Bonding over office drama.

Something very unusual happened yesterday. A co-worker asked me to join her and a few others for a drink after work, and I agreed.

We went to a local pub and ended up leaving around 10:30 (at NIGHT).

I can't even remember the last time I 1) socialised with work people and 2) socialised on a work-night. Spectacular miracles all around.

It was a nice night, we laughed a lot. Two of the younger mid-20's guys didn't know what kegel exercises were. They learned a lot.

What was most interesting for me, was how much I learned once they'd all started drinking. Especially regarding office drama and politics. There's long been two people I'm not a fan of. One is a partner who is terrible to work with. He has no concept of time or deadlines and speaks in weird, fluttery language that makes him impossible to take direction from. He also is a bit of a snob. The other is his attaché, a golden boy he loves, but who I now know everyone has problems with.

My issue with him was that he's entitled and inconsiderate. He talks to everyone like they work for him (he's not even an architect, he's still in school) and he's often patronising. Here are a few examples:

• Once I came in to a note that said "I needed a USB key, so I took yours." He went through my stuff, took my USB key, then removed what was on the USB key and placed it on a shared server. The nerve of going through someone's things!
• In the kitchen, he never cleans up after himself. And when we ask him about it, he clearly does not give any shits. He steams his milk and leaves a crust. Every. Day.
• He uses a coffee machine that's expressly for guests and senior partners (the kid is like 28).
• If he borrows something and you speak slowly and clearly that he needs to bring it back when he's done. He won't. You know this. And he lies to your face.
• I replaced the receptionist a few times this summer for her holidays. He would come and sit in the lobby in the couch chairs and read magazines. During work hours. Casually. No care in the world. 

These are everyday annoyances. You deal. I think shit started hitting the fan when he yelled at a client and a co-worker. And then it came out that two clients refuse to deal with him at all. This is a young kid. Not even an architect yet - how was he not fired!?

Then we found out he was hired at 55,000$ a year, which is significantly more than all of the junior staff. That added injury to the daily insult. He makes more than some architects. But they're women, you see. They handle their burden silently. They work hard. They're polite. They're enjoyed by their colleagues. He has an ego. He's entitled. He tells people their ideas are wrong, their designs ugly. A true visionary rectal wart. 

The gender pay-gap is real.

He comes in late, smug. People don't want to work with him. Co-workers think he's disrespectful. Clients think he's a dick. He's just not great. And the way he seems to be an exception to decency while making more money than folks killing themselves on projects makes everyone furious. 

I learned all about that last night, which was nice. I know it's a suck situation but the fact is I internalise so much being able to relate to other humans was nice.

I know very little about the people I spend my days next to. I liked everyone I went out with before, but now I know a little more about them. Mainly what lushes they are. I had a drink. It sucked. I don,t know enough about alcohol to have any test or knowledge. 

I'd like to work on being more social. 

I have a lot I want to work on!

It's Friday! 

Can't wait to go home and take my bra off!

Falling forward through time.

I haven't been able to bring myself to write lately. It just seems like time has been slipping away from me. Work has been busier, which makes a huge difference. I can usually read online and fart around creatively when I'm waiting on work. I've also been pretty tired in the evenings. I've been trying to cook a lot, and cook healthy, fresh foods, so that takes up more of my time. I've also been pretty social, if I plan something on Saturdays and Sundays, it's as if I lose all free time. 

This month has flown by. My birthday is in early January, and it's usually a not-great time for me. I'm trying to learn to celebrate that I'm still alive, and that people care about me, but for years it's always been a disappointment. My birthday is right after the holidays, people are broke and tired. I end up feeling my birthday is an inconvenience and is easily ignored or forgotten.

In roughly two weeks I'll be going out to BC to visit my friend C. Dr. Rishi has recommended I plan something for myself to look forward to, so I am, indeed, looking forward to it. It's be a nice mental break. It'll be good to see C and her new house. It'll be good to take in the sea and the area. I scheduled a small tattoo for myself of one of my illustrations (already paid for). Most importantly of all, I paid for the ticket with air miles. I don't have a grand to spend on a ticket. Not when I'm trying to save up to buy something.

So I'm going to BC. It might be nice to be somewhere else. To walk around. To breathe different air. To see a friend. To chat. To cuddle a dog. It's also warmer there, significantly. She's on Vancouver Island, so there's some kind of magical micro-climate there. For example it's 10°C where she lives right now and it's -6°C here.

