Baring my soul, and why THIS job didn’t work out for me.

Oh yes, friends and neighbors, if you’re counting, and I stopped awhile ago, that’s roughly the fifth or sixth job in a row where I just couldn’t hack it (although the job before this last one doesn’t count because it was school that I couldn’t hack, not the job itself). The sucky part about leaving this job, though, is that I was mentally ready for this job. I didn’t have panic attacks or go home crying (not from emotional distress, anyway). I fit in well. I learned the job really quickly–after the first day, I was basically flitting around on my own, doing very well if I do say so myself (and my manager would back me up on this), only having to bug other people to find out where things were. I didn’t feel anxious or stressed about being there, and that’s probably why I lasted as long as I did.

Did you know that if you spend five years sitting down, then try to stand on your feet for five hours on hard tile, your body will be in crippling pain before the day is halfway over?

I don’t mean like, feet aching whiny pain. No, this was literally-cannot-continue-to-stand-up pain, which was getting worse by the day instead of better as I got used to it. I was popping more and more Aleve with less and less effect. On the last day that I worked there, I spent the last two hours of my shift mostly sitting; I would try to get up and chop things, and I could stand for maybe two minutes. So I would sit down for another ten minutes, and do it all over again. I cried on the way home. The next day, I talked to my manager, and we agreed it wasn’t working. They needed someone who could stand for a full shift and do work. I didn’t want to steal their time and money sitting down when I was supposed to be working.

My heart broke, because I really wanted this job. It seems stupid to really want a job in a grocery store, but  . . . . it clicked so well. Everything fell into place beautifully in my mind. And I loved being in the big kitchen, I loved serving customers. I keep having dreams about going back into work, and in my dreams I haven’t really quit–or maybe I think they haven’t noticed I quit–but there’s a disturbed undercurrent that plucks at my heartstrings while I sleep. Because I know I can’t do it and I know it’s too late, it’s gone–the flowing water has not stopped for me; it has passed on and I wasn’t ready for it.

I feel like I’m drowning in it.

The solution seems easy but my brain just won’t wrap around it; I can look for a job where I don’t have to stand, and I can start building my strength back up, it’s not that hard, it’s really not so hard. Any sense of normalcy seems so far away, though. The stupid Asperger’s, it’s so stupid sometimes–all I feel like doing is curling up in a little cocoon and never coming back out, giving into the autistic parts of my brain and burrowing down forever. Slipping away from everything is the easiest thing in the world for me; I like being wrapped up in myself, I prefer it by nature and coming out again is the hardest thing. I’m going to miss my life if I don’t figure out how to be alive again, but it’s so nice in my little black velvet cocoon that the little ember inside me can’t seem to compete with the desire to stay snuggled in.

I’m tired of treading water to stay afloat, I’m so tired.

I’m so tired.

Taking the “tion” out of “emotion.”

Hello, personal blog. How are you? I haven’t been here much lately. This is set to be a long, personal, and possibly very boring post. I apologize. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want. I just have to write it.

Yesterday, something kind of awesome happened:

Sexy.

Yes, we got a pretty new car. Which makes us a two-car family again for the first time since 2008.

These past few years have been mightily rough for us, in a number of ways. You might remember that we were so broke in 2008 that we were almost ten grand in credit card debt trying to float the bills, because we made the somewhat badly-timed decision to move across the country and start a new chapter of our lives just as the economy was tanking.  (This decision I made on some bad advice from an ex-friend, who assured me that the economy in Columbus was “fine.” I really, really should have done more research about that.) I was still having workplace issues from the nervous breakdown I suffered when I worked at Starbucks; I couldn’t work a job for more than a week or two before I started having massive panic attacks. Finally, literally a week before we were going to give up and move back to California because we couldn’t pay the next month’s rent or bills, or buy groceries, my husband got a job.

Eventually, I started looking for a job, and I discovered a curious thing: nobody wanted to hire me because I didn’t have a car. I didn’t remember this being an issue before, but then, employers didn’t have their pick of dozens of candidates before; why hire someone who didn’t have independent transportation? I could have lied and said that I did, indeed, have my own car, but I’m kind of anti-lying. Because Mr. Geek absolutely needed the car to get to his job, I gave up looking for work until I had my own car.

