I’m working on a new strategy for not crying every day.

How is that for an opening? Ha!

I’m in a weird situation at work and I’m finding it damaging and stressful, yet somehow incredibly boring. At the moment, I work for a parent, running the administrative side of their businesses and the entirety of my own business. My roles encompass so many different moving parts that it causes literal headaches, trying to not miss something vital. Not to mention that I work with the poster children for patriarchal mediocre white men, complete with the sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and straight-up racism.

And yet, I am horribly bored. This is a problem as it gives me free time. Free time is where the worst of my panic happens. I’ve coped with my anxiety and panic by working until I dropped, for years. Free time is almost a curse.

But I’m required to be here, at my desk, between the hours of 6AM and 2PM, whether or not I have work.

So here I sit, and here I panic.

I haven’t determined how much is the time and how much is brought on by a place that just feels like conflict to me. Like right now. I’m currently waiting for a couple employees to fly off the handle for not getting paid as a result of them not turning in their time cards. I work with people who intentionally block my efforts to work efficiently, and resent me for the good job I do. At every turn somebody is refusing to cooperate in some way.

I’m burnt out. I’m tired of fighting.

Normally this free time and computer access would let me do a thousand things I love but with my burn out, I can’t do anything. I can’t write. I can’t edit. All I can do is stare into the void and wait for the day to pass.

Day after day. Week after week.

But even when I’m home, the moments I sit still, it’s like being attacked by my own brain. I try to relax and I’m abused by thoughts of my laziness, my lack of worth, my inability to accomplish anything.

It’s a bit like living in a hole that somebody is shoveling dirt into, but I’m the person burying myself alive. I am exhausted by my sadness, ground to dust by my anxiety, and tortured by my bouts of panic. At least once a day I fall apart, convinced I’m a terrible, worthless human and the author of my own misery. I wind up in tears, miserable and alone.

It can’t continue. It shouldn’t have continued this long, and I’m mad that I can’t find a button for an instant fix.

But I have to do what I can. Leaving my job is complicated right now, and not really an option. If I can’t fix that, maybe I can fix the spare time I have, as well as the persistent idea that I am accomplishing nothing of value.

Hence the new blog. If writing helps me deal with the drowning waves of emotions and thoughts that send me to dark places, then I will write. And if I feel like I’m accomplishing nothing, I’ll make myself accomplish something. The second part of this is deciding to try to breathe new life into my fiction writing. I stopped creating stories over the past year and that hurts as much as anything.

So my goals are to use the blog for accounting what I’m feel and what is making me crumble to pieces, and to write fiction using random prompts or generators.

Fake it till you make it, right?