Ugh.

I’d like to say that things have changed since I last updated this blog in what, November? But same shit different day, honestly.

I haven’t been scheduled at “work” for over 2 months now (I quit counting weeks after 2 months, honestly) and I haven’t been fired or anything that I know of, and I’m pretty sure that’s the sort of thing they tend to make pretty final. I still don’t have the balls to go in and turn in my hat and apron and bitch the manager out for never scheduling me. Is this payback for me saying I didn’t want to be the shift manager, way back when I first started? I don’t know, but it’s like, with job after job after job not working out, and with a plethora of rejection emails after interviews (or even without them, as I just got this morning from one of them), there has to be something wrong with me.

I just don’t see any other explanation for this. I mean, look at my past several jobs. Had to quit the call center in mid 2016 because I was literally having the worst anxiety I’d ever had in my entire life (crying before work, crying throughout the day at work, crying when I got home because I was already worrying about the next day at work), not to mention my stats being horrible due to said anxiety. Then the dishwashing at the nursing home didn’t work out. I missed a few days because I got sick, and they fired me because it was within my first 90 days. Like I fucking planned to get sick and need bloodwork and an ultrasound on my goddamn liver and gallbladder. They turned out to be small gallstones, by the way, but they’re not causing problems and aren’t blocking anything.

Then I literally went until, what, May of 2017 before I got the stupid pizza place job (think the place with the red roof with the cheese in the bread part of the pizza tbh), and at first, I was getting decent hours, but that was only because one of their cooks was on vacation. It was so important to me to do well at that job. I constantly asked if I was doing everything all right, if there was anything I could do differently or improve on. For a while, every shift I was even bringing home baked treats to work because 1, I like being nice, and 2, I lowkey thought people would like me if they grew to associate me with brownies or whatever. And apparently that didn’t make a difference. I slowly got scheduled less and less, and it wasn’t for the position I was originally hired for (cook). They would schedule me to come in, wash dishes for 2-3 hours, and then I’d go home, and that’d be all I’d get for two fucking weeks. At this point, I don’t remember specifics about how to make any of the goddamn pizzas, how much sauce or cheese each size gets, toppings, etc, so at this point she couldn’t even schedule me to be the only cook. I can probably count on one hand how many pizzas I’ve actually made totally myself (sauce, cheese, and toppings), and I’ve worked there since fucking May. Last year, I barely made 300 dollars there. I’m only going to bother filing taxes at all so I can maybe get 20 bucks back. The last two years, my tax return was 1000 or more, from the call center.

I’m going to be applying for disability, even though quite frankly I don’t think I’ll get it. My anxiety and depression have obviously gotten so bad that a normal job just isn’t possible anymore, especially when you look at the impact they’ve had on my last several jobs (I remember at the nursing home, I’d literally be crying openly, repeating “They’re gonna fire me they’re gonna fire me” over and over like a literal crazy person. The reason I didn’t get a job at this industrial laundry place is… kind of a long story.

First, I got there and I didn’t know where my birth certificate was, and they said if it was three days from then and I still didn’t have it, they’d have to terminate my job. The lady printed off some info for me and told me it was like 20 bucks to get an official copy of my birth certificate. Then we continued with orientation, or we were going to. I was getting a tour of the floor when I had literally the worst panic attack I can remember, I was pretty much openly sobbing. When they gave me a work shirt and pants to put on, I got in the one stall bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the floor crying for what felt like half an hour but might have been less, I don’t know. I was still weeping when I got out, and I said I’d really like to stay for orientation but at that point I was too upset. They sent me home but I do recall being told “we expect people to be able to work their full shift”, or whatever, I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

So back to the birth certificate issue. I got a 25 dollar prepaid card to try to buy it online, and then I find out it’s not 20 dollars over the phone, it’s 30, and I would need to send them in the actual, snail mail, a photocopy of my driver’s license. So I then bought a what, 35 dollar prepaid card, and tried literally six times in a row to buy the damn thing online, and it would not take my prepaid card. So then I decide to just suck it up and drive the almost 2 hours to the state capitol to get it in person, and the car I was driving fucking died an 1+ into the trip, in the middle of nowhere on the interstate, and I ended up having to call my dad’s aunt (barely older than he is, they’re more like cousins) who lived in the area to come get me. I stayed with her for almost a week, during which I finally did get the coveted copy of my birth certificate. So when I got home, I called up the laundry place and told them that I had gotten my birth certificate, and they told me they gave the position to someone else. And all of that happened because I had a fucking anxiety attack during orientation.

