mental health bad, long post, long paragraphs
how do i explain what its like to be a working person working in tech contracting for the government with my mental situation
the joker's trick of full time work, or maybe it's just a function of my awful job, is that the hours between clocking out and clocking in stop feeling like free time and start feeling like just dreading the start of the next work day. i feel like i could go to bed right this instant and sleep 14 hours and not miss anything
and i know that when i wake up what will be waiting for me is poorly explained tasks that require me to use technologies that have not been explained to me, the documents for which are spread across three different places that i had to individually ask permission to access, and my responsibilities might have shifted in a way i do not understand and will not be explained to me without my explicitly asking, and the boilerplate daily tasks for getting set up to do anything are byzantine and uncomfortable and require obscure configuration details and require me to enter the same fucking PIN two dozen goddamn times and i hate it i hate it i hate it i feel like i'm drowning get me out of this job good lord working for the DoD is bad enough why does it have to be hell on earth on top of that i am crumbling into fucking dust over here computers were a mistake tech was a mistake cast me into the wind
re: mental health bad
being mentally ill under capitalism is like getting shoved myst-style into a kafka story
re: mental health bad
re: mental health bad, long post, long paragraphs
and this doesnt get into the meetings, the fucking meetings, every morning a meeting, every morning just a little earlier than i feel comfortable waking up, sitting there until my name is called and having to bullshit an explanation for what i did yesterday and how i plan to be productive today
this is part of a brainwashing strategy called "scrum" which , as used by the government, seems like it was made for people who saw how outdated waterfall was but wanted their numbing slow torture of tech employees into drones to be disguisable as "agile" and therefore hip and modern
and then the retrospective and planning meetings which take 3-5 hours of my life away every two weeks where meaningless nonsense issues are discussed for hours and hours on ticketing systems i may or may not have access to and it is unclear to me where if at all i figure into the plan to resolve any of them and then my name is called again and i blurt out a fibonacci number like 2 or 3 and a rationale that shows i was vaguely listening
and when the meeting is over i want to cry and cry but i dont know where all my tears went but theyre certainly not coming out anytime soon
going to a physical office i never had this acute of a reaction to my boring enterprise work but im starting to think it was less that that atmosphere made me productive and more that it acted like an immunosuppressant, playing on my fear of being seen as weird by the people around me if i acted as erratically as this in the office, while the same complaints and the same chafing built up and up and up
and i know that the only other option at present, the only other option until i get a better job or my shit together enough to go freelance with music or code or something, is an increasingly stressful and terrifying state of unemployment. im not trained to do anything else that would pay me enough to pay the rent where i live. and i dont want to move back in with my parents, good stars, never that if i can help it, never go back to their conservative old person nonsense and be dragged away from the one place ive ever lived where i knew anyone around me. so i do the best i can and hide the sound of my cracking soul until after ive put in my hours for the day and turned my work laptop off
reflecting on this i feel acutely as though i have stared my future cause of death in the face