So I almost seem to have the major things in my personal life together, as well as the things for my first job. Now I'm working on my second job, the state of my apartment, and my therapy. With hopefully some left over for life's little unexpected joys insanities.
Things contributing to my present stability:
- Dedicated alone/quiet time for several hours, 3 days a week
- Therapy 1 day a week
- Actually being reasonably competent at my first job now
Of these, the alone time is probably the most important. Prior to Chris moving into the area, I had most of my free time to myself. When Chris moved here, I suddenly had almost none. The next few months were a learning experience in a lot of ways. It turns out I can, in fact, struggle through life with essentially no alone time to collect my thoughts in. It is not, however, beneficial to my health, welfare, or sanity.
As such I've now established fixed alone time in my schedule, which can (but hopefully won't often) be interrupted by special events. Since doing so, my subjective stress levels seem to be down some. Not a lot, as things are still in flux and the world is still its unpredictable self, but some.
Which leads me to therapy. Objectively, things are changing. Subjectively, I don't notice huge differences. The LENS (brainpoking) is slowly changing my brainwaves for the better, as evidenced by the occasional "what was that?" moment during the therapy and my new ability to forget things more often. That sounds like backward progress, but it's actually good. It means my overall anxiety level is down. I normally channeled my anxiety into making sure I didn't miss appointments or other events, and into remembering to do the roughly 5 billion things I have to do. The fact that I now seem to have less anxiety to do so means I forget things or miss things. Fortunately, I have an app on my iPad to take up the slack.
And speaking of taking up the slack: that is now my first job. I take up all the slack for people who are too busy to take up their own. My boss is hilariously overworked, in part because he's a very personable guy and a problem-solver, and so people bring him their problems. While it's excellent to have a resource like that available, it does mean he gets less of his own work done. Which is where I come in. In addition to answering phones (still horrible), cleaning (not horrible-usually), and keeping the bathrooms and kitchens stocked, I take on side projects. These include filling out roughly a small tree's worth of paperwork, creating spreadsheets, and faxing things and scanning them into our system. It's sometimes hard to tell, but I think it helps.
Strictly speaking, those things aren't all I do for my job. Under my other (semi) boss, I schedule appointments, add people to our system, call translators for our Spanish-speaking families, and relay various messages. I'll also pick up odd jobs that need doing, like plunging the toilet, hunting down the owner of a lost smartphone, shoveling snow in the morning, or making the second (or third, if it's a bad day) pot of coffee. The lattermost set is always of my own initiative. These things need doing, but nobody particularly tells me to do them. They just need doing and I'm usually the most available.
My second job is finally (bleh) kicking into high gear. Apparently it was already supposed to be in high gear and I was supposed to be doing things, but as somebody dropped the ball on showing me how and then proceeded to castigate me over it, I haven't been. Fortunately, one of the other people I'm working with is a lot more sympathetic and is going to get me started with the software I need to do the work. I should probably write about that particular experience, but as I spent 5 minutes during that meeting in tears and another 5 afterwards doing the same, I'm not particularly eager to do so.
My apartment is another animal entirely. I swear, every time I go out of town, a tornado coops itself up in my cabinets and whooshes out while I unpack, thus reducing my apartment to "barely livable." I'm one of those people who isn't a huge neat freak, but does get stressed out by not having any place to walk, or when the sink has small pieces of hair and dust all over it, or whatever. It doesn't help that the sink is bright white, and thus shows every speck of dust. So I've been slowly trying to restore order to the apartment: cleaning the fridge, organizing my shelves and cupboards, putting away travel luggage and things I'm not using on at least a weekly basis. It's slow going, because I don't like cleaning and rarely find it freeing.
Therapy falls in both the "I'm getting better at this!" and "This needs work" categories because I'm having trouble telling, subjectively, that things are improving. The program I'm on is slowly changing things, which we can tell from the results on the computer, but I think I'm fairly dense at immediate things. Hindsight, on the other hand, is 20-20, and I'm fairly introspective. So maybe half a year from now, I'll be able to look back and say "wow, I got a lot less anxious around that time!" We'll see. Or maybe I'll need to change programs again. It would probably help if I took a few minutes each day, or at least several times a week, to evaluate my mental state. I'm very used to avoiding thinking about my mental state on a day-to-day basis (sans drastic events) because the results are usually the same. That is, I usually come back with, "I'm tired. I'm really stressed out. I want to go home and curl into a ball and do nothing useful." Which, as you can guess, is completely useless for holding down a job and making a paycheck. So I usually ignore my internal whining entirely and suck it up until I can go home. I'm sure this isn't even slightly optimal, but I'd rather that than get bogged down in self-pity and misery because the world is so hard for me.
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