More on what's been going on lately
Aug. 30th, 2015 06:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goldkinI've learned to handle most of life's bumps and scrapes pretty effectively, so prior to Monday, I hadn't needed this space to vent for some time. I try pretty hard to not make habits of negativity and need for sympathy, because I have a pretty good life and much prefer using it to make things that people enjoy. Over the past couple years, the artistic hobbies of mine that you've seen on my other blogs have been really effective for me, and I'm going to keep doing those.
But, by gods, I've had a really awful week, and I need to get it out of my head. So please pardon while I use this space to do so again, and please only keep reading if you want to know the morbid details.
Last Sunday, I was shaken to my core when a friend of a friend tried to intervene in my home situation. They tried to broker a truce after some tension broke out over the weekend, and did so in a way that did not get the results they wanted. Specifically, they put themselves in the position of telling me that I'd not be able to continue my housing situation past the end of the year, and did so in a way that injected them into a complex situation that I don't believe they were prepared to handle. This conversation ended with me barely holding back tears -- after all, I care for the people I'm with very much and have been here for five years -- and I lost basically the entire remainder of the weekend to feeling unwell.
On Monday, my manager of four years announced his departure. This was, as you might expect, awkward for me -- I had just successfully wrapped up a major project and was hoping it would reflect well on my performance for the year. I can't talk about any of the details of it, but I can say that I'm very proud of how well this went... and having that success lost in the noise of transition-to-new-manager was a blow on my already low morale.
Compounding this, I communicated myself legendarily poorly to my friend-of-a-friend, upsetting them enough that it scared me very deeply. And so, on Monday evening, I checked into a hotel across the street from my home, and spent a great deal of time trying to emotionally care for myself and convince myself that everything would be okay.
Around this time, I picked up a Talkspace subscription for myself. While I have a therapist that I see once a month, I desperately needed out-of-band care at this point to keep myself emotionally together. This service deserves a very high rating -- the therapist I've been paired with has done a phenomenal job of helping me work through this. And at the time, being able to get immediate care on the "he said she said"*, allowed me to insulate everyone in the situation for long enough to allow things to cool off.
For the remainder of that work week, I spent my time at my ex's home, working out of their bedroom.** My work is portable such that I was able to do this on a moment's notice, with a few awkward rough edges that I hadn't immediately considered (ie, having to use my phone to load a specific VPN, because Chromebooks are lacking in that department). For meetings, I worked out of a conference room at our local business center, which also happened to be useful because of fire alarm testing in our apartment complex that week.
Over the course of the week, I tried to make peace with my roommates over IM. Some very good progress happened on Wednesday, in which we determined that we had mostly been talking past one another, due to a difference in cultural expectations and strategies of phrasing and de-escalating an argument. For those who read here, I generally construct emotionally persuasive arguments that are redundant in nature, which tends to cross wires when I should be operating in a more technical mode. I typically freely toggle between these, but when I'm stressed and can't remove myself from a situation, I tend to operate in the emotional mode -- which had been causing communication to break down and become worse without my being aware of it.
On Friday, I attempted to make peace with my roommates in person. That was, at least partially, effective. But for a home in which I felt to some degree loved and cared for, it was an emotional slap in the face to discover just how deeply the resentment had run over my own miscommunication.
Add to all of this the fact I had already been looking to buy a house, and the metaphorical floor has fallen out from under me. I'm still healthy and financially solvent, so that's good -- but pretty much everything I had hoped to accomplish this year was crushed in one week. I have been sort of reeling semi-competently ever since as I tried to handle it, taking each day at a time to make it through, while ensuring I had enough emotional and cognitive energy left to do a competent job at work.
The tl;dr of this is: I'm probably not going to be cognitively well again for at least another few days, maybe as far as a week or three. I'm also unsure if I can make good art in this state. Astute viewers have probably recognized that the quality and definition of what I put out has been erratic in recent months, and that is directly attributable to the amount of tension I'd been experiencing inside of my own home. I'm not sure to what degree I can or should communicate this better, but things will, as I see them, recover.
I guess I'm not entirely appealing for sympathy here; I'm just rather freaked out by all of this and trying to gain traction on it by writing my own thoughts. I just wish that things were not so socially treacherous for me right now, and I feel that getting the hell out of Dodge, so to speak, will do me a lot of good.
Until that happens, please understand when I seem quiet or distant on my personal blogs. I do that to stay positive, and to buffer actionless negativity from all of you, because no one needs that in their timelines. I like all of you very much, and the conversation I'd rather have is a positive one that, as things get better, I'd like to make more candid as I go.
I'll be okay. Just... fuck this past week.
---
* This idiom wants for a gender-neutral alternative. Does one exist?
** My ex lives in the same complex that I do (I actually share their lease on top of my own, because they needed a place to stay after their own bad situation), so this was something of a surprising windfall.
