I spent most of my morning crying. Fortunately a fair bit of that was with the bartender, although that meant I was incoherent for half of the session. The sadness and loneliness has gotten bad enough that I asked him for extra sessions and he granted my wish, even though his schedule is tight over the next couple weeks.

To tell the truth, I wish that I could take a vacation, but I’m saving my vacation time for when I can visit friends. And it’s not clear that a “staycation” would do me good, as isolation tends to drive me batty—but on the other hand, at least with a staycation I could choose to be around people rather than working in isolation. Plus it’s a bad time to ask for a vacation anyways.

With my previous team at work, I could go to work and not be lonely. I would get pulled into discussions about design, architecture, and whether Wolverine could be killed. I would make jokes, laugh, and work.

My current team just does. Not. Talk. Not unless it’s purely about work—and even then, nobody discusses anything outside of the strict parameters of the job. No one likes their job; everyone has regrets. I’m not special in my despairing, but of everyone there, I cope with it the worst.

It’s easy, so very easy, to dislike a job like this.

I should be glad I have a job, though. Not everyone is so fortunate, and life with the PTSD and bipolar is hard enough as it is without doing something stupid.

But gods, I just want to end it all sometimes.

So! My bartender and I discussed (as much as possible, given my extreme weeping) mitigation tactics. He asked me to approach this as a problem to solve. For instance, I could make connections outside of work; I can make new connections inside work and preserve old ones; I can try to socialize with my teammates.

I have no problem with preserving old connections. I’ve been spending every other lunch this week visiting and saying hi to the old team and my other former colleagues.

But when it comes to new… I guess it falls under change, which I don’t deal well with, but more to the point, it falls under trust.

And I’m an extrovert with severe trust issues. My father, as a pattern of abuse, isolated me and discouraged me from forming friendships. He taught me to automatically think of other people as merely opportunistic would-be villains, or even secret murderers. You could say that he tried to create an introvert; you could say a lot worse things, too.

I worry a lot about rejection, too. Rejection by coworkers makes things awkward… on the other hand, we pretty much don’t interact, so maybe it’s a meh-meh situation.

Writing about this makes me cry, even after sleeping on this entry. Change on top of lack of interaction on top of suddenly having to deal with the loneliness aspect of the Years of Zorn and Tharn on top of the bipolar on top of the PTSD…

This is why I haven’t been writing. I think I’ll just start reading again. I’m almost done with the latest Mark Reads, though, so what I’ll find after that is beyond me at this point. I want new and comforting or maybe funny.