back in the bay area

once again, i want to thank everyone who replied to my last two posts (which i’ve now made private, as i tend to do that). i don’t intend this site to be a pity me, plea for help kinda thing, but just a venting, being honest thing. but ya’ll had some good comments for the previous month, and i thank you kindly. i’m currently in the bay area, escaped portland, got in 3.5 days ago, though not without some motorcycle trouble along the way (broke down while still in oregon, but some kind people rescued me, gave me a place to stay for the night, fixed my motorcycle for me). feeling pretty mellow, good to be back in the bay area, just a little worried about the looking for a job situation. but that’s for a week from now, right now i’m in the bubble where i’m revisiting the city i have now moved back to twice, the only city i have ever moved back to, and meeting up again with all the good people in my life who are important to me. i didn’t realize til i found myself stranded up in portland how important these people were to me. it’s nice not to feel completely alone.

anyhow, sorry this isn’t a content-filled post, just wanted to say thanks, again, for the kind thoughts last month.

“i deal with retards enough at work”

here’s an especially nice detail about the coworker who is still trying to exact revenge on me, or whatever the hell it is she’s doing with the backhanded trying to blame things on me and talking about me behind my back.

that one time we went out drinking, we wound up in the back bar of a local lesbian club. (she’s straight, but no matter.) where there was a karaoke stage.

now, keep in mind, the house we work at is filled with people with severe mental and physical disabilities, all are non-verbal, except for one person, who has cerebral palsy and makes voice-sounds, but can’t actually communicate verbally, though he can hear, and can use a modified form of sign language. he gets about mostly, when out of his wheelchair at the home, by sliding along the floor, pulling himself with his hands. another client walks around the house hitting himself on his head. another has had his legs amputated, is non-verbal, another drools continually, has to wear a helmet, and mostly sits on a sofa and grunts & tears paper into shreds.

i’m citing these details to let you know what kind of work we do, and that to do this kind of work requires respect for human beings, no matter how different they are. that no matter how a person is shaped or formed, every human being deserves to be treated with decency & consideration.

so i’m with the (i’ll find out later) revenge-bully coworker, at the lesbian bar, in front of the karaoke stage, and a young woman with cerebral palsy comes in, in a wheelchair. she parks her wheelchair facing the stage, sort of near our table, but a respectful distance away. the entire time this person with cerebral palsy was there, blissed out smile on her face, rolling her head this way and that in time to the music, my coworker got an uncomfortable, unhappy look on her face. after maybe 10-15 minutes, she leaned over to me and said, “i deal with retards enough at work, i don’t want to have to deal with them when i’m out having a drink.” i just looked at her, and said, “i can’t believe you actually said that.”

she replied, “i can’t help it, when i’m out relaxing, i don’t want to have to deal with retards, i get enough of it as it is, they need to stay away from places like this, they make people uncomfortable.”

again, i just looked at her. “y’know,” i said, “that i’m technically ‘retarded’, being on the autistic spectrum?”

she didn’t say anything else about the person with cerebral palsy after that, got a bit quiet, but the entire rest of the time the woman with cerebral palsy was there, my uneducated, barely graduated from high school coworker kept glaring at her whenever her back was turned.

people, i swear.

what one doesn’t expect to do on a friday night

i went to the mental health/crisis clinic in portland tonight. didn’t know i was going to wind up there (was supposed to meet some ppl online, but when i hadn’t heard from them by 7pm, i gave up on them.)

having drinks at the local lesbian bar. the coworker i’d invited for drinks (had invited her because she’s having a really rough time, and needs someone to talk to) bailed on me. on drink two, drinking slowly. playing pool by myself, guy finally asks to play. solid, tall, well-built. kicks my ass. neither of us hardly say anything. he asks if i want to play again, i say no, i’ve gotta go somewhere, but you play really well, thank you.

i’d pondered on whether to do it or not. on the one hand, the state of denial i’ve been living in is what’s enabling me to subsist. and to question that thick veneer of denial, to go to a mental health/crisis clinic to talk of the very things i’m denying… pavlovian reflex not to. but then i stood there in the bar at 7pm, both parties i was supposed to’ve hung out with having bailed on me, so detached in denial i am not even there, i feel nothing. address already in my little book, and it being only 8 blocks away, without fully thinking, i am then walking the sidewalk toward the clinic, motorcycle bag and helmet in hand.

as i walk, i think i am, very detachedly, neutrally, trying to figure out what i’m going to say, when they ask me why i am there. and that my response will probably be: “i don’t really know why i’m here. (pause) possibly because someone i’ve known a while has been reading what i’ve posted online, and seriously suggested i get help. and then that friend called up to find out where i could get help, and told me to come here.” however, when it got to the point where they asked me specifically what i was there for, i didn’t know what i would wind up saying.

