#taking melatonin at 6pm because today has been terrible and i just want it to be over

[flyingbananasaur]

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[loquaciousquark]

Hey, all, I’m probably not going to be around much for a few months aside from queues & TM posts.

Work stress has taken over my life in a way it never has before. A very long story short, my closest coworker (both friend-wise and workload-wise) took another job that began at the end of April. While she knew from November she was going to take this job, she did not inform administration until the very final contractual required moment of 30 days out. This means there has been no chance for admin to be looking for long-term qualified candidates to replace her position, since to get hired on at the school even on a temporary faculty basis takes about six-eight weeks.

(She told me about this job in November, but made me promise at the time not to tell anyone because she was going to tell them soon. Then, as schedules were being planned out for this summer and her time was being allotted under the assumption she would be there, she deliberately said nothing and made me answer the emails so she wouldn’t be “lying.” I have known this hell has been coming for me for five months and haven’t been able to do anything about it because I gave her my word.)

In addition, while not her fault, three other administrative support employees and two other faculty members have left/will be leaving in less than a month as well. One employee’s family member died unexpectedly, one employee was grossly incompetent (although I can’t remember the last time we actually fired someone for that), and the other faculty members are leaving for really good jobs elsewhere. Just very unfortunate timing that means we are all spread excruciatingly thin for now.

This all comes at a time where I am actively beginning that Service Director position for the primary care clinic on top of everything else. This position, while I think a great fit for me, what else I teach in the school, and how I plan/organize/relate to the students, has come at a terrible time because it in and of itself is a massive amount of work, especially getting it off the ground. If I’m going to implement all these new policies and changes I’ve been dreaming of for years, I need to do it at the beginning of my tenure--to try and keep everything going the way it has been and change later once everything calms down would be infinitely more work at that time & have a bunch more pushback from both the students and the faculty I now lead as part of this clinic, many of which have decades of seniority on me.

I’m doing the work of two-and-a-half full-time faculty right now. I do still really love this job, but right now I can’t handle it.

I’m grinding my teeth at night and clenching my jaw during the day. My dentist suddenly wants me to get a bite plate when before a few months ago, I’d never ground my teeth in my life. I’m getting excruciating stress/tension headaches almost every other day from how tight every muscle of my face and neck is. I’ve gained over ten pounds in the last two months from eating like crap because anything that requires more than two steps of prep is mentally, physically, and emotionally impossible, which has the added effect of making me want to cry every time I look in a mirror and see my stomach so far away from my mental “normal,” because I was already seven pounds or so more than I wanted to be. I’m only getting three or four hours of sleep a night despite melatonin because my mind is just reciting checklist after checklist of things I need to do to keep all my sudden responsibilities on track.

I saw my psychiatrist today (which in and of itself was overwhelming--I thought until I was leaving for the appointment that today was my annual physical, and it wasn’t until I was checking the auto-filled address that I realized it was in the wrong building for that. Turns out I’d independently scheduled both the psych follow-up & the physical within a few days of each other, and I’d missed the text appointment reminders for the physical because the psych ones were more recent. I have never straight up no-showed an appointment in my life before this.)

I only had about thirty minutes with her, but part of the problem is that I haven’t taken my meds regularly in over a month because even such a little thing was too difficult. I’m going to try to start back on that, but...

I told her it doesn’t feel like I’m trying to keep plates spinning in the air. It feels like I have them all under control at the moment, they’re just excruciatingly heavy. The only way I’ve been handling this sudden pressure of doing basically two and a half jobs with no margin for error in any of them is being ruthlessly, relentlessly organized. Which is fine, except that I can feel how that changes my personality when I have to go so hard and regimented, and I hate how it feels to have both no margin and no grace.

I had a student the other day email me about a flight she booked for a Memorial Day vacation at 6pm on a Friday, not thinking about how clinic does not always end on the dot at 5pm. We (both students and faculty) are required to stay until the patient’s exam is complete. Sometimes that’s at five. Sometimes that’s at 6:30. On rare occasions I’ve stayed until 9pm in clinical care because that’s what was needed at the time for that patient.

