#selfcareathon2018

[wiredandrewired]

So my time off is still a few days out, but I’m gonna informally kick off my selfcareathon aka ‘finally taking time off of work to heal some of the staggering damage it has done to my body and mind’ with a confession, because I’ve finally realized/come to terms with something, and I feel like I need to unpack it--like tangibly unpack it somewhere--or else I’m just going to stuff it back in the closet and pretend it didn’t happen.

And I’m gonna kick the confession off with “I’m here, doing this, because of Voltron.”  Which isn’t entirely specifically true, I’m here because of Honerva.  Which still isn’t quite right.  

I’m here because of this.

And not in a ‘do it for her’ sense or anything.  I’m doing this for myself and the people I love, who deserve better.  

Some teal deer under the cut.

So, the thing. I’ve been really proud of myself over the years for dealing with my addictions like a semi-functional human facsimile.  They’ve done some really shitty things to me and I’ve been pretty good at kicking them to the curb and moving on, even though it wasn’t easy; since I managed to get out of abusive environments and find a more supportive one, I’ve been able, with that support, to do a lot better.

But I’m still kind of a mess, and I don’t always recognize addictions, or compulsions, or obsessions, for what they are.  Because in part I think there are things that my brain labels as ‘good addictions’, even though there’s really no such thing.  And even though my entire support network has been telling me for a year, and my coworkers, and now even my superiors at work, it took seeing that face up there in the glass at the end of my work week for me to realize I was letting my not my job, but my fixation on it destroy me.

The media image of a workaholic is so specific.  I see the office worker who always stays late.  The cop who can’t let a case go.  The scientist who has to know.  It’s hard for me to see the auto assembly worker who works seven day twelve-fourteen hour shifts and insists on going the same speed the whole time, running three stations because they just can’t keep enough staff on night shift, insisting they have to--HAVE to--run them all at the same efficiency and speed and quality that a full staff would because the numbers/quality we need at the end of the night are still the same, right????  Just because he hasn’t been able to feel his hand or wrist for the past week and there’s a dull throb in his shoulder because it keeps soft dislocating--look, you can pop that back in on break, it’s fine, it’s FINE--doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be done, right???  And he goes home not tired but exhausted and he still can’t sleep because somewhere in the middle of that the whole right side stiffens up and some kind of feeling comes back but it’s this cold disembodied stabbing pain but it’s fine, FINE, because once you get back to work it’ll just go numb again, it’s fine, just got to get back to work.  THAT’S not a workaholic.  That’s just dedication, right?  That’s a good work ethic.  And any time it faltered for even a moment, I had to be punished for it.  I was told for so long I would always be useless--did I want to prove her right?  God, no.  Anything but that.  I’ve got so much work to do.  I have to do it.  Have to.  Even now I feel like I’m whining writing this because this is nothing, it’s part of the job--am I even LISTENING to myself?  Just get back to it.

At the end of my last stretch, when my project supervisor gently tried to cut me off (’You can go ahead and stop, we don’t need any more tonight’ ‘It’s fine, I can keep going--’ ‘Alex.  Alex, please stop and drink some water.’  And he sent someone to the first aid room to get an ice pack for my wrist because at this point my hand was so swollen my glove looked like a balloon and I just) I got so fucking angry.  I didn’t need to stop.  I didn’t need to take a drink.  And first aid?  We didn’t have numbers yet, what did he know?  This is MY LINE, and fucking MANAGEMENT doesn’t know what’s best for my line.  I have THIRTY goddamn more minutes of good production time!  Like the very idea that I should spend ANY of my floor time doing ANYTHING other than working was not just offensive but a complete fucking affront.  I ended up throwing one of our big roller racks when he literally told my supply line to cut me off, when he had a team lead confiscate the machine keys, like I was some kind of alcoholic, and just

he was right.

Because when the gal at the next station asked if I was okay and I wheeled around, I caught a look at myself in the panel at the back of the machine station.  And that up there, that was my face.  

And it stopped me dead because I’d seen it before, and I knew what it was, and for the first time it hit me.

No one is making me do this.

This is a fucking addiction.

I got so angry when they tried to make me slow down or stop, and I didn’t care if I hurt myself or someone else trying to keep going.  I have always been like this at work.  No matter what my job, I have always acted like the world was going to end if I stopped or slowed down for even a moment, no matter what, and while some of the time I can laugh at it by the end of the day I am limping and ragged and sick, I am impossible to be around, I am so utterly demolished that I can’t function in the rest of my life--because everything I have is poured into being ready for the next shift, making it through it, doing the work of how ever many people aren’t there regardless of whether or not there’s anyone else there to help one way or the other.  And in my head, that’s always been labeled a good thing.  A ‘healthy fixation’.  A great work ethic.  But nothing good or healthy or great should make anyone treat themselves or others with that kind of rage or disregard.

The biggest thing I need to do during this break I’m taking isn’t letting my hand and wrist and shoulder heal, though those are all important.  The most important thing I have to do is try to seperate myself from that mentality.  The people I love keep telling me this job isn’t worth what I let it do to me, but the solution isn’t in finding a new job, because I’ve come to realize it isn’t the job that’s doing it to me.  Are our hours unreasonable?  Yeah.  They are.  My doctor actually told me they’re ‘practically inhumane’.  Is the work physically draining?  Sure, of course.  But it isn’t the  hours that are hurting me, and it isn’t even really the work.  When my superiors--the people who should be pushing me--are instead having to cut me off, when they are expressing fear and concern for my ‘great work ethic’, then I need to be able to step back and realize that while I may not BE the problem, I definitely HAVE one.