nice clinic. a far cry from the dingy, grungy, cracked out, homelessness of most clinics in san francisco. it was clean, spacious, well-lit. everyone was white. everyone in portland is white. i fill out the initial paperwork after the clipboard was handed to me. under purpose of visit, i write: “depression, suicidal thoughts.” leave it at that. as i sit in the waiting room (when not out smoking, staring into nothing, sitting cross-legged on the ground off the parking lot), i resist the urge to crazy myself up, make it seem like i belong there. and also ponder my impulse to make myself seem normal.

maybe 20-30 minute wait. (again, far cry from san francisco clinics, in which the initial wait is usually 2-6 hours.) a small woman with a limp finally beckons me down the white carpeted hallways, to a very clean, well-lit room. she begins to ask me questions.

to sit there at 8 oclock on a friday evening in a well-lit room with someone you don’t know, and tell this person of why you are there… to tell them that you’ve been dealing with severe depression the past 4 months, that you are wearing the same clothes every day, barely eating, crap at that, showering once a week, completely given up, everything lost, not paying your bills, nothing tying you to this planet, you’ve sorted out all your affairs, written out your suicide note, posted it online with all the passwords and such to all your online blog accounts, readied the methods by which you’d publicize the location of that… that, in response to the question “do you ever harm yourself?” and you say, “isn’t that what life is about?” and she laughs but in a non-mocking way, as if to say, yes, that’s true, and she says do you ever bang your head on things, and you don’t want to say it, it’s so embarrassing, so teenage, and you finally say in a voice stripped of all concern for what you are saying, “i’ve cut myself.” several times in the past 10 years. last time? she asks. in december. then qualify it by saying “not enough to do any damage.” what you don’t tell her is that the reason you didn’t do any damage is that you found yourself holding the very sharp knife over your left forearm, the white of your wrist, and bent it down into your skin, making a cut, and it slid so cleanly, so easily, you were so close to slicing your wrist open right then, and you put the knife away right then. because your cowardice is still too strong.

you find yourself telling this person that there is nothing tying you to this planet, but that you are not actively suicidal, at this exact moment in time. that if… if &/or when you do it, you believe it will be spur of the moment, so therefore you don’t believe that you can be actively suicidal. but that the state you’ve been in the past 4 months, it’s prime material for such an event to occur. and you are here because of that, because it’s getting worse.

when she asks you if you’ve made plans, decided on what methods you will choose, you don’t know how to respond. you don’t want to be classified as 5150. so you don’t tell her of the incident with the knife. you do not tell her of planning to the detail driving your motorcycle off a cliff into the columbia gorge, down to whether you’d pause on the road or just drive straight off, whether you should drink, take the rest of your ativan before you do it, and, despite the intense cold, whether you should strip off your gear before driving over the edge, to better ensure you will actually die from the impact. you don’t tell her about holding your bottle of ativan, looking down at it, considering taking the entire thing, but aware there’s not enough pills in it to do any real damage. you don’t tell her about the elaborate plan you concocted in which you drove yourself to a local hotel room (this plan was hatched on the day you wrote your suicide note) and take your bottle of ativan along with several beers, wait for it to kick in, and then hang yourself from whatever was strong enough to kill you dead with your camping rope. and that you planned to set your camera to film it, livestream it, so the performance could be saved somehow, posted online, for the sake of Art. you don’t tell her that you’re leaving portland in a week (because that will reduce your chances of receiving services), and that when you’ve referred to it as a suicide run in your online posts, people don’t get that you mean that literally. that the reason you don’t want to ride along the coast, that instead you want to take a bus, is because you’re scared you will never make it to san francisco. because the temptation is very great, given the homelessness and no job waiting you in san francisco, the tall cliffs, narrow roads, are so easy to drive off, that you’ve contemplated it down to the smallest detail. that with your plans to do dispersement camping in a national forest along the way, driving off a dirt road into the dark roads, you’ve planned it down to the tiniest detail. finding an out of the way spot, your sharp knife with you, downing your bottle of ativan, wait for it to kick in. you’ve drained the gas from your motorcycle, cellphone battery is drained, no chance of anyone coming on you/your body in at least 6-12 hours. and when the ativan has kicked in you take your very sharp knife and slice your wrists open, and bleed there in the darkness. and you’ve thought enough ahead to know to post-date an entry to your blog, for 10 days in the future, so that people will see what you’ve left for them online, your suicide note and tying loose ends, but giving you enough time to delete the entry in case it somehow doesn’t happen.

