There’s a Name for It.

There’s a name for it, for how I feel, for who I am.

I’ve never tried to explain myself, my insides, to anyone. It felt insignificant compared to other peoples problems. I felt insignificant. I didn’t think people would understand and even if I could say the right words, would they even care if I had a problem that wasn’t visible?

But here, in my safe-space, in the place that I hide from the world of people I know and share with complete strangers, here, I can tell the truth. I can express what is happening inside my brain and my body and heart. So here it is:

I am different than everyone else. I don’t see things the way other people do. I don’t see the world that everyone else does and not the fun magical creatures kind of way, but in my own way I have two sets of eyes. One pair of eyes see the world as a child, full of wonder and excitement and appreciation for the smallest and strangest things. I truly love my life in these moments and oddly, these moments usually come when no one is around. The second pair of eyes don’t see the world, they look intimately, to my surroundings. These eyes don’t see the bright, colorful life I have, they see the flaws and scars that life has left on my soul.

It is in these eyes that I see my problem. The first pair of eyes belong to a girl I used to know, that I still try to be. The little girl whose parents hit her and hid her away from the world, trapped in her own thoughts. Those eyes learned how to read in such a way that she could escape the awful feelings of neglect and abandonment from people who were always there. These eyes could see the life that she was supposed to have and project it upon the world much the say way one would project a movie about an architect building a skyscraper on the side of a building that was consumed by the elements long ago. It’s an illusion that even I don’t know how to escape from, not that I would want to if I could. The world is in shambles and everyone is selfish, but not the little girl, the little girls with her sparkling eyes. She knows that there is a better place and why shouldn’t she continue to live there.

Then the little girl stops, and she replaces her glittering eyes with dull, dark, sullen ones. The world she once looked at has changed. It seems smaller, it seems like the world only exists around her, around me. A small space, usually my work space or house or gathering of friends, is all that is visible. The people that are immediately around me and are interacting with me become harsh realizations that I am not telling the truth, that i’m somehow hiding from the life that they are all living, the real world is how they describe it, but what they truly mean is the broken spirit and controlled freedom that accompanies becoming and adult with responsibilities. They don’t see that in me, because I don’t see it in myself. The dullness of the world presses in on me and makes me retract into a shell of self doubt and hatred. The sadness that no one really understands me, could never understand my mind or my heart. That no one really cares how I feel, what’s going on in my life, that no one would really care if I weren’t here to be the butt of all their “harmless” jokes, they would be better off with out the girl that retracts at the first lash and tries to be nice to those that intend to hate her. The darkness that consumes my thoughts and makes me wonder why life has been so cruel to her, to me, when I’ve always tried to do right by everyone.

And suddenly, the little girl with sparkles in her eyes comes back, her life’s not that bad. She has some friends, she has a church family that loves her, even though they don’t actually know her, she has grandparents that would break if she weren’t around to hold them together. She makes her excuses for suppressing the grayness, because life’s not so bad, in fact, it’s full of wonderful things, like reading and other distractions that keep her from falling completely through the black hole.

This cycle of complete and utter oblivion and then depressive brooding happens constantly, sometimes within the same hour. Some people call it mood swings or PMS, but it is so much more than that. Every feeling is multiplied by ten, happiness, sadness, grief, every emotion is intense and life changing. Every cut heals slower and every memory fades faster. There are millions of tiny workers that are keeping that little girl from the “real world” and they are not ready to go into retirement.

But today, they did get a pay cut. Today, I found out i’m not alone, that what I feel is not my burden alone to bear. It has a name.

Dysthymic Disorder is a real thing.

“People with dysthymia generally experience little or no joy in their lives. Instead things are rather gloomy most of the time. If you have dysthymia you may be unable to remember a time when you felt happy, excited, or inspired. It may seem as if you have been depressed all your life. You probably have a hard time enjoying things and having fun. Rather, you might tend to be inactive and withdrawn , you worry frequently, and criticize yourself as being a failure. You may also feel guilty, irritable, sluggish, and have difficulty sleeping regularly.” (http://www.allaboutdepression.com/dia_04.html)

“The symptoms may cause significant problems or distress in social, work, academic, or other major areas of life functioning.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysthymia)

The people around me may not know that I have a problem, they may think that i’m just irritating or naive, but I know the truth. I know what I feel is real. I know i’m not alone in my bruised self-worth. My mental instability has a name.