And it’s like, I also had a lot of anxiety when starting the pizza place job. I also warned the boss that yeah, I had anxiety, because I’m like, better to tell her starting out than to not tell her and have some huge panic attack at work, you know. I expressed nervousness at being the only cook when it was really busy but I never said I wouldn’t do it, and like I said earlier, it was very important to me to do well at that job.

It just feels like more and more, it literally doesn’t matter what I do, that everything is going to turn out to be shit anyway, so it’s a piss poor motivator to actually do anything. Which is a super shitty attitude to have.

But it’s like, and the guy who prescribes meds (I like skype with him once every three months, at the mental health place because he lives in like Georgia or some shit) even said, “when you don’t have a job you have anxiety about money and when you have a job you have anxiety about getting fired”. And it’s like, for so long it’s always been like “Well once you get a job you can relax”, and then literally as soon as I hear I’ve been hired, my brain goes straight to “THEY’LL PROBABLY FIRE YOU ONCE THEY FIND OUT HOW BAD A WORKER YOU ARE”, and more and more I’m finding out that I’m literally going to have anxiety no matter what my circumstances are. No job? Stress about money, and the family that have been paying your bills for the last 6+ months. Job? Stress about getting fired and then going back to not having money and costing people money. And it’s so exhausting. And I still kind of blame myself for all this. It comes up constantly in therapy where I’m like “What if I’m secretly faking it, what if it’s really not this bad and I’m lying to everyone and I really don’t deserve all this special bullshit” etc.

I mean, for so long, I’ve blamed everything on myself. And yeah, I’ve done shitty things in the past, not all my failures are out of my control. Some of them are my fault, but every time something doesn’t work out, I immediately blame myself, and I’ve literally been doing this to some degree since childhood. When I’d misbehave and get grounded, I didn’t think on my actions, I just figured I was a bad kid, and I grew to resent my parents. Negative reinforcement didn’t work.

I’m still having trouble getting myself to believe that my anxiety/depression are this severe, but at this point they literally prevent me from living my life. I’ll go days without showering, or leaving the house, the dishes pile up, I’m wearing filthy clothes because I haven’t done the laundry in two weeks, that sort of thing. And at this point, they either prevent outright or make it almost impossible to concentrate on working when I have a job, because I’m so busy thinking about how I’m not doing well enough quick enough and that they’re going to fire me. And that’s why it’s like, at the same time that I don’t feel like I’m crazy enough to get disability, more and more I’m finding out that I just cannot function normally, in normal society.

But it doesn’t feel fair, there are so many other people that are doing okay, and they’ve had to wade through way more bullshit than I have, but at this point, I feel like I’m hurting the economy more by not having income than I would be if I received a disability payment each month. I have to assume that I wouldn’t get section 8 anymore, or I’d owe a larger portion of my apartment’s rent. I likely wouldn’t need food stamps anymore because the disability would cover my food costs. I’d also likely be able to use it to cover my own bills, and to start paying back my parents for the assload of money I owe them, as well as building up a savings account again.

But it’s like… I’ve always been taught that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. So I just don’t see how disability is anything but wishful thinking. I feel as if I’ll be in these circumstances forever, and it’s honestly only because I’m so afraid of everything (including pain, and consequences) that I haven’t thought of killing myself, but that’s really not something you can discuss with people without scaring the shit out of them.

All of this, and then you add what’s been happening in the news, and politics, and my anxiety is literally the highest it’s ever been, and I really can’t live my life like this.