I'm reading The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams right now and there's this short story that moves through time and it's just beautiful and stirring. It took me a while to warm up to her book, some of the stories are very removed and are written with distance. But some, like The Excursion really fascinated me. The New York Times describes her as "one of the greatest chroniclers of humanity’s insignificance." Reading that clicked her work into place for me.

In Williams’s precise, unsparing, surprising prose, her characters reach for the sublime but often fall miserably to earth: ‘‘Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness.’’ She has a gift for sentences whose unsettling turns — ‘‘While she was thinking of something perfectly balanced and amusing to say, the baby was born’’ — force readers to grapple, just as her characters grapple, with the way life will do what it wants with you.

Her work is so removed, so unsentimental.

Joy Williams likes a good road trip, so let’s take one through a Joy Williams story. The road is familiar — you recognize the religious undertones; the dark humor; the animals flapping overhead and squashed on the pavement. You smile at Williams’s disarming manner of juxtaposing words, pressing unsettling meanings out of them: ‘‘The two women sat in the living room surrounded by wooden ducks. The ducks, exquisite and oppressive, nested on every surface.’’ You think you know the route you’re taking, but after a few detours and hairpin turns you may have lost track of how you’re ever supposed to get to where you’re meant to go. The ride might end with the squeal of brakes and shattering of glass. It might also be beautiful: 

The car flipped over twice, miraculously righted itself and skidded back onto the road, the roof and fenders crushed. ... None of them were injured and at first they denied that anything unusual had happened at all. May said, ‘‘I thought it was just a dream, so I kept on going.’’

This is it. This type of removed way she writes about brutal, daily life, and how the absurd and the routine are lined up against that brutality and how narrative moves through them both so effortlessly. There is no real relationship to the characters. Her stories are intentionally alienating, which is something I haven't experienced before.

Her work really presents my own disassociation to me. Moving through memory and present time, through wants and dreams and should's and have to's.

I'm asking myself a lot of questions lately, but I'm also attempting to swallow my need for patience. I need to make decisions. To prepare. To choose one option over another, and reading Williams' makes it all seem less important. Less permanent.

That's the mirror she's created. We're impermanent, and at a glance, we're often absurd and hard to understand. In some moments, we're genius. At other times, we're the worst. And when sweetness presents itself, it's a glorious treat.

Can we just "golden-girls-it" now?

This weekend was a good one.

I took Friday off to head over to a friend's office. She has her own design studio and has a corner dedicated to photography. She has experience as a photographer, and she gave a couple of hours to a friend and I to try and get some decent head-shots for Linkedin and for website use.

She actually rents her office space above a restaurant owned and operated by a former classmate of ours, so we all ended up having lunch, and people started calling people and we ended up having dinner and drink at her loft later on.

It was just nice seeing everyone, and being unexpectedly social.

Saturday I had a dinner party planned for three good friends of mine. Two of which had never met. So it was just a really nice time, filled with chat and giggles and a new 2 month old baby who cooed a lot.

It really reinvigorated me. It can be so nice, being surrounded by friends. It can take a lot of energy out of me, but it was nice.

There were high points and low points during both events, since it seems like everyone is doing really well, and getting their shit together, and I'm not. I'm still struggling. I find that very difficult. Comparison makes a terribly view of the world, I know, but I couldn't help but feel like the limping party.

I know that the way I feel about my body is something that affects me negatively daily, but I'm not sure how to move forward. I want to be pro-active, but I have so little energy.

Why is having a body so difficult for me?

I'm a blast at parties.

This past Saturday was my buddy E’s birthday. She’s had a rough go of things this year with her divorce from a not-so-nice guy and the emotional and financial fallout from that. Saturday was the first time I've seen her house full of people (he was controlling about friends and social events) and she seemed really happy. 

A highlight of the night for me was when I remarked that when the teacher population was high, all they talked about was school policy, and when the ratio changed and the childhood friends came around, they told old stories of things they did to each other ("You told on me to the teacher! Remember?!"). They then asked me to choose a subject for the conversation and I called their bluff and said “Syria.” I was ignored. They went back to talk about teacher drama.

It was an okay night. I mean, I got progressively more comfortable as the night wore on and the group whittled down. I don’t like large groups. I don’t like strangers. I don’t like people screaming over music to have a conversation. It was just a bit much. 

I also don't really like a segment of E's friends - and she knows this. I also don't drink, so I'm sober to deal with the social awkwardness of it all.

I made an effort because I knew it was important to E.

