The point is, I was in danger of being right back there again.
The very next day after the linked post, I said, "Og says that I'm putting far too much pressure on myself, that if the job is going to cause me this much trouble I should just walk away from it and find something else."
I've heard it from others since then, and I wish I'd been smart enough last year to heed his advice...and this time I'm taking it.
Last year, I found myself in a very difficult place, and ended up scratching myself with a razor blade in order to find a way out of it. That gave me the "out" I needed, the path to ending the avoid-avoid conflict. It also cost me some $2,700 in hospital fees, doctor fees, ER fees, ambulance fees, fee fees, and the horse I rode in on--almost literally, as I could have bought quite a nice motorcycle for that. It cost me my FOID card and two weeks in the psych ward. It also cost my family and friends quite a lot of angst they did not need.
This time? This time I talked to my therapist, and my fiancee, and prayed over it...and came to the conclusion that I can't do this, that if I try I'm just going to lose my shit and end up in the psych ward again.
My exhaustion--and falling asleep while driving--was a symptom, not a cause; and it means that I have to be a lot more careful about how I approach the "career" facet of this big life rebuilding project I embarked on in June of 2011.
Here's what I wrote to Lemonzen earlier:
I have to be out of the house for twelve hours a day, and have perhaps 3 hours in which to do *everything else* (bathe, cook, pay bills, shop, etc) before I MUST be in bed for the next day. On this schedule I cannot go to either Bible study (that keeps me up past 9 PM) or choir (which keeps me up until 8) so I am, in effect, unable to go to those activities if I want to get 8 hours of sleep and be able to function the next day. 8 hours of sleep is 7 PM to 3 AM, more or less; if I have to get up at 3:30 in order to leave the house at 4:15, I MUST be in bed by 7 PM. Especially since I don't go to sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow--it usually takes some time for me to fall asleep even when I'm really tired. And of course I wake up in the middle of the night to hit the can, so I don't get 8 hours of sleep even if I do get to sleep at 7 and have the alarm set at 3:30.She has been extremely supportive throughout all of this, and is 100% behind me. More, I cannot ask.
We had three chances to talk today; and our last conversation occurred after I should have been asleep. I did go to sleep around 8-ish...then woke up at 9:30, completely, and was unable to sleep. I was depressed, and crying, and was--in every respect--in exactly the same emotional state as in May of 2011, when I had that job in Rantoul. I called Lemonzen; she and I talked for about an hour, and at the end of it I'd made my mind up on what had to be done.
So I resigned the position at Michaels. Sent an e-mail to the HR person who offered me the job saying I was regretfully resigning blah blah blah etcetera.
It's not an optimal solution, but it's a damned sight better than continuing to try until I get so depressed I feel like cutting myself is the only way out.
...already have begun looking for a new job, though--put an app in at CompUSA via the Internet Wednesday afternoon, and there are a few other places I'm going to have a gander at later today (Thursday) or perhaps tomorrow.
But while sitting here and thinking things over, I realized that what I ought to look for, right now, is a part time job. Jumping right into a full-time job seems to be part of the problem.
It's Man's lot to live by the sweat of his brow and I have no objection to earning a living; I just can't seem to do it very well. It's something I've got to work through; I had thought it was simply a question of sufficient distance from Mom's death but it's obviously a lot more complicated than that.
I honestly thought I was ready.
Well, besides looking for a new job, I'm also going to embark on a new project: I'm going to write some short stories and try to sell them. I have some ideas (and a few roughs in the can) that I can start with, and I might be able to make something out of them. We'll have to see--but if I did that, and could make a few bucks here and there, it would help.
Also, there's my promise to Lemonzen to shop [Release Candidate 1] to at least one or two publishers by the end of the year. Selling a novel would be huge.
And maybe that's why the Lord is putting me through this. You never know.
