I snapped. And I will get to that later. But first, look how lovely things were a few weeks ago:
Yeah, it was great. As Easter approached, I thought, “Wow, I can’t believe I haven’t had a breakdown! I must be over it!!!”
🙄
Well, as we know, I’ve had the same guiding North Star since I was a little kid, which is to be a mom. My plan for the past several years has been to be a single mom by choice. The problem is, I think I might have had my priorities all wrong with regard to my strategy to get there.
My thought was, the most important thing that I needed must be full-time employment. So, I signed up for that, even though the new health insurance is crap. Which is extra frustrating because it’s about $600/month as opposed to free like my old insurance. (Tangent: Call me a conspiracy theorist, but there’s no way this happens by accident. The desperately poor get free preemo health insurance, while the middle class get to make a lot more choices and have self-expression in ways that the poor don’t. The result? The desperately poor and the middle class are pitted against each other, each thinking the other has it easy and is the cause of their difficulties in life. Almost like this is supposed to be a distraction from the actual source of our problems…)
Anyway, so I was pouring myself into trying to succeed at my job. Thing is, appearing normal takes an outrageous amount of energy, which takes away from remaining mental resources that I have to do the actual job description. So, I have a co-worker, who has decided that I’m evil and she’s going to make sure everyone knows it. Oh, and since I’m on the overnight and usually scheduled with her and there are only two of us on, that means the only human available is this person who is just absolutely nasty to me in every interaction we have. She actually point-blank admitted that she treats me differently from everyone else, saying that she thought I was huffing at her. Which, I just chronically can’t breathe. I have PTSD. It’s a known problem. But, co-worker did not accept that explanation and has been spreading rumors, trying to gaslight me, and just engaging in all manner of sabotage. My initial assumption was that this was unintentional, and maybe I reminded her of someone, or something of that nature. I reached out to admin for support, so they knew there was an issue. After like a month and a half of aggressively trying to figure out what she needed from me so she could stop treating me like shit, I finally came to the conclusion that she was not well-intentioned: she knew I had done nothing wrong, she knew I wanted to resolve whatever conflict was going on, and the problem had nothing to do with me. My best guess is just that she’s been used to being the only full-time person assigned to third shift, so she was posessive.
So, that went on for a while. The director keeps having legitimate family emergencies and hadn’t been able to meet with me, but the assistant director was supportive, so I thought things were okay. After weeks of failed negotiations with my co-worker as to what the heck she needed from me, I finally sent the director and assistant director an email that this has degenerated into a hostile work environment and just bullying.
So, my nights were mostly just trying to do my job without losing all self-acceptance. I reminded myself that I’ve honestly never had a co-worker who had it out for me like this, so although I have my issues, I didn’t deserve this. The problem wasn’t me. The problem definitely is drastically compounded by the fact that this co-worker’s MO is very similar to that of my mother, who also routinely lies about me and gaslights me and all of these things. But this was a different situation; she doesn’t have the same power as my mother. It was nothing personal about me that was causing this behavior. Blah blah blah basically positive affirmations. Which, the problem is, there are many people who assume that if I’m struggling, I must not be using positive affirmations and I should start making use of them. Whereas from where I’m standing, I’ve been at maximum benefit for positive affirmations since forever. Unfortunately, positive affirmations can only get you so far when you have trauma that was formed when you were pre-rational. Thinking rationally about why things should be okay, doesn’t work when your amygdala is used to perceiving all disapproval as extremely dangerous.
So, there I was, giving my heart and soul and every fiber of my being, yet failing so profoundly that those looking in usually figured I hadn’t even thought to use “skills” and I was just thoughtlessly reacting to things like an idiot. That is the backdrop against which disasters frequently happen. Because on a Tuesday morning (April 22, so like a bit over a week ago now), don’t I get a text from the director at like 7:30am saying she wants me in her office after my shift. So I’d just worked a full week, and I walk down to her office, panicking out of my mind but masking (apparently) effectively.
Anyway, the director apparently had no idea that the assistant director had been telling me I was doing everything fine, and there were a whole bunch of problems with my work that she thought I knew she was upset about. I was trying to figure out what she was saying without giving away the fact that I had had no idea she was dissatisfied. Honestly, I also had almost no handle whatsoever on what she believed had even happened. It felt like she was referring to a reality that she thought I shared. I was trying not to be disrespectful, so I was gently trying to figure out what on earth she was talking about. For example, she said that “a third party” had told her that I told them that she (the director) wasn’t doing enough to help. Which, she (the director) thought that was unfair. But, like, I defintely never said that. When I tried to probe as to who this “third party” was, she just said “I hear from other staff, I hear from clients…” Basically, it sounded like everyone was talking about me and I had no prayer of being able to find out who was saying what or why.
Now, note that when I’m talking to an authority figure, I’m not able to in the moment advocate for myself. This makes sense in light of my having been routinely beaten severely at the slightest provocation of either of my parents. At that point, “I,” meaning me, really don’t have any conscious control or awareness of anything going on. It’s just Trauma on auto-pilot, trying to emotionally regulate the other person so we won’t die. So the director reamed me out, insisting that saying things like “bully” or “hostile” was totally unfair, and it was “a communication problem,” and we (me and co-worker) were both equally to blame. Which, I had originally taken that stance and aggressively tried to solve the problem from that angle, only to have the co-worker point blank state that she was treating me the way she was on purpose because she didn’t like the way I breathed.