you don’t tell this stranger sitting in front of you in this clean, well-lit room any of this. you just say you haven’t been able to find yet a method that was foolproof. when she asks if you own a gun, you say no (though don’t say that you’ve considered buying one here in portland, since the laws are so lax, and have access to guns in san francisco, where you’re going), that even if you did, it’s not a method you’d choose, as it’s too easy to miss the brain-stream, and instead just blow part of your face off, leave you disfigured, paralyzed.

you don’t say any of this, you instead hedge, evade, some weird dance, her questioning, you evading, you only say, i’m not actively planning on killing myself at this time, but not clarifying how on the edge you are, how close to doing it you are. because you’re scared if you say this she’ll force you to stay, force you into a hospital, and what will that accomplish? (or maybe it’s the loss of freedom that bothers you more, hating being told what to do.)

she writes many things, both sides, on her piece of paper, her form, scribbled in margins, written diagonally. all stuff i’m not going to recount here, because i’m tired of it. and she posits the suggestions that perhaps what you need is not medication, but instead counseling. and you think you remember saying, i’m not against counseling (oh yes, you’d referred to counseling as a misuse of money, so sterile, clinical, so removed from the true transformation a human being in need… needs), but you are in a very bad space… oh, you don’t remember what you say, but the meeting is ended with her deciding you are going to see the psychiatric nurse afterwards.

the psychiatric nurse sees you 30 minutes later, again, down the white, clean corridors, her referring it to as a laboratory rat maze. finally into a room, with a desk, several chairs.

and it gets bad. you are so detached, so removed. you are not yourself, haven’t been yourself for a long, long time. you are not sleeping well, barely eating. you are not going out, not paying your bills, don’t have access to pay any of your online bills, things are going to collection. you are leaving in a week, putting everything you have onto the back of your motorcycle and making your suicide ride along the pacific coast. and that if you somehow make it to the bay area, what awaits you is… the depressed economy, hardly any jobs, no place to live, hardly any money with you, and sf so unfriendly to homeless people, and on top of all this you are so riddled with crippling depression you don’t know you have what it takes to look for work, to make it work. you are catatonically scared that this truly is a suicide run, you are heading to the end.

you have all this on top of you as she begins to talk to you. and you somehow break down. not in a crying way, not in an opening up way. but in a you’re not there, you are not there, i can’t give, i can’t talk about this, and it’s half an hour of you losing your conversational abilities so bad that she doesn’t know what to do, and you have you rhat over your eyes, staring into the nothing carpet, and you keep scratching your nose, you don’t know why, just know it looks weird, and she’s offering nothing definite, keeps backtracking, almost as if she’s expecting you to decide what she needs to do, or is that not it, is it instead you are socially missing, you are so deadened and detached you’re not capable of talking about it, it, the reason you are here? it gets very bad, and you respond by pulling in further, and she’s evasive, circling in her speech, and it’s the kind of speech you have the worst time with, and it makes you pull in, get frustrated even more, and she’s telling you that you don’t need psychiatric medication, instead you need to sleep, and you say yes, i’m not getting sleep, but somehow can’t explain convincingly enough that the depression has stripped you, drained you, you can’t function, can’t think, every ability to function, be a person is gone.

and you made the mistake of saying that being put on paxil as a young’un spiraled you into a manic episode. (is that even true?) cuz now she’s unwilling to put you on an antidepressant. when the antidepressant is what you want, you so fucking desperately want and need. and you made the mistake of saying that you had major neuroleptic side effects in response to the depakote. that trazodone and seroquel both, prescribed for anti-psychotic purposes, made you highly aggressive and gave you very bad nightmares. the reason you telling her all this is bad is because she’s staring at you, and you have you hat down, staring at the floor, in a very bad, compacted space, and she’s telling you she doesn’t know if she wants to give you any drugs, given the bad reactions you tend to have to most medications.

and you tell her yes, i haven’t had a good history with medication, and i stopped taking medication because of the side effects, but this, what i am dealing with right now, the depression, the being on the edge of actively suicidal… i compare the two, and the side effects from the medication is worth it, if i have to choose between the two, i will choose the side effects.

and this is what she says to you, this is honest to gods what she says to you: she looks at you, and she says, you may think it’s bad, the end of the world, but i look at you and you are functioning, able to speak, form sentences…

and you’ve already grabbed your jacket and bag, ready to go. she honestly can’t be telling you this, she honestly isn’t telling you this. she can NOT be telling you what you’ve been told so much of your life, that you’re forming coherent sentences, presenting well, then, obviously, it can’t be that bad.

the next half hour is awful. you’ve lost all ability to take part in the conversation after that. but you’ve broken down, and you realize at some point that you are trying not to cry, but it’s pushed down so deep, and you are failing, failing very badly at the human give and take, you’ve descended into a very non-functional place. she’s at a loss, it’s like she’s staring at you, waiting for you to say something, take part in the conversation, and she finally leaves, tells you to wait, she’s bringing someone else in.