We’ve been trying to buy another car for–well, awhile. Six months, seven months? After we paid down the lion’s share of our credit card debt–or, as was the case for some of it, transferred it into low-interest long-term student loan debt by using my living expense loans to pay those bills–we were able to save up enough to buy a second car. We needed to do this anyway, because the car we have now is a total piece of crap. (It’s not the car’s fault. It was a salvage title and we were kind of defrauded when we bought the car.) It runs, but there’s so much wrong with it that could be catastrophically wrong at any time, that we were uncomfortable having it as our primary car. So we shopped around. And we shopped around. And we shopped around some more, and we discovered something very interesting: the used car market in Columbus sucks. It really does. Every car we ran across that looked promising was a salvage title, or it had been in accidents, or some other bullshitty thing was going on, such as the gentleman who was trying to sell us a car that he didn’t legally own, because he had never transferred the title into his name. There were dealers trying to sell cars as private parties who had owned the car for maybe a month; we wanted to find an owner who had owned and driven the car, hence, why we wanted to buy private party.

In the end, we decided to use the cash we’d saved as a down-payment on a newer car with lower mileage. The idea is to have this car for another decade or so and take good care of it, rather than taking a chance on another mystery car that could have major hidden problems. We found one in a nearby city that was a pretty good deal, and we finally, finally pulled the trigger and bought a car.

This unleashed a cascade of emotions in me that I now realize I had been tamping down for years.

Because of the 2008 financial disaster–and by that, I mean ours specifically–we’ve been living fairly frugally. We only go out a few times a month, if that, and never anywhere nice (I can’t tell you the last time we saw a film for full price when it first came out); we buy clothes from the thrift store, or out-of-season on sale; and I will admit it to you here: I practically had to beg to get a cell phone. We literally fought about getting a cell phone for over a year. The only major purchases (other than the cars, one of which was out of desperate necessity when the hood of our Camry flew off while Mr. Geek was driving it) that we’ve made since 2008 have been my laptop and plane tickets to visit Mr. Geek’s mom in California a few months ago. Almost all of our extra money has either gone to paying down debt or socking it into savings. In our minds, we’ve created the idea that we’re extremely poor because of this. Extra expenditures–even small ones, even necessary ones–were often greeted by Mr. Geek with stress reactions, frustration, even anger, because he was working long hours and we never felt like we were getting ahead.

You can imagine, this hasn’t been awesome for our marriage. Luckily, our love is made of sterner stuff, and we’ve weathered these rough times.

I’ve also been a total hermit these past few years. I haven’t wanted to buy a bus pass because they’re kind of expensive. I hate asking people for rides, because I’m almost thirty years old and I don’t want to be a fucking bum. So, I’ve been penned up in my house–mostly perched right where I am now, on the corner of the couch, whiling away my time on the internet, trying to be productive. Waiting. Waiting for life to start back up again. Waiting to be me again. And now that we both have cars? I feel like the world has opened back up.

I have been overwhelmed.

The night before we were going to pick up the car, we didn’t feel elated about having bought a car. We felt anxious. We both knew that we were on a life-changing course. How much tension will be eased when I’m finally able to go back to work (as nervous, as oh-so-nervous as that prospect makes me)? How will we feel now that we don’t have to fret constantly about the Mazda breaking down, since it’s no longer our primary car? And we still even have some savings, so we’re not totally down to the wire anymore. It’s like waking up from a long nightmare. This prompted a bout of near-mania for me; I was emoting constantly (and broadcasting such–apologies again), unable to dull my internal chatter, unable to keep myself from expressing said chatter.

For me, this also means incredible freedom. I don’t have to plan my days around a small window of mobility. I can go anywhere I want, anytime I want. I can resume some of my old habits–if I can remember them–like going to multiple grocery stores instead of buying everything at the Kroger down the street because it’s all I have time to do. I can go to the gym on my own time. I can go out for a cup of coffee with a friend, or dinner in the evening. Shit, I can have a social life again without having to beg rides. I could join a club. I can become independent again. Even if the Mazda does break down, with a reliable primary car, we wouldn’t have any compunction picking up a cheap car that might break down. We have more security now. This is dizzying, exciting and frightening all at once.

But mostly exciting.