She wanted to get out of clinic with an excused absence. We require three weeks’ minimum notice because when a student leaves without coverage, we have to reschedule all the patients they were meant to see. Her schedule was fully booked, and I had to say no, because right now I have nothing left to try to find an alternative for her. I hate saying no to students, especially when it’s something I truly could help them solve with some investment on my part, but right now--I’m sorry, but I can’t. Why on earth did you schedule a flight for 6pm on a day you have clinic until 5, especially when the airport is a 20-minute drive from the school even without traffic? I can’t fix this for you, not right now. You have to show up to clinic or find your own coverage. I don’t care how you do it, but someone has to be there, and I don’t have anything left in me to help you figure out how to do it.

My mom listens to a guy who sometimes talks about how you have to have a margin in your life to manage your stress. A margin in your work helps you enjoy your leisure time; if you don’t have that margin, even scheduled play feels stressful because you have work playing through your head the whole time.

I’m out of margin. I’m ten feet over the line in every direction I’m so out of margin, and I am constantly being asked by students and other faculty, “How are you doing now that the person who you shared 90% of your work life with is gone? Who’s going to help take over [year-long highly-intensive Methods course] now that Dr. So-and-So is gone? Who’s going to help you teach it since we all know what a gigantic course it is and how it’s always required two people to run full-time, and now you’re down to one who’s also taken on a bunch of other responsibilities at the exact same time?”

and they’re laughing when they say it. and i’m laughing when i tell them the truth, which is “no one.” and we all laugh together and inside my head i am ripping apart under the pressure.

Even if they hire someone by August, it’s not going to mean any relief until September due to onboarding, and even then it won’t be what I really need. This woman I worked with and I had both taught this course together for years, and before that we’d both taken it as students. We knew how it ran inside and out. We knew what the responsibilities were. We had the workload divided evenly and didn’t have to consult over every decision that was made--it just got done. Even if they do hire someone at lightning speed, I still have to train them. I have to show them where the group drive is on the faculty intranet. I have to teach them how it’s organized. I have to show them how to upload quizzes and how to grade them and how to edit the Excel practical documents and the timeframe we expect the grades back and why our grading standards are the way they are and what to say to guest graders and guest lab instructors and show them where the file folders are kept and where the .docx’s are kept and the way things are sorted and how the tests are written and how to extensively edit a PDF file and give them the contact information for faculty IT support (which still ends up being me half the time) and the manual printer and the woman who orders office supplies and the woman who orders clinical equipment and the man who orders building maintenance supplies and when you go to one and not the other and how electronic testing works and how to grade it and how to upload a document with all the specific little requirements the program wants to make sure it imports correctly and how to deal with the errors this program will inevitably throw back because it’s niche software for a niche school and that means it’ll never be user friendly.

It took me almost two years to really feel comfortable being co-coursemaster for this course because it is so unbelievably massive. Even if they hire someone by August, I still won’t have a full-time coursemaster pulling their weight until 2021.

The other metaphor I used with my psychiatrist is that I’m holding on to a cliff’s edge with my fingertips. Right now, I’ve got a pretty decent grip, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you put another pound on my back it might pull me right off the rock.

I don’t see practical relief coming any time soon. “What can we do to help? We want you to know you are very supported right now. You let us know what you need.” What can you do? Hire someone tomorrow who already knows how our computer system works, who can troubleshoot their own IT, who can look at a list of tasks that need to happen to get this Methods course fully ready every single semester of every single year and do them without any handholding from me. Hire someone with as much attention to detail as I’ve had to have because it’s the right way to do the damn job. Hire someone I won’t have to clean up after because to them “the cart in the closet” is the same thing as “the specific place on the labeled closet shelf where the equipment belongs.”

I’m clenching my teeth so hard they’re hurting, so I guess I have to stop. If you see me in-game somewhere, believe me, it’s not because I’ve caught up. It’s because I haven’t and I can’t bear thinking about how much I still have to do.