Continuing the theme of life is totally messed up right now, I spent most of yesterday waiting for the feelings to get me, because I was prepared. I was going to grab them by the throat, yank open that drawer, and examine the fuck out of them.
So naturally, nothing happened. This makes me feel sick inside, because there’s only one more week of unpaid leave to get my shit together, and I know I’m still vulnerable. I need practice slaying monsters….
But as a friend pointed out, it doesn’t work that way. I can’t slay the feelings forever, I can only learn to live with them. Which is pretty damn depressing when I think about it, because that means whatever my parents did to me I can never escape. I can’t even just leave it in the past, I can’t “get over it” because what they did to me changed my physiology and brain chemistry and, when it comes down to it, the very folds of my cerebrum, to the point where I can never wipe that slate clean. At least, not without damaging a lot of other things in the process.
Gods that made me sad to type out. It makes me so sad and hurt; I like things to be neat and done with. I charge into situations because I want to swing a sword of fire and cauterize the shit out of a problem. At work, I do slay monsters—it’s called oncall. Bad things that happen to our customers can be brought to an end. This doesn’t happen every time—occaisonally you get the bug that’s too subtle and pops back up again—but it happens often enough that oncall is just satisfying to me, even if it rocks hell on my health due to the fact that I can’t sleep while I’m oncall at night. I can’t take the soothing drugs, you see.
Well, I could, but then I wouldn’t make a very good oncall.
And that’s ultimately the problem at work, too. Oncall takes a toll on my health that’s starting to affect my work adversely. My mental problems become so much worse and even unbearable during oncall periods that stretch across evenings, because I can’t take some of my more important calming medications. And if I don’t take them, during the stress of oncall, I can’t relax and I can’t sleep. This means my nerves are going twang and they are much more likely to snap.
The effect continues for a period that’s one week before oncall, during oncall, and one week after oncall. My body anticipates the disturbance, and then afterwards it’s recovering from the disturbance.
I’m going to have to retire from slaying monsters, it looks like. And I can’t even slay my own, not really.
In the end, that’s what this unpaid leave is about: it’s about coming to terms with the former, and adopting new ways to deal with the latter.
I feel so livid and miserable right now. It’s hard to go back and account for yesterday, but here goes:
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Cleaning something out. I’m starting to organize kitchen cabinets. This is hard, y’all.
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Cooking/baking/etc. something for myself. I burned a burger patty. I still haven’t gotten the hang of those at all.
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Reading/watching something entertaining. Guards! Guards! still.
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Reading/watching/doing something educational. Nada.
Spontaneous ∂erivation 
Part of the problem with monsters who live in drawers is that they don’t really like light, you see, and they don’t really want to be examined. So while you were all prepped and ready and rarin’ to go… the monsters, well, not so much. They’d rather stay in their drawers, thank you very much.
In a way, this is the point of monitoring. If you watch for the monsters, they can’t get you very easily. It’s like turning lights on inside your mind. If they try to rattle a fork, you’re right there, ready to pounce. Monsters don’t like light.
That’s a good way of thinking about this. Thank you.
Still with the “Oh, honey”. And I too know the love of monster-slaying; it can almost certainly still be part of your life (the world is full of monsters!), but you may need some time to figure out which monsters can be slain without you being on call.
*hugs* Yeah, hence accommodations—though I don’t know what those will entail yet—are going to be made at work. Oy.