How (Not) To Cope With Depression
May. 30th, 2003 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I just went to hotjobs.com and read all the postings on the message boards.
"9 mos. unemployed-- is it me?" "14 mos unemployed, 15 years experience, have exhausted contacts, what do i do now?"
Sooooo depressing.
I have a job, yes. I am no longer some schmoe who can't get a job. But almost all these people seem like hard-working, well-qualified people. No jobs exist for them, and people dick them around because they can. All kinds of wondering about unemployment benefits, all kinds of anger about how much money we're spending on Iraq and how much the upcoming tax cuts will save the wealthiest citizens while leaving the upper-middle-class-on-downward in the lurch, stuck with high interest rates and tremendous debt.
I have a job, yes. I also have the hiccups. I also have real difficulty with my job. I resent those who got to enjoy the economic boom, though I feel sorry for them because they got to advance their careers so fast and are now stuck back at pretty much square one-- all those mid-to-upper-level employees who advanced so quickly during the dot-com etc. boom that the sky was the limit when they were 30, and now they're 35 and are wondering if they'll ever pay off that credit card debt before they die... There are so many, so so many, for whom there is so little hope of attaining even comfort, much less the splendor they once had. Although then you put beside that those who never enjoyed the economic boom, who had nothing then, and still have nothing, and you wonder which is sadder. Because while the former have more pain from having had hopes crushed, at least they know that life is not all about always being down. But those who've always been down, and always will, at least aren't feeling much different than normal. Both are pretty soul-destroying, really...
I feel bad for all of them, and feel bad for myself because I don't know how I'll ever get to afford grad school, or even relocation to the places I love which are, sadly, all economically depressed. There will never be jobs in Buffalo. In Troy, there's slightly more hope thanks to the one-man revitalization project started by my uncle peter's best buddy Carl, who's bringing in monied hippies from Chicago and Manhattan to buy aged and beautiful historic townhouses in downtown Troy, refurbish them, and telecommute to their high-powered jobs elsewhere. That's the only thing propping up my beautiful, troubled, isolated hometown. Troy's economic boom came to an end during the 1850-70s, when the railroads replaced the canals and rivers as the main shipping thoroughfares. Troy has never quite recovered. It's a beautiful ugly little quaint livable shitty city with beautiful, sprawling, stupid, boring, tidy, cozy, rural, inbred, fascinating little suburbs and its only redeeming feature is that it's too small for the corrupt Albany politicians to bother with their grandiose schemes. And, it's beautiful.
Anyhow, there's no way to live there, and nowhere to relocate to where I'd feel more at home than I do in Westchester with its odd mix of chic and Lyme disease (I found a deer tick on my arm yesterday. Grim), pretension and ignorance, and ridiculously high prices for everything from celery to Celicas.
I would mind my job less if my boss weren't so... well, how can i put this? He doesn't really know how to talk to people. He invades personal space and has dubious grooming habits. He's pushy and irrational and immature and is much given to temper tantrums. He Knows Everything and makes disastrous decisions because of this that nobody can possibly argue with, or if they do they'll be a victim of another tantrum. He's got great ideas, but he's also probably clinically bipolar with a heavy dose of paranoia. And he just won't leave me alone. His brother is even worse, more juvenile, more loud, less reasonable, much given to highly inappropriate comments and observations (finding the one photograph of female breasts in an art book and making a point of showing it to me, of course) and never, ever shutting up-- ever. He even talks to HIMSELF. Incessantly.
Pretty much everyone else at the company, I either like or can at least respect. But that pair--- I don't know. They just creep me out.
I would love to work for people i liked. But there is no perfect job.
Blech.