It’s just such an absurd combination of being both an out of body experience, whilst also never having been so bodied. I'm disconnected and not at ease in the space, the people and the ease with with they socialize being totally alien to me, and then my body is this anchor of which I'm hyper-aware, in that I'm us uncomfortable with the space I occupy. I can't be easy and free. I am not easy and free.

Someone made a fat joke at one point, and I just sat there and did my best to seem unphased. I guess gym teachers have a way of making the chubby kid feel like shit no matter the age or place.

I'm just not a happy, positive, fun person right now. I am able to admit to a good day, and can absolutely understand my being a pleasure to be around on those days. But inviting me to a party when I'm not doing well just seems like a bad idea. I wish it were more acceptable to bow-out due to depression.

I feel like the opposite of an empath. Instead of being able to sense the emotions of others (though I am highly sensitive) I instead radiate my own feelings, bringing everyone around me down. Like if I were to be relegated to some old cabin, all the flowers around me would shrivel and die. And on a good day, sure, they might bloom, but on a bad day you’d stay clear, and even at a distance you could smell the rot.

I hate that it's such an ordeal. Me doing something as innocuous as going to a fucking birthday party. 

Man-alive... 

On the echoes of trauma.

I've been thinking about memory and trauma a lot lately. Why is it that certain things are fixed into my brain. Why is it that certain memories have had such an impact on me? It’s as if the memories have pooled, and during the course of the depressive episode of my 20’s became this large body of water I don’t remember crossing. And this water, unmoved and untouched, has become stagnant. So here I am, on the other side of it, trying to figure out how the hell I got to where I am, and how to navigate my way forward.

I use to think this meant going back, trying to return to how things were, but now I know better. There is no going back. I am a totally different person to the micro level. You don’t survive a sickness untouched. Your cells have mutated. You've adapted.

But moving forward isn't as easy as it sounds. Patterns and habits exist. A decade of negligence to parts of me needs addressing. Waking up is painful. Uncomfortable. Takes energy.

“One step at a time.”

“One day at a time.”

Focusing on the management of my life, on surviving one day at a time has gotten me through a lot. But it’s also meant my vision of the future is extremely limited.

I lose the entirety of my 20’s to depression and anxiety. I hold pockets of memory here and there. All of it is a haze. A deep, thick cloud I surface from occasionally. It’s become a joke to some of my friends, “you don’t remember anything!” they'll say, recounting the time I slept through our being lost in a national park.

The reality seems to be that I don’t remember significant periods of that time in my life because my focus of surviving one day at a time meant every day was nearly identical. My only comfort was in sleep and unconsciousness. My work and school memories are cloudy at best. I kept telling myself as long as I was in school, I was mildly productive.

My recession from life, my attempt at protecting myself back-fired. I gained weight. I became physically unhealthy. I detached from my sexual self. I became so internalized, it took years to re-form my voice. To hear myself.

How can a memory of someone be so traumatic? At some point, aren't they just a ghost? This event has become exponentially larger as it transitioned to something resembling myth. At some point it just represented the feelings it engenders, doesn't it?

Your ghost reminds me of shame. Of rejection. Of pain. Of me being on my own. 

How do I let go? How do painful memories become less intrusive?

I think a large part of my problem is my disengagement from my life. Ten years of memories didn't happen. I wasn't out. I wasn't dating. I wasn't travelling. I wasn't socializing. I was surviving myself. Because of this, I wasn't making new memories. New references.

My references, my memories were these old ghosts.

There’s shame tied to my inability to let things go; these memories that have festered into larger villains then they originally were. Why can’t I be lighter? Easier?

Makes me think of Jenny Lewis’ She’s Not Me.

she's not me, she's easy

I am not easy. lol. I can’t be! Look how fucking dark and incessant my brain is! Sure, in real life, I'm comical. I'm clever. But how can anyone fall in love with me, when I'm so heavy? How can someone truly know me and still want to be with me?

Stagnant pools of memory, and heavy fucking baggage.

It's like I'm a junior adult. Sure, on paper I'm 31, but I'm lacking a decade of the formative experiences my peers have. First apartments. Room-mates. Casual sex. Parties. Drinking. Exploring with drugs. International travel. Basically 100 different kinds of socializing. Dating mainly. 

Socially stunted and romantically retarded. 

That's me. I'm trying my best to figure out how to move forward. I don't want to feel like there's no way out of this. 

It's going to be so much work. 

Accomplishing little things.

Sometimes there are days where small accomplishments take all you've got to give. On those days, small might as well be huge. You can buy this print, by Tyler Feder over on her etsy store. She also has a blog called roaring softly.