Problem is, I had been forced to move beyond the happier possibility that this was just a communiction problem. Because obviously I do experience communication problems regularly. That doesn’t explain the severity of this co-worker’s behavior, or the fact that she had never, at any point, expressed any actual desire to have a functional relationship. She made demands, I tried to comply, somehow it was never good enough, and now here we were. And usually the point at which I lose my job is when I’m in that state of having absolutely nothing more to give, and then I’m given “constructive criticism” that is not actionable. So in this case, I was supposed to believe that the co-worker was well-intentioned, and just talk to her about how I don’t like it when she lies and says my shift is covered when it wasn’t, or when she says to wake up so-and-so at 3am and that turned out to be wrong, or when she started the rumor that I didn’t want to be told basic information about protocol, etc, which resulted in my not being given critical information, which resulted in my repeatedly asserting emphatically that I absolutely did want this information, which finally ended up with the rumor being unstoppable because the person starting the rumor knew it was false from the outset.
But, I didn’t lose my job. I kept calm (probably mostly thanks to dissociation), let the director vent until she seemed to feel better, and then made it out of there like a bat out of hell. Then when I got home, all heck let loose. I don’t super remember exactly what happened and what I do remember is in no particular chronological order. I know that the rest of the day was really hard and I was reaching out for supports, and somehow made it through the day.
Well, one thing about me is that I do have a history of nightmares. However, more frequently, what I get is dreams that things are okay and my life is worth living. In this particular dream, I had decided to just start trying to get pregnant and I was so excited and relieved that, at age 35, I didn’t have to put it off anymore.
Yeah, so waking up from that sucked. Going from finally, finally attempting motherhood, back to my dumpster fire of a life, pretty much was the turning point that turned crisis into Crisis. Next thing you know, one thing led to another, and my thing was that I couldn’t quit my job, so my options were to make my job work (not possible, since I would be required to pretend to agree with a zillion alternative facts or risk getting even more “constructive criticism”), or commit suicide (which I really didn’t want to do, but it seemed like the one thing that would make everyone calm down and stop being mad at me). From there, I ended up in a CCS, which was actually much better than my previous experience with a CCS. So it was all basically okay until HR called.
Now, I knew better than to reach out to my job when I was falling apart, especially since I didn’t have to go back to work for a couple of days so I had time to figure things out. But basically HR called and said they couldn’t approve a transfer to another location until I’d worked for 6 months. I had only worked for a little over 4 months. So my options were to suck it up, or go per diem. I didn’t feel like I had any choice, so I accepted the offer to go per diem. Then not long later I regretted that, for a million reasons. One, going per diem basically seemed like quitting, which meant I was going to die. Also, what if people thought I had taken the decision lightly, and had just impulsively left my job without seriously contemplating all other options, up to and including suicide? Quitting my job was basically the same thing as signing up to be labeled with Borderline Personality Disorder forever. That doesn’t even include how my Republican siblings think I’m a lazy, irresponsible, apathetic welfare queen that’s basically a waste of air. Having a job was the one way I justified my right to be alive to a society that has historically been very skeptical in that regard.
So, I called the assistant manager, but that turned out to be a mistake because I was crying harder than I’d cried like in years. I mean just hyperventilating, full-on sobbing like just totally out of my mind, absolutely nuts. Assistant manager seemed startled, surprised, concerned, maybe even a bit scared, but she remained supportive. She said to just call back HR and get my job back. She even ended the call with a sincere, “It’s going to be okay.”
Yeah, well, apparently I didn’t believe her, so that’s where I was in the metaphorical hole and didn’t stop digging. So yeah I sent her a text message. I re-read the text message the next day, and have blocked most of it out. It was lengthy, let’s say, basically oversharing to to the max about my entire tragic life story. So that was bad.
Now, at that point, perhaps due to the really amazing people working in the CCS, I finally was able to figure out that there was just no way I was going to be able to make that situation better without some time to chill out and get it together. So, I sent AI a question that turned out to be legitimate:
With the help of artificial intelligence, staff, and 12 years of intensive therapy under my belt, I managed to scrape together a text message asking for sick days that was reasonably effective and probably did not exacerbate the damage any further. Then I spent the weekend chilling out, doing nothing, nobody freaking out at me for doing xyz wrong, no expectations, just blissful safety. I was so much better after a few days of that. Now, one thing that had also been going on in the background was that the pope died, and one thing led to another and my siblings were full-on planning to save my soul immediately by convincing me that the Bible was the infallible word of God. So, I risked getting hit by even more toxicity and threw myself at the mercy of Reddit. Guess what? They were amazing. Like, pretty much, they said what I needed them to say, which was the same thing that people had been telling me for years, but I wasn’t in a space to hear it:
A man receives only what he is ready to receive… We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now.
-Henry David Thoreau (Because grad school was totally worth it, and not in any way a waste of $27,000.)
Anyway, basically, I needed new people in my life. This makes sense. I’ve been desperately lonely because having “mental illness” is isolating, and when I am around people, I’m constantly watching everything I say. Thankfully I actually do have several people in my life now who are really solid, healthy friendships, but I hadn’t told any of them that I was struggling at all. Because when you have a really, really small friend circle, it’s a ton of pressure on the people in your life.
Maybe, this whole time, I’d been thinking that employment was the most important thing, when building up my social network has always been the most important thing.
Social supports obviously are important if I want to have a baby. Social supports also are the thing that will be the antidote to feeling inadequate at work. Currently I always feel like I deserve it when things go wrong or somebody doesn’t like me. The fact that my self-esteem is perpetually in the basement unfortunately creates a viscious cycle of failure, which then makes self-esteem suck even more, and that goes on forever.
So, my new plan is to switch to per diem after all. TBH I’ll probably make the same amount of money because my health insurance will get cancelled. I signed up for a whole bunch of social shit, and actually went to a board game gathering at the library. Going to social shit isn’t free and I don’t have a car and there are barriers. But I’m just going to really try to shift my primary focus from employment to social supports, in hopes that those social supports will eventually be the thing that makes me successful at full-time employment, and then I can go ahead and have that baby.
I’ll keep you posted!!
