I’m trying to be better but I’m terrible some days and better others, my willpower day-to-day isn’t at all consistent enough to help. I’m always depressed and tired, even when I take my meds and get good sleep.
I love to imagine myself as I would be if I had the willpower and energy to tackle each day. What it would be like to be able to make friends as an adult without having anyone from college, highschool, or childhood. What it would be like if I could go about my day with confidence in my own ability, knowing I can back it up. What it would be like to live in my skin without wanting to scream all the time even when I’m happy. What it would be like if I was enough for myself.
What it would be like if I was just good enough to be okay. I wish I could be okay
How about ya’ll?
I know many people are like me in one way or another, and asking if there are is kind of pointless, but I just want to hear from people like me. I don’t want to be alone.
But I also know that these things are literally mostly the fault of the banal dystopia wearing down our will to live every day. As well as that despite all this shit you still believe in us, in the potential of humanity, is an act of love so pure that one who feels it cannot be evil. I will not accept your self hatred, you are a good person, just one thats been worn to pieces trying to pull them back together.
Sadly, I get little sleep still because I am burdened with work (which I drive 35+ min one way each day), many projects that lead to more rabbit holes, and many DIY projects I need to do because I am too poor to pay for convenience or have no options if I don’t want my privacy invaded and wallet abused by a shitty company. My wife does a trucking job and is gone M-F, so I have to take care of a lot of work during the weekdays, and she cooks for our meals for the week on Sunday. I also assist with her in the weekend chores, including laundry, vacuuming, etc. One of my 3 SSDs in my encrypted, contiguous LVM volume group failed (I wish I did a RAID setup like my home partition of 6 hard drives), so I am having to redo all of the work I completed on my Gentoo desktop on my laptop, having to relearn and remember the few years of work I lost. I am so exhausted when I get home, and I tend to have to fit all of my projects in the weekend if and when I am not helping PSL or doing errands with my wife. I have projects that still have not been completed in years that could have been completed in a week if I was not working. It took me 2-3 months to install an air conditioner this year (and by then summer was almost over, and the heat is probably why my SSD failed (my watercooled system didn’t have enough airflow to cool the DIMM.2 slot)) because it took a lot of money and time to acquire tools and materials to cut a piece of wood to mount the air conditioner on (so it did not lean toward the building and leak and create a bunch of mold like the previous air conditioner last year, which was a massive project to clean up). I am burned out, and the work never ends with barely any light, if at all, at the end of the tunnel.
Another rant incoming...
Meanwhile I am so exhausted that I have been coming to work late, which is getting progressively worse, and luckily I have not been fired yet, even as I take frequent and long bathroom breaks from likely having IBS induced by my anxiety and desire to take a breath. My job is a nightmare to work for. Every higher IT department (Patching, Security, etc.), is ludicrously incompetent. We have no test environment here, we just treat production as our test environment, so we have a shitload of tickets that tech support (my team) are extremely overburdened with often due to the higher up teams constantly breaking things. Meanwhile I have to program many scripts in PowerShell because I am the only one that can really do it, and I have to balance tickets (about 50 in my queue alone, with many high urgency ones that I can’t get around to doing for months at a time), image laptops for the entire team (I regret taking this job because I essentially became one of the most screwed over after the ticket mandate), create scripts for our new software deployment and migration projects (because the original IT decided to use a “localhost” domain for the AD controller, which is what they were directly told not to do in college), recreate scripts because higher IT teams are incredibly stuck-up and act like they are so smart that they can’t accept a well-crafted script from a lowly IT contractor like me (meanwhile we were using scripts that were literally broken because a dumbass IT manager doesn’t know how to do a switch statement in PowerShell), etc. Patching and their infinite intellect are always scaring the CTO (who actually doesn’t really have any IT experience, she was a franchise manager of an ice cream shop and only worked at a finance company as a project manager of a team remotely related to IT) into worrying about every security issue and non-issue, and make wonderful decisions like deleting all older Microsoft Visual C++ dependencies, which I said from the start was a terrible idea, and was vindicated when employees’ softphones and other software stopped working. I emailed them a Microsoft docs article showing that while newer Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables have backwards compatibility with older versions, it was not guaranteed for anything older than 2015, which was most of the redistributables we had. The company always chooses the shittiest software that they get tricked into buying by shell companies, and the software is completely and utterly slow and tends to conflict with each other. Security uses Carbon Black to block any software by hash, and Patching refuses to ignore the protected vlan where I image computers, which tends to fuck me over so much when I am trying to image computers. Nobody will admit their mistakes and will not hold themselves accountable. You have to pull miracles every day to get anything done, and get paid $22 an hour as a contractor and pay $400 in insurance every month and have no guarantee to get a permanent position or even an extended contract, during a job market with 100s of tech workers (especially due to all of the tech layoffs) trying to get a job, with many in the market likely being scams or non-existent/available to entry-level IT. IT is extremely understaffed, 1 IT person per 200 employees, with most users being very incompetent, the higher IT teams even more so, and we are just running more trains into a larger trainwreck and creating more fires. When we were half our size, management still claimed we were overstaffed. Now my team has to get 500 and increasing tickets done by the end of the year. Everyone is doing the jobs of 3+ people, and there’s no separation of duties whatsoever. We just keep hiring more employees and no IT at all besides developer jobs and senior level positions. I believe a third of the company is contractors, and it took 4 years for one member in my team to get a full time job, and he was about to quit. The turnover rate is so high, and because of my contributions and skills, I am probably not being fired for being late because they cannot afford to lose me.
The job sounds really stressful :( By the look of it at least you won’t lose the job but I hope you’re getting paid and compensated proportionally for all that hard work and tight deadlines.
The world likes to rush doesn’t it. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed I wished things would go at half speed for a bit so I can catch up. The lack of sleep is probably the most ubiquitous symptom of a human life under capitalism. I hope you can find a better job that respects your health more, or a compromise with medication. I don’t like medicating all that much as it’s often a result of atomizing individuals into having this or that disease or condition. But I’d love to see comrades overcoming the struggle with whatever material means they’re able to access.
In a better world, if your personal desktop breaks you’d be able to take a break and figure it out. I hope you get your nice Gentoo installation back eventually.
Also, make backups of your /etc and dotfiles. I have just a single LVM encrypted drive and never touched RAID, everything important textwise is managed with git and hosted on 3 mirrors. My homelab just runs with separate ext4 drives and I make backups on one of them. I run backup scripts every Sunday because that’s when I have time.