And here I am, a 35 year old man, finally able to do that because of a netflix cartoon, and that one moment a character’s life-destroying addiction is revealed for what it is.  If not for that, I would never have even considered putting in for time off to recover.  I would never have allowed it.  Getting up the guts to ask was all me, but realizing I needed to?  That came from her.

I’m not going to let this turn me on the people I love.  I’m not going to let it make me forget my family.  I’m not going to let it break me.  I’m not going to let it change me into something I’m not.

I’m not going to let it turn me into a monster.

...and I just needed to get all of that off my chest.

[wiredandrewired]

Selfcareathon update

I’m gonna spare y’all’s dash my bullshit.

Unless you’re on mobile.  Sorry.

So, my first night off was Thursday, and I keep having to remind myself when I look at the big black circle on the calendar marking out when I go back that it’s okay to take this much time out--even that I need it.  @wireslide and I have parsed out some of my behavior patterns when I’m out of work for a while and we’ve both made a point of acknowledging that when I contextualize them in light of having an addiction, they make sense--they are consistent normal behaviors for someone in withdrawal.  It does help to remind myself of that.  Right now I’m still on day 3, and that black circle looks so far away and it’s already making me twitchy (I’ve been shut down for suggesting maybe I could go back a little earlier than planned if my wrist starts feeling better), and it helps to remind myself that this isn’t some new thing, it’s been a thing for years, and I’m just finally getting around to acknowledging it.

My wrist is already feeling a lot better.  Feeling in my fingertips is intermittent still, but I can rotate my wrist again and the ‘tendon pop’ in my finger and shoulder is a lot less when I try.  My right shoulder is starting to come down and is almost level with the ‘normal’ one again.

But for real, I would not have gotten this far already if it weren’t for my coworkers who are honestly angels and I would fight anyone for them.  ANYONE.  They kept me off of the front end entirely even if it meant doing stations they would normally avoid, designated different people to be the ‘freaking out about our numbers’ guy (even added it to the work rotation on the first day) so it could be an assigned job that someone else was there to do so relax Alex, picked up the slack when I couldn’t move my hand at all and gave me tasks I could still manage so I would stop trying and not freak out about weighing down the team.  When I did try to do the front end on the day I was assigned to it, I was actually able to admit that I couldn’t (I could not fully close my hands, and could not rotate my wrist at all.  When I tried you’d see something 'pop’ in my middle finger and neck but that was it, and my vision would start to gray out/flash with black and white spots), which I seriously never in my wildest imaginings would have guessed was something I could make myself do, and asked to switch with someone.  Everyone on the team was willing to swap stations with me.  The one crap team leader was in that night and he pitched a fit about it, but thanks to my really great work cell, these fucking champions of all that is good, I stood my ground and was moved for the night.  It was terrifying.  I kept trying to apologize and go back and say I would run it again.  I could do it, I was convinced.  I could make my wrist move.  It was my job.  It was my night on the machine.  My team stopped me. 

You know, I constantly hear people tell me that if I always do all the work for all the stations, everyone will slack off because they learn they can get away with it.  But we need to have more faith in each other.  When I needed help everyone stepped up, not slacked off, and kept coming over to me throughout the entirety of the last few days to tell me I was doing a good job.  I mean, I mentioned to my work cell that I thought I had a problem and suddenly I kept having people I’d worked with for years or even just a few months come up and tell me they were proud of me?  And that if I needed to take a break I shouldn’t hesitate to tell them, and they’d cover my station so I didn’t have to worry about it not being done?  One of the quality techs actually like pulled me in by the shoulders and hugged me and told me he knew I could get through this, and he was so happy to hear me say I wanted to, because he’s hated seeing me break myself for people who don’t care for so long.  We’ve worked together for years but I had no idea this was a thing.  It was this really startling realization that everyone around me could see I had a problem clearly and I was just clueless.

I understand why no one ever said anything.  It was just so surreal to say I had a problem and wanted to fix it and suddenly have this floodgate of acknowledgment and support open where honestly I’d thought people would see me as whining or disregard it entirely.  It’s easy not to think of work addiction as a ‘real thing’.  We’re taught it’s not a real thing--or not for us.  One of the girls I work with kept herself on a station close by mine all through the last night, and it was a hard night, and I was so grateful for her for keeping me from running off the rails when management came around looking to shuffle for a push.  But she also told me something that is honestly powerful as fuck and keeps me up a little sometimes now: not only that the key to beating an addiction is remembering that it IS an addiction, but also that just because my dealers are giving me money instead of the other way around doesn’t make them pushing a fix on me any less.

Like Jesus, man.  I’ve been searching for help with workaholism and that is seriously the most evocative thing I’ve heard so far.  Web help needs to get on this girl’s level.

But yeah.  Being reminded that I have an addiction on a constant basis, both with acknowledgment of the negative and with positive reinforcement, is literally the only reason I did not panic and cancel my extra vacation days.  And I’m pretty sure my super team is the only reason I didn’t accidentally extend them by ending up in the hospital with my janky-ass wrists cut off or something.

Anyway, limiting my comp time because haha wrists.   But I hope to be able to do some light drawing within the next few days.