Tuesday, July 7

I had an okay day on Monday at work. I've been having social anxiety on the job that started after my first couple days when the initial glow faded and my feeling of alienation from the culture that I now worked for started. I realized that this was happening and that it was making work very exhausting for me. I still tend to get stressed at work habitually, but I'm working on relaxing and making small talk that's not forced. It seemed to be working Monday. I have four more shifts this week so I'll have plenty of time to practice, and I luckily also have less homework because of holiday and midterms. 

Art has been a struggle lately. I inked a bunch of things and didn't color them and now I have a stockpile of WIPs that I need to color. I want to learn color but I'm also terrified of it. It's the pressure that drives my art block lately. I feel shame about where I am as an artist and creator and I want to make more and more and more, but I feel so tired about creating lately. Social media caused me to see art in a new, more negative light. Art became a chore and not a fun pastime, and I was comparing myself to others too much. 

Today I drove early in the morning to my driving test. The wait beforehand was stressful and my mom was stressed out too, which was really evident because I got yelled at a bunch of times for stupid reasons on the journey there. It did nothing at all to help my own nerves, and even though I could feel myself slowly dissociating I felt that I couldn't do much to stop it besides slow it with constant assurances and self-talk. I ended up failing because of a stupid mistake on a turn; I know that I drive well, but when put into stressful for unforseen situations I forget how to think critically. I'd never seen a three way lane before so I blanked and treated it like a right lane. Sigh. In the end, I'm still in the same situation I was in this morning, except I need to retake my permit test again. I've been trying to get my license for two years now, maybe more, and it's been broken up by the pandemic and the dmv getting closed down plus us moving, plus me having really bad driving anxiety for a while. I no longer have that anxiety, but I just feel incredibly exasperated about this whole thing; I just want to get it over and done with already. I got emotional after I failed the test and came to terms with the fact that what happened happened and I can't blame the DMV or myself for it, nor will I take shit from anyone for my mistake. I stewed it in for a bit after I got home and was unable to take a nap, feeling so dissociated out, when I decided to just text a friend to mentally tether myself. We ended up playing Stardew Valley for six hours and dragged two other friends into it. It was fun! It didn't fix my problems, I know. It's not something I'd normally justify using my time for, and honestly it makes me feel bad.. useless. But most people see this kind of thing as normal. Taking hours off to spend time with friends, not pushing oneself to isolation in order to productively use every hour of the day, that's normal. What I feel I have to do, to be productive, in order to justify my existence, to structure my life, and block out bad thoughts, it's unhealthy. I turn to productivity and useful tasks to block out deeper problems; sure it's better than drugs and helps certain things in the long run, but I've been seeing more and more how many issues I've been ignoring that way. 

I have a therapist now and friends. Maybe friend singular in terms of "I'd trust the majority of the time to talk about this stuff, including randomly when I'm not having a mental breakdown". That's progress from not long ago where I had to wait until long bottled up explosions to tell anyone anything. I wish I were farther along, but I must be patient with myself. Besides that, I keep in regular touch with a couple friends now and we play games several times a week. I can tell it's good for all of us. And I go to work, which gives me more interaction with people and experience working with customers/coworkers and in awkward situations. Even though I woe the fact that I get stuck in at least three awkward situations* every time I go to work, it's better than still being home and being stuck in no situations at all, isn't it? I'm trying to see the good in things. Having other people see me gives me a tether to reality, and having to interact gives me even more of a tether. Getting paid and getting practice, even getting to know a few people, that's nice too. It's just the transportation that's an issue, but I won't go into that now. 

I've had two therapy sessions now where we just tried to get to know each other. I'm not sure how I feel about it but it's definitely a step up from my last therapy experience where I could feel from the start that it wasn't working out, sessions were twice a month, and yet I persisted and ending up getting heartbroken (nonromantically). I dissociated during my second session though because I forgot to eat during session and started feeling the effects of that in the last 30 minutes. I don't like dissociating in session, it feels like I lost thay bonding time and it's hard to remember what I said and what she knows about me. We set some goals for therapy that I thought were really nice to refer back to and I asked a lot of questions that I got satisfactory answers to. If anything I'm smoothing out my understanding how the therapeutic process is supposed to go now. If this doesn't work out, I can take that knowledge to the next therapist. I just hate having to break it off with people, but it could be necessary. 

It's late night now, and I have an engineering midterm tomorrow morning. I didn't study because of the bout of depression and the subsequent gaming. I don't really beat myself up for it, but I wish that wouldn't happen. I don't want to force myself to work when I feel so awful, but waiting for it to clear up is difficult and feels inefficient. I can only compromise by allowing myself to slack on work sometimes. Maybe I deserve it after all these years of neglecting myself for the sake of work.