 

(I would like to note that this is a self-diagnosis. I have not seen a professional. I have, however, read peoples thoughts and symptoms and personal feelings about there own Dysthymia and could have written their synopsis myself. I do plan in the future to seek out professional help.)

 

 

The Boy That Sits Over There….

I just came to a realization, literally, one minute ago, that I am in serious denial.

I’ve spent most of my life expecting romance to come in a movie package deal. But when talking about the latest superhero movie “Dawn of Justice”, I had this to say to a co-worker:

“Critics say that people were building it up in their heads and were disappointed when it didn’t match what they thought it should be, but if you go in with no expectations, the movie was great.”

Why am I capable of going to see a movie with this openness, but I don’t use this same mindset for my life? If I can listen to a song, watch a movie, read a book and have a completely blank expectation for how those things will pan out and I’m always genuinely happy at the ending, why can’t I live my life in that state of wonderment and bliss?

I make up in my head what I think a certain scenario should be. Ex. Boy meets girl, talks about deeply personal stuff via messenger, boy asks girl out, relationship ensues. But instead of that being the case, boy just never does anything, girl has to decide if she even likes him and I wind up completely upset over something that I don’t even know exists. Instead I could just let things happen and be happy that I have made a new friend. But of course, my romantically inclined body wants more from everything and everyone. I want the most intense, most amazing love story, I want friendships that will last for 50 years instead of 50 days. I want more than this world has to offer. (Disney reference!)

I need to find a way to open my heart to something that might not be perfect. Messy is not necessarily bad, it’s just not what is expected. And the unexpected can be great. Spontaneity can not be planned, right? Which is something us romantics tend to appreciate.

This is the beginning of me just accepting life as it comes, not planning how things SHOULD be, but letting them happen as they unfold and appreciating those things all the more.

Workplace Internet

I live in constant fear of losing my job.

I am not a terrible worker. I do exactly as I’m told, I give great ideas to my boss and I’m always willing to pitch in. I am the girl that is constantly asking for something else to do, just to keep myself busy. Where my fear comes in is when I have downtime. Idle hands make me a little anxious. I sit in my desk chair after I’ve finished all my work and I wait while my students take their tests. I am expected, at this point, to sit patiently and quietly until a student has a question. Imagine, sitting in a chair, staring at a computer, waiting on someone who is taking a three hour test to need your help. It’s madness, especially for someone as restless as I am. And I have found myself turning to the internet for it’s guidance.

Out of an eight hour day I spend six of them on YouTube. Only two hours of my day is devoted to answering questions, taking pee breaks and snacking on chips from the concessional. The minute someone looks like they are going to ask me a question I jump up to help. I do not use the internet to avoid work, but to make it go by faster with nothing else to do. This act alone is enough to warrant my fear.

I’m not watching porn. I’m not watching anything particularly controversial.  I am usually perusing MineCraft videos and watching Jenna Marbles play with her dogs. It’s mindless and numbing, but it takes up some of the dead time in my work day. Somehow though, it is always seen as a terrible thing in the workplace. I am no doubt looking up different way to murder my coworkers and I obviously do not have enough work to do. Only half of that statement is true. There isn’t enough work for me, but there also is just enough that you need me here. I am terrified that my boss will walk in and be upset that I’m watching StacyPlays lose over and over again to Graser10 in Mineclash.

The moral of this story is: You may lose your job one day because you can’t sit still for a few hours, but do you really want to work someplace that bores you so much that you need to make a new Pinterest board?

The Truth in Longevity.

I’m writing these words with anger driving me. In a few weeks I may not feel the same way, but I want to know how I felt at this exact moment in my life when I read this twenty years from now.

I’ve spent two years in my position. Two grueling, tragic, and downright ridiculous years fighting to love something that I knew I would grow to hate. When I first began this job I looked at it as a new beginning. I was getting to work with people from all around the world, I would be getting valuable experience in a field that matched my personality traits, I would spend my days gabbing to people about their kids and jewelry and not be yelled at later because I wasn’t turning over tables fast enough. It was a new chapter; a new leaf to turn over. And for the first time, I felt like the work I would be doing wouldn’t be a job anymore, but a passion. This was short lived in my opinion. Within three months, most of the employees had quit due to poor management and lack there of and I became the most knowledgeable person in the building. I had to learn things on my own, without training and help. I had to be on the phone with our systems everyday for weeks. I spent so much time learning all that I could so that I could take care of the company that I was so excited to be a part of. Within the first six months I had obtained two raises and numerous praises from our owners about how well I had handled things. I could do no wrong and I excelled in everything I did. This feeling was short lived however.

