So I meant to post a lot of this like 6 months ago, but a combination of desire for games (which I don't ignore, nowadays, it's too rare), lazy, workhell, and depressionhell... anyways.
Speaking of, um.
Content Warning: depression (double extra content warning for tinytext)
So last year around this time was the last actual Life Update from CK yeah? Yeaaaaah I was downplaying how bad I felt. Being me I can surface level just auto-pilot through most things, people don't expect me to talk to them very much and I'm boring so I sound like I'm just all business work mode regardless of what I'm doing.
Like my work mode is also ditzy and self-deprecating mind, but it seems to come off as "oh just trying to keep things light" as far as I can tell.
And I mean, it's a long-term care home. Around half are elderly folk, maybe a bit more. Several have advanced dementia. Several more have obvious signs of decline even after the ~year and a half I've been there. I'd say around two dozen residents have passed away of natural causes in that time. Even the kitchen work is continual motion, lots of interruptions, unusually to get full lunches, clearly the bottom rung "everyone who feels abused just kicks you because you're beneath them" position. Because of the way the union there is set up, the frequent call-ins (which mostly decreased aside from a sharp increase in January, then again through most of April, hence meaning to write most of this six months ago) mean first shift (like myself) will have to stay and cover any from second shift, since there aren't supposed to be empty positions. Ignore that if someone from first shift calls in, it goes empty unless someone wants the hours.
I think I've somewhat fucked up my feet after doing a few too many of those in a short span.
It's an unending grind, is what I'm saying. Seeming continually tired but somewhat morbidly jokey isn't all that odd.
Typical early-morning work thoughts (repeat with triple intensity during mandated overtime):
There is no future. We collapse at ever escalating speeds into fascism, the inevitable point of no return for capitalism and global warming approach ever faster because we run so far from addressing them.
YOU have no future. Even if humanity makes it, you can't do this much longer. You have no skills. You will keep doing this until you collapse. Don't expect to see 40.
You are miserable. Tomorrow will always be today, except you're older, more tired, more beaten down. There's nothing to your life except work, your friends move on without you, and you will die alone.
Objectively, given the above, you would be better off dying.
At heightened intensity, you can also add "maybe just plow into a tree on the way home."
To answer the obvious question, I don't trust anyone locally to not be a disinterested pill-pusher and do more than write a script then ignore. Also, when some of the triggers are stress from overwork, I mean... having the time to even go would alleviate the problem y'know?
Anyway, I think of it as a fog. Like, some of that is stuff that's floated about in my headspace for years. Milder forms since literally high school. But normally it's just stuff that's there if I go looking for it, but doesn't really intrude on daily life. But in a depression fog it's effort to wave it away and function, right?
Towards the end of January my grandfather died. (clarification: this was my mom's dad, not my father's parents whom I live with). My sister actually called me at work (apparently, she left me a voice mail, then felt super guilty and instead called me at work because it was wrong not to at least say it directly), flubbed the explanation a few times (she said nursing home rather than funeral home).
For what it's worth, he'd had heart troubles a few years before, but otherwise was fine. Basically he went out to do the chores (he still did some of the farm work on his property), collapsed in the field, and was dead within minutes. My line in most of the proceedings amounted to "of ways to go, fast and mostly-healthy is way better than most", since of course my relatives would have already asked what I did for work and many of them have also worked healthcare.
Anyways, so I'm about two hours from finishing my shift at this point, and everyone's just kinda there at his house, so... I finish my shift. I spend about an hour on full auto, quite numb, but once that passes...
I feel about as good as I had for months.
The fog lifted more or less entirely, think to call ahead and see if everyone's eaten, have no trouble doing my minor bit in sticking to schedules and running around (I was a pall bearer, but otherwise didn't do much funeral/wake planning.) It only last a couple weeks, but things weren't quite so bad after that internally, took a harder nudge to get into the nastiest part of the monologue and the fog wasn't quite as all-encompassing.
For some reason sharp emotional shocks kick my brain into proper functionality.
Although it's definitely possible that DLCon being forthcoming helped with things not being quite as bad once the fog returned. Having concrete dates like that on the horizon is helpful for focus. But I think that even without that it'd have taken a while for things to descend quite that far despite no material improvement happening anywhere in life.
I still need to think about how to move on though. I don't think I can handle the added workload if I wanted to try and get anything more out of this position (like, there's a completely reasonable chance that if I wanted to get a bunch of schooling in that they'd pay for chunks of it), and I'm not... really sure of anything I could move into in terms of another field. Or even what I'd tolerate. But also it'd be exceedingly difficult to find another cook-type position with remotely similar pay and benefits that also wasn't massively worse in terms of physical strain. Which, y'know, is a problem like my feet kinda hurt all the time now.
So yeah like... mostly nothing's changed, but actually the fog hasn't really been a thing the past week or so so like... thought I should finally get this done.