But, by gods, I've had a really awful week, and I need to get it out of my head. So please pardon while I use this space to do so again, and please only keep reading if you want to know the morbid details.
Last Sunday, I was shaken to my core when a friend of a friend tried to intervene in my home situation. They tried to broker a truce after some tension broke out over the weekend, and did so in a way that did not get the results they wanted. Specifically, they put themselves in the position of telling me that I'd not be able to continue my housing situation past the end of the year, and did so in a way that injected them into a complex situation that I don't believe they were prepared to handle. This conversation ended with me barely holding back tears -- after all, I care for the people I'm with very much and have been here for five years -- and I lost basically the entire remainder of the weekend to feeling unwell.
On Monday, my manager of four years announced his departure. This was, as you might expect, awkward for me -- I had just successfully wrapped up a major project and was hoping it would reflect well on my performance for the year. I can't talk about any of the details of it, but I can say that I'm very proud of how well this went... and having that success lost in the noise of transition-to-new-manager was a blow on my already low morale.
Compounding this, I communicated myself legendarily poorly to my friend-of-a-friend, upsetting them enough that it scared me very deeply. And so, on Monday evening, I checked into a hotel across the street from my home, and spent a great deal of time trying to emotionally care for myself and convince myself that everything would be okay.
Around this time, I picked up a Talkspace subscription for myself. While I have a therapist that I see once a month, I desperately needed out-of-band care at this point to keep myself emotionally together. This service deserves a very high rating -- the therapist I've been paired with has done a phenomenal job of helping me work through this. And at the time, being able to get immediate care on the "he said she said"*, allowed me to insulate everyone in the situation for long enough to allow things to cool off.
For the remainder of that work week, I spent my time at my ex's home, working out of their bedroom.** My work is portable such that I was able to do this on a moment's notice, with a few awkward rough edges that I hadn't immediately considered (ie, having to use my phone to load a specific VPN, because Chromebooks are lacking in that department). For meetings, I worked out of a conference room at our local business center, which also happened to be useful because of fire alarm testing in our apartment complex that week.
Over the course of the week, I tried to make peace with my roommates over IM. Some very good progress happened on Wednesday, in which we determined that we had mostly been talking past one another, due to a difference in cultural expectations and strategies of phrasing and de-escalating an argument. For those who read here, I generally construct emotionally persuasive arguments that are redundant in nature, which tends to cross wires when I should be operating in a more technical mode. I typically freely toggle between these, but when I'm stressed and can't remove myself from a situation, I tend to operate in the emotional mode -- which had been causing communication to break down and become worse without my being aware of it.
On Friday, I attempted to make peace with my roommates in person. That was, at least partially, effective. But for a home in which I felt to some degree loved and cared for, it was an emotional slap in the face to discover just how deeply the resentment had run over my own miscommunication.
Add to all of this the fact I had already been looking to buy a house, and the metaphorical floor has fallen out from under me. I'm still healthy and financially solvent, so that's good -- but pretty much everything I had hoped to accomplish this year was crushed in one week. I have been sort of reeling semi-competently ever since as I tried to handle it, taking each day at a time to make it through, while ensuring I had enough emotional and cognitive energy left to do a competent job at work.
The tl;dr of this is: I'm probably not going to be cognitively well again for at least another few days, maybe as far as a week or three. I'm also unsure if I can make good art in this state. Astute viewers have probably recognized that the quality and definition of what I put out has been erratic in recent months, and that is directly attributable to the amount of tension I'd been experiencing inside of my own home. I'm not sure to what degree I can or should communicate this better, but things will, as I see them, recover.
I guess I'm not entirely appealing for sympathy here; I'm just rather freaked out by all of this and trying to gain traction on it by writing my own thoughts. I just wish that things were not so socially treacherous for me right now, and I feel that getting the hell out of Dodge, so to speak, will do me a lot of good.
Until that happens, please understand when I seem quiet or distant on my personal blogs. I do that to stay positive, and to buffer actionless negativity from all of you, because no one needs that in their timelines. I like all of you very much, and the conversation I'd rather have is a positive one that, as things get better, I'd like to make more candid as I go.
I'll be okay. Just... fuck this past week.
---
* This idiom wants for a gender-neutral alternative. Does one exist?
** My ex lives in the same complex that I do (I actually share their lease on top of my own, because they needed a place to stay after their own bad situation), so this was something of a surprising windfall.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-30 04:33 pm (UTC)Also, as for your idiom, the closest thing I can come up with is "we said they said". I don't think another one exists because it's couched in this silly normative ball of wax around traditional marriages along with expressions like "the ol' ball and chain" and such.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-30 05:14 pm (UTC)As for the idiom, "through the grapevine" and "game of telephone" are a little similar in meaning, but not similar enough.
no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 05:30 am (UTC)