It has been a very long last six months. To catch you all up, I have left one highly toxic and soul/spoon-sucking job. I loved the job itself when I was allowed to do it. I didn't mind putting up with some of the abuses that came with it. HR is a murky field and payroll even more so.
However, the supervisor I served under had gone from being awesome to being a manipulative gaslighting emotional abuser. It took me a long time to see it for what it was and then a longer time to decide on what my response was going to be.
Things went remarkably downhill when I started slowly setting up and then enforcing some of my boundaries. That's when I really started being able to see the situation I was in for what it actually was and not what I had thought it was. I did the smart thing and got myself out, I left with as much dignity as I could, given the fact that when I handed in my notice, I was immediately persona non grata, frozen out, and referred to in extremely derogatory terms. There were lots of rumors flying about and I was not allowed to serve out my full notice.
Which in the end, worked out for the better. I was able to start the new job early and it's been to my benefit there. However, it's been an uphill battle with going from a very bad workplace to a workplace that is actually a really awesome and decent place to work. They actively care about their employees' health and sanity and not just in a half-assed attempt to squeeze more work and effort out of you. They treat you like an actual person. It's unlike anything I was used to before.
It's also been one heck of an adjustment as I recalibrate and unlearn all the survival habits that I had developed out of self-defense. As I categorize all the different triggers and forumlate different healthier ways of handling them. It has taught me a lot.
I'm not totally over what happened. It's going to take more time, I put in five years of being the best employee I could be and at the end, I was made to feel like I was the lowest of pond scum for leaving. I have some currently-being-resolved grief for some of the time I spent and the relationships that I lost when I left.
In the midst of all of that, my parents and youngest sibling were still within the first year of being back and readjusting to everything here, including the loss of a treasured family pet that returned back with them. Dealing with all the different financial and emotional stresses and their own grieving processes because the way they came back was not ideal and it was something that had been poorly handled by the agency from the start. From being on the outside of that process, I was still working through the grieving process on my end (kind of still in anger mode there, but I'm working on it) and helping them through the readjustment phases.
My glorious roommate was also still recovering from major surgery and we were still coping with the changes that the major emergency surgery had forced us to make. I hit 30 and wow did 30 punch back. I had thought those jokes were just silly things people said and I was so terribly wrong about that. All of my goalposts got moved and a lot of what hadn't been normal became normal and there's been a lot shifting with my own myriad grab-bag of medical maladies. Having had fibro for eighteen years now, there's been some shifting of what passes for my baselines and some accomodations that have had to be made because of that. Which in and of itself is fairly frustrating, even more so when it feeds into some of the mental illness components that come hand in hand with the whole chronic pain thing.
As a historian, the leadup to, the election, and everything afterwards has been horrifically traumatizing. I have been in a lot of different places and seen a lot of different styles of government and I never thought I would ever see the sorts of things that I have seen in the last two years happening here. I thought we would be above that and I was wrong.
There have been glorious high points in the last six months, but there have also been some pretty serious lows and some middles that just needed to be slogged through.
All of it however requires time and spoons. Which is why a lot of my extracurricular stuff has suffered a lot. I simply haven't been able to give myself to a lot of what I had enjoyed before because there's nothing there to give, even if I wanted to.
I started this, thinking about grief and all the different ways that it has impacted me lately. How in some places, I'm further ahead in the grieving process, some places I'm not making a lot or even any progress. It's good to at least take stock of those, so I know where and how I need to divert energy.
Because the hits just never stop coming, we've had recent news involving my roommate's family that isn't as bad as it could have been, but it's still extremely terrible and it's really made me stop and think about a lot of things lately.
How despite the dumpster trash fire that is the current state of the govt and all the rest of the crap that has happened and that we've had to muscle our way through...I still count myself fortunate for my house and my new job and my community, both in physical space and in the internets. I love all of you and wish the best for you and will cheerfully defend and fight for any and all of you. Offer shelter and food when and where I can, funds when I can, and always and forever an open inbox and a listening ear.
If you need me, I am here for you.
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