Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure if the current blog I’m writing it on has any readers, let alone if it will. Maybe the text might be properly edited and published down the road, who knows. Get ready for me to get horridly personal about the experience of having a job.
Part 1: cause.
Or, You (or well, me)
You’re ? years old. Your parents notice that you are hesitant to go outside and barely want to do anything.
You’re 10 years old, and - at least to your current knowledge - the first document gets drafted. Alongside some neurodivergencies, a note is made about your depressive moods.
You’re 12 years old, and you can’t help but worry that the extra care you get from your parents is a burden. Maybe it’d be easier for them if you weren’t there in the first place. Maybe it’d be easier for them if you weren’t there anymore, at least.
You’re 16 years old. You try to take care of your peers. You spend a few month-long spans struggling with disassociation and feelings of emptiness and demotivation.
You’re 17 years old. You start to break out of your shell a little bit.
You’re 17 years old. The prolonged, untreated brainwaves get more and more the better of you. You present your end project progress in December, and even though you already have more than most would have at the end of the year, you can’t help but present it with a request for a do-over. You repeat this a few months later, until the stress builds up at you waking up in panicks.
You’re 17 years old. Your teacher takes you aside and asks if you’re okay. You attempt to explain, and she listens. With your permission, she convinces your parent to make an appointment with the psychiatrist and a therapist. The former convinces her that both anti-depressants and rilatin might help me.
You’re 18 years old. The anti-depressants start helping. For the first time you notice the beauty in your environments.
You’re 18-19 years old. The people who employed you obscured and closed in deadlines, withheld payments, and were not strangers to yelling at you through the phone. You work on the bus to school, in the lunch breaks, on the bus back and your evenings. You lose touch with your loved ones and your grades plummet. Your identity is wrong, but you don’t have the environment to work on it. You notice that your food stops having taste.
You’re 19 years old. You explain to your parents that you want to drop out. The monotomy of bussiness-focused programming has got to you, and you have become disillusioned due to toxic environments, privacy destroying performance marketing and business-first classes.
You’re 19 years old. You find a new college course. It’s in Antwerp. You move into a dorm, and are suddenly surrounded by new and open people. Someone mistakes you for a girl. You realise you wish they were right. You realise that that means going home would never be the same.
You’re 21 years old. You quit your old job after they refuse to pay multiple hundreds of euros for multiple projects over multiple months. You change your name, hair and wardrobe. You fuck up constantly as you re-learn everything. But you’re surrounded by amazing people that motivate you to keep improving.
You’re 21 years old. The rift you were afraid would happen has happened, and your life has changed 5 billion times in the span of a few months and years. But you walk back to your tram, and for the first time feel like you’re in a place where you belong, and can become happy.
You’re 22 years old. You dropped out of college again as your stress keeps you up more and more. The constant thoughts of “you could be studying for your finals right now” at every hour of the every day breaks you. You start looking for a job. You start looking for a permanent place to live.
You’re 22 years old. Your uncle, who - while always supportive - you have been bonding with more since you came out, passes away. The stress of your money & possible incoming homelessness impedes all your relationships. The changes that are making you happy make it harder to be with your family for long stretches of time.
You’re 22 years old. You have a job. You rent an appartment. You even have renters insurance. Every week can contain a single or multiple days wherein you struggle to work, communicate, or eat. But, you’re allowed and able to be yourself, and you’re beginning to understand how your brain works. You hope.
Part 2: consequence.
Or, How it affects your (mine) work
It sucks. Because the first thing that you have to do here is split everything up in two categories. Things that will directly affect your work, and things that affect your personhood, and can thus be argued into infinity whether it’s “actually a problem”. Concentration problems, complete loss of appetite, inability to communicate, brain fog. But fuck, when I can’t speak to the people closest to me, to partners nor friends nor family, it’s hard to make an exception for work. But, you’ve got these things, so how do you fix them?
Part 3: solution
Or, How you (me) and your (my) employers are minimising the aftermaths
I’ve been granted the ability to have flexible hours. I try to still be on time for any meetings I’m expected
Part 2: consequence
Or, a disservice
The above ignores one of my hardest symptoms is a bit of a wildcard. It does a disservice to how much stress has an effect on me. I wish I was exaggerating when I say that it has caused me to need to go to professionals in their fields. One condition I accrued during college was one that “only appears on people undergoing chemo-therapy or 60 years and older”. At the time I was still eating consistently and healthy and everything. As of most recent, a different condition of which the strongest effect of it had laid dormant for over a decade has flared up again, causing a span of 3 days where I consistently could barely breathe or move. I’ll feel guilty for my lack of performance and feel like I don’t deserve to eat.
So what do you do? Not work to avoid stress?
I’m a perfectionist. One that likes to do all their work to get an empty queue. But this is impossible. As a programmer, code could always be optimised and new technologies always used. As an “artist”, one word or frequency can always be changed. As an adult, there is always a chore to do. Even if I did not need to work to survive, I would go crazy from not working or creating in some capacity.
Part 3: solution
Or, try?
My life is currently a bit of a juggling act. A meditation technique that I swear I learned from a book and not a way more comparatively asinine location that I use symbolises your brain as an anxious kitten to guide no jokes about my name here. Contextualising that in my work-health balance, it is currently guiding my mind into work to get things done, and then guiding it away so I don’t overtly stress.
So, lets try, I guess. I’m restarting therapy. A psychiatrist appointments incoming. I’m contacting organisations to possibly help.
Its worth a shot, right?
(To be updated)