My immediate supervisor drives me nuts because she's simultaneously very canny and intelligent, and the biggest ditz ever to walk the planet. She combines an impeccable sense of style with being 150 pounds overweight. She diets rigorously and eats three Twix bars a day. She saves and saves her money and then spends it all on a $400 purse instead of, say, college for her kids. She advises me and scolds me on how to budget my time and then blows an hour and a half on Minesweeper or online shopping at Nordstrom's. She whimpers at how overloaded she is, and gives me fabulous advice on how to balance my workload and my sanity, and then spends an entire day on a rough draft that she could've knocked out in 30 minutes, which is then entirely rejected by management.
She gives me the best advice I've ever heard but in such a condescending tone that it makes my eyeballs hurt just to listen to it.
I've become very furtively sarcastic on the one hand, but then on the other, I'm totally unable to tolerate sarcasm from Dave or his family. I just can't handle the stuff i dish out. Which is no change from the ordinary; I do it to myself all the time in online debates by escalating an argument and then whining. I'm as inconsistent as my supervisor is.
I'm being terribly clingy, which only serves to drive poor Dave away in a desperate need for some kind of balance. I need him to be all kinds of things he isn't right now, and I need it badly, but of course i don't really and will have forgotten it in a week, right?
But I don't. I may seem totally irrational and not at all sane, but I am still myself under all that. I don't know if that's what differentiates me from the insane, but I have the ability to understand that I'm not behaving quite normally, and to appreciate the responses of others to the situation. And I will remember the responses of others to the situation. There have been times when I've been like this and Dave has done something so simple as put his arm around me and just sit, and it makes all the difference. The irrational part of my brain understands that it's not being rational and while it will continue what it's doing, it won't take itself quite so seriously. And it all eases. A large source of difficulty in my life is learning how seriously to take myself... I laugh at those who take themselves too seriously, and try to laugh at myself, but then I realize that if I don't take myself seriously, nobody will-- and in order to survive, and feel human at all, one has to be taken seriously by someone at least SOME of the time... and if not me, then who? It's impossible...
I'll leave you with yet another contradiction:
calorie-free sweetened seltzer tastes quite good on its own, but when you add vodka, it becomes high-calorie and also tastes like cough syrup.
"9 mos. unemployed-- is it me?" "14 mos unemployed, 15 years experience, have exhausted contacts, what do i do now?"
Sooooo depressing.
I have a job, yes. I am no longer some schmoe who can't get a job. But almost all these people seem like hard-working, well-qualified people. No jobs exist for them, and people dick them around because they can. All kinds of wondering about unemployment benefits, all kinds of anger about how much money we're spending on Iraq and how much the upcoming tax cuts will save the wealthiest citizens while leaving the upper-middle-class-on-downward in the lurch, stuck with high interest rates and tremendous debt.
I have a job, yes. I also have the hiccups. I also have real difficulty with my job. I resent those who got to enjoy the economic boom, though I feel sorry for them because they got to advance their careers so fast and are now stuck back at pretty much square one-- all those mid-to-upper-level employees who advanced so quickly during the dot-com etc. boom that the sky was the limit when they were 30, and now they're 35 and are wondering if they'll ever pay off that credit card debt before they die... There are so many, so so many, for whom there is so little hope of attaining even comfort, much less the splendor they once had. Although then you put beside that those who never enjoyed the economic boom, who had nothing then, and still have nothing, and you wonder which is sadder. Because while the former have more pain from having had hopes crushed, at least they know that life is not all about always being down. But those who've always been down, and always will, at least aren't feeling much different than normal. Both are pretty soul-destroying, really...
I feel bad for all of them, and feel bad for myself because I don't know how I'll ever get to afford grad school, or even relocation to the places I love which are, sadly, all economically depressed. There will never be jobs in Buffalo. In Troy, there's slightly more hope thanks to the one-man revitalization project started by my uncle peter's best buddy Carl, who's bringing in monied hippies from Chicago and Manhattan to buy aged and beautiful historic townhouses in downtown Troy, refurbish them, and telecommute to their high-powered jobs elsewhere. That's the only thing propping up my beautiful, troubled, isolated hometown. Troy's economic boom came to an end during the 1850-70s, when the railroads replaced the canals and rivers as the main shipping thoroughfares. Troy has never quite recovered. It's a beautiful ugly little quaint livable shitty city with beautiful, sprawling, stupid, boring, tidy, cozy, rural, inbred, fascinating little suburbs and its only redeeming feature is that it's too small for the corrupt Albany politicians to bother with their grandiose schemes. And, it's beautiful.