After a year of being the MVP of the hotel team, I was put on a back burner as we welcomed a new, fully-equipped-for-work-ethics, General Manager into our midst. I was extremely pleased that someone had come in to take some of the weight off my own shoulders and felt even more confident that I was in turn teaching this new woman how to do her job. It was enlightening and educational to work along side her and transform a broken system into what I considered to be a fully functioning atmosphere to be called a hospitable work environment. Everything from that moment forward was truly blissful. We had a team that was nice to each other and went out together after work. We helped each other learn and grow as a team. Our new management right along beside us. Again, this was a short lived feeling.

Do you see the pattern??

In our line of work, or at least in MY line of work, where every happiness is dashed away almost as quickly as it came, it’s hard to stay positive. As soon as our new manager got the hang of our brand, she didn’t need me anymore. I was just a front desk person again. Not being needed or useful began to torment me, so I began coming up with more and more ideas for projects that I would never finish because hearing the words “this is a great idea, but we can’t really do that” became the loudest silence I had ever heard. So I just did my job, day after day, continually repeating the same steps, the same words, the same slow paced environmental tasks that I had to do. I became bored and started finding “unsatisfactory” ways to waste my time. I watched so much YouTube and television. I played countless app games on my phone. I even started this blog whilst sitting behind my desk when I should have been doing something productive on a work scale.

During this downfall of my own productivity, all the others in my team were also on a decline. Within a few months that entire team had moved away, found new jobs, or just left us to do something else. I had an entirely new group of people to be with and while they were and still are great, they are not like the old team. They don’t take care of each other like we did. It’s constant nit-picking and down-grading and outright destruction of emotion. I do love my new co-workers, but the emptiness I feel when I think about them makes me realize that it’s just not the same.

With all this lack of love and kindness from everyone, the change in my shifts from the days to the nights, and the recent news of our General Manager leaving us for a better job (which I am completely excited for her about, though I did cry for a week about it), it’s just shambles now. Pieces of what was left of a once great empire. All the emotions of this are magnified by the lack of people I get to meet on my night shift. I have no audible outlet anymore. I collect my thoughts into webs of ire and pain and stew them for weeks at a time, which is completely outside of my personality traits. I don’t like to sit in a puddle of depression, contradictory to my bathing preference.

With all this pressure and anxiety and emotional turmoil that I’ve endured in just a few months, it’s no wonder that my presence at this company is now in jeopardy. I don’t want to be here any more than anyone else wants me to be here. My path lies in another direction and I think it’s time to run. I’m nostalgic for my lost co-workers and their amazing personalities, but maybe this has helped me grow into a knowledge of who I want to be in life and who I want to surround myself with.

Maybe I’ve learned something bigger than how to put a person in a hotel room.

The Book is Always Better than the Movie.

Everyone has one; the thing that we don’t want anyone else to know. Mine isn’t terrible, but if it got out, I would never hear the end of it. It’s in the “forbidden romance” department and it clogs my brain with thoughts that shouldn’t be thought and lusts that shouldn’t be lusted.

Enter “This Guy”

I work at the front desk of a small hotel. I see all sorts of people come through our tiny town. Some of them blow in and out of the doors as gusts of wind, but some stay longer and he was one of them.

In the first couple weeks we barely glanced at each other. Nothing more than “Have a good evening” passed our lips. It was courtesy meets robotics, an echo of sentences repeated multiple times a day. The next visit he would ask me about my day and I would ask about his work; idle chatter. Finally we progressed to full conversations. I learned things from him that a hotel clerk shouldn’t know about her guests. He confided in me, which was something he shouldn’t have done, for both our sakes.

He’s been here a while now and it has become routine that when he gets off work he comes in and directly goes upstairs to change into workout gear, goes for a run and when he comes back we talk until interrupted. We chat about his divorce or my new hair color. We sometimes flirt, nothing too heavy. It’s the little dance we do and somewhere during the third or fourth performance, I started a solo act.

He had began to show up in my dreams. Just a side show at first and slowly he became the main character of my elaborate dramatics. The longer he stayed at the hotel, the more I saw him during the night. His piercing eyes and ripped abs started to be a knee-buckling experience every time my head hit a pillow. We grasped at sheets and became a tangled mess of skin. In my world, he was desperate and I was full of desire. We raged with passion and stimulated each other with heat. Behind my eye lids in deep slumber I found that I was sexually attracted to this complete stranger.

