All right. I am finally having some peace with it now, but it took many days. The lesions, the sleepless nights, the self-harm…
* * * * * * *
My eye had been hurting me. My right tear duct kept getting clogged. Warm compresses made it better but it kept coming back. Finally, it occurred to me that it might be be my night time anti-depressant, Elavil. Elavil dries out my body’s systems. It is called a something… I’ll think of it later. My mouth gets dry. I get constipated. It affects my vision. My eyes temporarily lose some flexibility. Sporadically, I have a hard time reading.
I’ve tried to go off Elavil several times due to one irritating symptom or another. But there’s one thing Elavil does that hasn’t been duplicated. It lets me sleep, deeply, and reduces the extreme impact of my nightmares. This is no small thing. I can’t go many nights without sleep assistance without getting weirder and weirder. The good thing is now I recognize the weirdness as different than my normal state.
OK, picture this. I had to cut down the Elavil because my eye was bothering me which leads to increasingly difficult nightmares. I wake up with “convulsions” (I’m trying to get away from the euphemism of “shaking”) several times a night. This alone is enough to make me not want to go to sleep.
Then, I think somewhere just before or just after I saw the movie Philadelphia I quit taking Elavil all together. The images of the lesions triggered a memory or multiple memories. My ability to deal with the triggering was impaired by my sleep disruption. (HEY, DON’T EAT PIZZA ON TUESDAYS. “You are just trying to distract.”) This is heady stuff. I’ll elaborate… in a bit.
* * * * * * *
My head hurts and my body feels weird. Doesn’t it just always seem that way? I get sick of it. I’m sure everybody else does too.
I am also suffering from marginal self-esteem. I’m good enough; I’m not good enough. I work hard enough; I don’t work hard enough.
Am I going to say anything more exciting than that? Am I going to lead the reader into my Byzantine world? Open the swinging door to my consciousness? I think not. But then again…
* * * * * * *
Angry. I was profoundly angry. Always angry. Every Damn Day. Angry. Angry even as we speak. Angry in the morning. Angry in the night. (I’m sure this is a good thing but it seemed excessive.)
Coupled with that, I had the perpetual headache and body nausea. At this very moment, I’m probably the angriest about work.
I had started my brilliant career innocently enough as a typist with insurance companies. Naturally, insurance companies are not known for their high wages. Consequently, I didn’t made a fortune and couldn’t hang in there for the long haul.
I quit and landed a state government job at the tender age of 20 as a file clerk. Would you believe, the pay was better? Really, my dream of finally bringing home $100 per week came true. For a long time, I was fairly content being a file clerk especially after I was able to work part-time and got the rest of the time to enrich my life. (YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING. “Mental health treatment, dim-bulb.”)
Eventually, the day came when I quit being a file clerk and became a clerk typist for the Human Rights Commission. I was content with that too. After awhile, I promoted to an investigator with the Commission. That’s where I was now.
Being an investigator was compelling. I liked the work, got along well with coworkers and the public, and felt challenged. In fact, things would’ve been perfect except for those very little things like bureaucratic management bullshit which waxed and waned like the tide. Currently, we were in a wane phase. I’d worked for the Commission for ten years and ridden through many of these times. However, I’d reached too high a level of awareness to ignore them with any degree of success.
This particular night was the night before a unit meeting. “ I hate meetings,” I told my coworkers. “All I want to do is the work.” Unfortunately, the current management was of a mind to have meetings to discuss the content of future meetings. What the meetings provided in the way of assistance for my work could be reduced to two paragraphs in a memo. Other than that, they were what several coworkers grimly described as “fluff” and lacking any real substance.
“Do you know what we discussed in the last unit meeting?” I told an ex-coworker. Without waiting for an answer, I said, “We had five agenda items. The first two, we tabled for further discussion after much discussion. The third required further study. And the last two, we couldn’t get to because we ran out of time.”
I ranted and raved. It was clear to me we were on a downhill slide and had yet to reach the bottom. In any case, it made me blisteringly angry and disrespected as if my time and energy meant nothing. Oh, of course, these idiots meant well but since when did that help anything.
The Commission had a one-year backlog of cases. This meant that from the time a person filed a discrimination complaint we would not get around to investigating it for a year. How would that make you feel especially if you were working the same job all this time? “But don’t worry, the Commission has devised a new mission statement. We are working on new policies and procedures all the time. We are buying computer equipment, attending meetings, and traveling to and fro. But don’t worry, we’ll get to your case eventually. But we can’t agree on the definition of customer service so we’ll have to set up a task force. Are you free next Tuesday?”
I had nothing but rancor for the madness and the night before unit meetings gave me headaches. All I could think of was just surviving it and getting on with my work. “Oh, and just for the fun of it,” I’d say to coworkers, “I’d like to be distracted by work.”
I knew this cycle would pass. I had already lost many friends though I kept in touch. The process of attrition had not left a lot of people I had started with. I was never quite sure when a cycle would take me too. I assumed not until I left voluntarily, but one could never be certain with the Commission.
Upon returning from any kind of extended leave, I would always enter the office by saying, “ Okay, has anyone been laid off, fired, demoted, promoted, or transferred?” If so, I usually hoped that it wasn’t me. Most of the time, I was right.
* * * * * * *
(“Okay, I feel like I can go on now for a while.” HOW’S YOUR HEAD? “Better, I think.” THANK GOD, I CAN’T STAND ALL THAT WHINING.)