Anyhow, there's no way to live there, and nowhere to relocate to where I'd feel more at home than I do in Westchester with its odd mix of chic and Lyme disease (I found a deer tick on my arm yesterday. Grim), pretension and ignorance, and ridiculously high prices for everything from celery to Celicas.
I would mind my job less if my boss weren't so... well, how can i put this? He doesn't really know how to talk to people. He invades personal space and has dubious grooming habits. He's pushy and irrational and immature and is much given to temper tantrums. He Knows Everything and makes disastrous decisions because of this that nobody can possibly argue with, or if they do they'll be a victim of another tantrum. He's got great ideas, but he's also probably clinically bipolar with a heavy dose of paranoia. And he just won't leave me alone. His brother is even worse, more juvenile, more loud, less reasonable, much given to highly inappropriate comments and observations (finding the one photograph of female breasts in an art book and making a point of showing it to me, of course) and never, ever shutting up-- ever. He even talks to HIMSELF. Incessantly.
Pretty much everyone else at the company, I either like or can at least respect. But that pair--- I don't know. They just creep me out.
I would love to work for people i liked. But there is no perfect job.
Blech.
My immediate supervisor drives me nuts because she's simultaneously very canny and intelligent, and the biggest ditz ever to walk the planet. She combines an impeccable sense of style with being 150 pounds overweight. She diets rigorously and eats three Twix bars a day. She saves and saves her money and then spends it all on a $400 purse instead of, say, college for her kids. She advises me and scolds me on how to budget my time and then blows an hour and a half on Minesweeper or online shopping at Nordstrom's. She whimpers at how overloaded she is, and gives me fabulous advice on how to balance my workload and my sanity, and then spends an entire day on a rough draft that she could've knocked out in 30 minutes, which is then entirely rejected by management.
She gives me the best advice I've ever heard but in such a condescending tone that it makes my eyeballs hurt just to listen to it.
I've become very furtively sarcastic on the one hand, but then on the other, I'm totally unable to tolerate sarcasm from Dave or his family. I just can't handle the stuff i dish out. Which is no change from the ordinary; I do it to myself all the time in online debates by escalating an argument and then whining. I'm as inconsistent as my supervisor is.
I'm being terribly clingy, which only serves to drive poor Dave away in a desperate need for some kind of balance. I need him to be all kinds of things he isn't right now, and I need it badly, but of course i don't really and will have forgotten it in a week, right?
But I don't. I may seem totally irrational and not at all sane, but I am still myself under all that. I don't know if that's what differentiates me from the insane, but I have the ability to understand that I'm not behaving quite normally, and to appreciate the responses of others to the situation. And I will remember the responses of others to the situation. There have been times when I've been like this and Dave has done something so simple as put his arm around me and just sit, and it makes all the difference. The irrational part of my brain understands that it's not being rational and while it will continue what it's doing, it won't take itself quite so seriously. And it all eases. A large source of difficulty in my life is learning how seriously to take myself... I laugh at those who take themselves too seriously, and try to laugh at myself, but then I realize that if I don't take myself seriously, nobody will-- and in order to survive, and feel human at all, one has to be taken seriously by someone at least SOME of the time... and if not me, then who? It's impossible...
I'll leave you with yet another contradiction:
calorie-free sweetened seltzer tastes quite good on its own, but when you add vodka, it becomes high-calorie and also tastes like cough syrup.
this is from kat
Date: 2003-06-01 06:38 pm (UTC)