This is a really real mental health post.

TW: Mention of Suicidal Thoughts

I made in it to United Way today.

This is actually a huge accomplishment.  Normally when I’m crashing I call out. It’s a volunteer job and it wears me out. It’s the last place I want to be when I’m fighting my own brain.  Today I figured maybe it would be a helpful distraction.  I pushed myself to go in.

The last bunch of weeks they’ve kept me off the phones and put me on other projects.  I went from updating resource listings, that I would have been using 2 years ago, to alphabetizing and sorting lists of resources that their system wasn’t handling properly.  Today I entered something into the system that I don’t fully understand, but it needs to be done, literally, 900 times. Boring, monotonous, repetitive, unskilled work that shouldn’t take up the time of someone with skills to do something more.  Therefore it’s perfect for me.  Except I like the idea of feeling like I’m doing something important and this just feels like busy work to free up the other people to do the stuff that actually matters.

I also wonder if I fucked up on the phones and that’s why they took me off of them.

The other problem with repetitive busy work is it gives my brain three hours to continue ruminating.

Click here and here and here and hit submit.  “If I’d finished a degree I could be doing more.”

Click here and here and here and hit submit.  “I wonder what I fucked up on the phones to get me sent down to this.”

Click here and here and here and hit submit.  “I always start off so great, but it always falls apart and I fail again and again.”

Click here and here and here and hit submit. “Where’s the permanent exit from all this.  I’m tired.”

Its one thing to be in that fog while I’m sitting at home.   It’s an entirely different experience to be surrounded by the activity of office life and feel myself slipping further and further away.

Click here and here and here and hit submit.  “They’d be glad they don’t need to find something for me to do each week.”

My brain starts looking for a plan.  What’s on hand, what’s around.

I’m still not sure if it was good that I went in or not.  There were people there who I could have told, people who I trust, who would have talked with me, except right now I don’t really want to tell anyone during the worst of it.

I feel like I’m looking for the emergency exit from life.   Except jumping off this bus isn’t really the answer.  I know that, logically.

But the fog is so thick and that exit looks so clear sometimes.