But the corn is up
Jun. 16th, 2022 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormYesterday was pretty rough until I saw the corn come up.
There were a ton of meetings back to back at work. The last one was a check-in with my supervisor, who now officially has a pattern of saying "if you need help with your workload or anything just ask" and then rejecting my requests for help and explaining that if I want he'll take on the fun parts of my job but he can't help with the particular thing I asked for. Figures, I guess. This workplace really is a case study in pretty much every bad or useless management technique out there. Then at the end of every meeting he asks for feedback and I'm just worn down.
Anyhow, then I had counseling with the work counselor. She doesn't know what to do with me, really, though she's pretty good with LGBTQ+ stuff. It's the first time I've actually had a counseling appointment line up with being in a pretty bad place emotionally (basically getting reduced hours at work is taking a couple hours a day to sort out and means I won't have much for vacation time etc this year and is highlighting the rigidity of the workplace, all of which is Not Great, and I do feel stuck here). She kept, I don't know, poking into the things that hurt but without the compassion I'd expect from a counselor and without answering my questions just ended at "talk to your doctor about this" and "I'm worried about the hopelessness in these stories" and "you've been through bad things before, use those tools".
I get what she was trying to do but it was the wrong way to go about it. Makes sense, I've only had three sessions with her and only one per month so she hasn't had much chance to form a rapport. In any case, I can translate some of what she said into a reminder to check my narratives. And here's one of my narratives: I'm grieving a lot right now. I'm grieving the idea of a workplace where I feel comfortably at home, I'm grieving the loss of Tucker, I'm grieving the brief moment of hope for a physical connection and an understanding support network in town here. I'm also, more overarchingly, grieving that I live in a world where I need to do so much work and use so much finesse to be allowed to live here: where I'm balancing what I can say about myself around gender, relationships, my brain generally, how I live, and the things I love because I can't just be open about all that stuff at once without social ostracism. You know, that's the thing about learning that I'm wired different: there's not just one trick everyone else has learned to make them ok with fitting in and I can just learn it and be fine.
So I have all that grief. Now that the corn is up I can put it into the corn, I cannot tell you how much that helps, but my narrative is that I'm grieving right now. My narrative is that it's actually ok for me to not perfectly compartmentalize that; it's ok for it to spill over and for me to feel unhopeful about the future sometimes now. It's ok for me to feel scared in a system and a society that would rather grind me up in self-justification than really look at me. It's ok for me to take a break from optimism; there will be time enough for me to look at the smashed pieces of whatever I was hopeful about and painstakingly reassemble them into some new and creative form. And you know, I will be feeling creative again sometime, and I'll be able to work to reassemble an idea of the life I want and then pursue it.
That "sometime" does not have to be now. The corn is growing. For a couple months it'll grow with or without me. I'm allowed to rest and lick my wounds and not perform. It's ok for me to just watch. During the summer folks will swing by and care about me and hold me some. In the fall my garden will serve me up a bounty of information and maybe also food. The land will love me in a way people cannot.
("why do you think you'll lose the house if you stop working, why do you keep thinking you'll lose things?" the counselor asks, as if she doesn't understand that we pay money for houses. "Because everything has left, in my life, the only thing I get to keep is my body and my self" was my answer).
I didn't know how to tell her I just need to stop fighting for a little while, fighting for this or that, and just rest and be in grief and be loved by what I trust to stick around, in this case Threshold and old friends. Her prompt got this post going, so that's something, but ugh. I'm so tired of having humans not understand.
There were a ton of meetings back to back at work. The last one was a check-in with my supervisor, who now officially has a pattern of saying "if you need help with your workload or anything just ask" and then rejecting my requests for help and explaining that if I want he'll take on the fun parts of my job but he can't help with the particular thing I asked for. Figures, I guess. This workplace really is a case study in pretty much every bad or useless management technique out there. Then at the end of every meeting he asks for feedback and I'm just worn down.
Anyhow, then I had counseling with the work counselor. She doesn't know what to do with me, really, though she's pretty good with LGBTQ+ stuff. It's the first time I've actually had a counseling appointment line up with being in a pretty bad place emotionally (basically getting reduced hours at work is taking a couple hours a day to sort out and means I won't have much for vacation time etc this year and is highlighting the rigidity of the workplace, all of which is Not Great, and I do feel stuck here). She kept, I don't know, poking into the things that hurt but without the compassion I'd expect from a counselor and without answering my questions just ended at "talk to your doctor about this" and "I'm worried about the hopelessness in these stories" and "you've been through bad things before, use those tools".
I get what she was trying to do but it was the wrong way to go about it. Makes sense, I've only had three sessions with her and only one per month so she hasn't had much chance to form a rapport. In any case, I can translate some of what she said into a reminder to check my narratives. And here's one of my narratives: I'm grieving a lot right now. I'm grieving the idea of a workplace where I feel comfortably at home, I'm grieving the loss of Tucker, I'm grieving the brief moment of hope for a physical connection and an understanding support network in town here. I'm also, more overarchingly, grieving that I live in a world where I need to do so much work and use so much finesse to be allowed to live here: where I'm balancing what I can say about myself around gender, relationships, my brain generally, how I live, and the things I love because I can't just be open about all that stuff at once without social ostracism. You know, that's the thing about learning that I'm wired different: there's not just one trick everyone else has learned to make them ok with fitting in and I can just learn it and be fine.
So I have all that grief. Now that the corn is up I can put it into the corn, I cannot tell you how much that helps, but my narrative is that I'm grieving right now. My narrative is that it's actually ok for me to not perfectly compartmentalize that; it's ok for it to spill over and for me to feel unhopeful about the future sometimes now. It's ok for me to feel scared in a system and a society that would rather grind me up in self-justification than really look at me. It's ok for me to take a break from optimism; there will be time enough for me to look at the smashed pieces of whatever I was hopeful about and painstakingly reassemble them into some new and creative form. And you know, I will be feeling creative again sometime, and I'll be able to work to reassemble an idea of the life I want and then pursue it.
That "sometime" does not have to be now. The corn is growing. For a couple months it'll grow with or without me. I'm allowed to rest and lick my wounds and not perform. It's ok for me to just watch. During the summer folks will swing by and care about me and hold me some. In the fall my garden will serve me up a bounty of information and maybe also food. The land will love me in a way people cannot.
("why do you think you'll lose the house if you stop working, why do you keep thinking you'll lose things?" the counselor asks, as if she doesn't understand that we pay money for houses. "Because everything has left, in my life, the only thing I get to keep is my body and my self" was my answer).
I didn't know how to tell her I just need to stop fighting for a little while, fighting for this or that, and just rest and be in grief and be loved by what I trust to stick around, in this case Threshold and old friends. Her prompt got this post going, so that's something, but ugh. I'm so tired of having humans not understand.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-18 02:01 am (UTC)