It wasn’t long before I could barely meet his eyes when I came in to work. I had brought my dreams with me and they evolved into fantasy. When he came in from his run, glistening with the sweat of the hard labor it involved, I came up with wild escapades that could be a alternative cause for his lack of breath. Could we have possibly romped around in the back of my car, my nails drug down his back as he ripped my shirt at the seams. I had begun to create a fictional novel in my head where he was cast as the shirtless “Fabio” on the cover of my Danielle Steele knock-off.

I can never explain why my mind wanders off into these erotic notions, nor would I even try. I constantly wonder, though, if I have ever popped into one of his midnight memories. Has he undressed me with his teeth in a fantasy world that only he knows about? Is the sexual tension I feel a one-sided affect of my own desires begging to be released? I won’t let myself entertain the idea that we could one day act out the scenarios I have designed in my head. I hold to the truth that the imagined is always better than seeing it in a real way.

The book is always better than the movie.

Don’t influence me on how to feel.

So here’s the scenario:

You just dyed your hair, you feel fierce, you even put on a splash of makeup before driving an hour to work an overnight job. You feel a little sick because it’s flu season, but that isn’t keeping you from singing your favorite songs on the radio at top volume. You feel kinda awesome.

Then you get to work. Normally this doesn’t bother you because you love your job and your co-workers. It doesn’t even matter that they have you working graveyard; it gives you plenty of time to think of concepts for your new blog. Today is different though. You had a bit of a panic attack leaving work yesterday because your paycheck didn’t post to the bank at the time it usually does. You got just a bit worried that something was wrong so you had been looking forward, all day, to getting to work and opening the pay stub to make sure it was there. You rush into the building, put down your purse and immediately walk over to the cash drawer where the checks are hidden. But, something is in the way. It’s your co-workers knee. He’s blocking the drawer. You politely say excuse me and he responds with “What do you need in there?”. It seems like this would be obvious because payday is filled with people digging around in that drawer, but for some reason he wants to ask you about it. “I’m getting my paycheck” you say in a questioning tone, not a forceful one, but full of confusion as to why this person is questioning my motives.

“Are you having a bad day?”

I am now.

This is my thought process. Why is getting my paycheck so threatening that you feel defensive about me being in our cash drawer? It’s not like I have ever taken money from it for my personal gain. I haven’t ever thought about trying to screw up your count. Why, today, do you feel the need to question my motives? I was genuinely happy and having a grand ole time until you said something that made me instantly defensive.

I began to wonder if there was some reason that I should be concerned about getting in the drawer. Did something happen that I don’t know about? Do people think I’m a thief? Did I forget to do something with money that is causing my co-worker to believe that I can’t be trusted in my own cash drawer? The answer to all of these is no, but somehow I can’t help but feeling that his reaction is somehow my fault.

________________________________________

Why do we let others dictate how we feel? With six simple words, my co-workers question changed my entire perspective on my night. I am now full of hostility and judgement. Why does today have to be a bad day in order for me to be determined to see my pay stub? Is it okay with you, person I only see ten minutes a day, if I have other things going on in my life that don’t involve you?

Now let me interject here that I LOVE talking with my co-workers. I have personal relationships with all of them and adore them. I’m not the kind of person that can come in and just begin working. I want to know how your day was and how the kids are. I would not, however, start a shift of with “Are you having a bad day?”. People don’t respond to this well, as we can clearly see from my own reaction. If someone has genuine concern for how your day is, they will ask about what you did that day, not the tone of it. “Are you having a bad day?” is code for “What is your problem?”. It means that you, the bad-day-haver has some form of wall around you that others can’t see. My wall, in this scenario, was my determination to make sure things were okay with my cash flow. Obviously, my co-worker didn’t know what I was thinking or doing, so he reacted the way anyone would react to my actions, but in a nicer way than “Why are you invading my personal space?”

Sometimes things that people say, give us these insane brain signals that tend to make us defensive, even if there is no reason to be. People who ask “Have you lost weight?” only mean the best by that statement, but for people who have previously been overweight, this could bring up painful memories and trigger our barriers to come up. It’s very hard to know what string of words will cause these reactions, but when we hear them we will and instantly it will be war between the unsuspecting offensive speech maker and the unwarranted defensive emotionalist. Something neither of you intended but exists all the same.

So for those of you that have experienced this, please make sure that the person that is now shocked by your defensive outburst knows that you didn’t mean any harm. The words spoken reminded you of another time and you shouldn’t take that out on your co-workers, they might be your boss one day.