and you sit in the small room, staring emptily at the floor, and the agitation is intense, and you are not there, and your eyes are not focusing and you are burning up and the humming of the room is surreal if you allowed yourself to think about it.

and the original intake person comes in, and then it’s the two of them in that tiny room staring at you. and you’ve lost the capacity to be a functional human being. and they are telling you that what they can do for you is limited, that your needs are complex, multi-layered, and you need more full-time care, and there’s nothing a crisis center can do for you. you sit there, head bowed, completely dead, empty, not knowing what dark place you will head for when you leave this clinic.

and then somehow the psych nurse has an a-ha moment, says to the intake person, hey, what about haldol? that would be a reasonable course, wouldn’t it? i somehow manage to ask what the drug is, and she says, it’s an anti-psychotic. i ask, is it an anti-psychotic like seroquel, trazodone? she says those drugs aren’t anti-psychotics. i said, oh, the clueless psychiatrist had given them to me for anti-psychotic purposes, i honestly don’t know if he knew what he was doing. she continues to do her circular conversation thing, but seems closer to a terminus, and finally decides to give me a prescription for haldol, says it will cost only $4, 30 1mg tablets, i’d cut them in half, take once a day. and possibly, if i don’t get massive side effects, when i come back in a week for the followup, she might give me a low-strength prescription for celexa as well, for antidepressant purposes. she says the haldol is a personality glue, can be used to pull a person together, together enough that they can start to function again.

you know, in some corner of your mind, that this is an interesting person, and somehow you and she sit there in the small office for 20 minutes, her telling of her own ptsd, similar problems to your own, on her own medication. she tells you that she thinks that you don’t just need a mood stabilizer, you also have a personality disorder, that your situation is multi-leveled, and needs closer looking into. the majority of you doesn’t want to hear this, because the majority of you is too far down, does not have the strength. all you can handle is a quick fix, anything, at least something to take the depression away, give you back your ability to think, manage your affairs. but a dim part of you files a note away that what she’s doing, this hyper-detailed look at you, is a good thing, it’s what more people who dispense psych meds needs to do. and she talks about herself, how she likes working on the front-line, in crisis clinics, and how the portland budget is getting slashed and she may be out of a job in june. and you know you should connect, emote, listen with more empathy, but you’re not capable of it, but you honestly wish you could.

she walks you down the rat maze out to the main door.

you walk back down hawthorne, past the lesbian club, dykes milling about, you too in another dimension to be a part. your thinking is sluggish, has been. you go to two different pharmacies to try to fill the prescription, none pan out. you give up for the night. you are clumsy when filling your motorcycle with gas. you merely sideswipe a car. you feel borderline paranoid, like the walls of reality are floating, your mind is truly falling apart. you purchase an incomplete 6pack of beer, the guy has to point it out. you go back for another bottle to round out the pack. you walk back to your motorcycle, start it, to find you left your helmet across the street at the corner store.

you finally drive thru the oddly warm portland friday night air down dark city streets, clumsy and everything floating, and when you arrive home you somehow manage to get yourself in the front door, only to find that the lightbulb has died in your room. so you sit here, in a pitch black room, typing this post, and then you publish it.

don’t matter how well i do the job, it’s never good enough

there is a someone else at the minimum wage job i’ve been at, the home for developmentally/mentally disabled people, someone who i don’t like working with. she’s bossy, abrupt, inconsiderate… that pretty much sums it up. thankfully i don’t work the same shift with her. i’ve had a few run-ins with her when i started and working training shifts while she was on, her taking the remote control out of my hand, switching the channel on the tv while i was watching it, closing a door i’m standing right next to, getting a breeze, insinuating that the reason a client’s pants are falling down is because i didn’t put them on right, etc. i’ve pretty much just avoided her as a result.

recently, i’ve been working the 7 til 2p shift. this person has been starting her shift at 2, so there’s usually a 5 minute transition in which we’re both there.

from 8 til 1p, my sole duty is one-on-one care of one specific client, it’s written into his management contract. i, and no one else, bathes him, feeds him, changes his diapers, knows where he is at all times, gives him liquid when he indicates he’s thirsty, clean up after the things he throws to the ground, takes him out on driving trips. my one-on-one care of him ends at 1pm, and from 1pm til 2pm, i’m on general duty.

recently, due to weird scheduling decisions, there’ve been as many as 5 people in the home during the 1-2pm time period. the person i work the day shift with, we both work well together; i take care of my client, but also do whatever i can to help her out, keeping the house spotless, helping her with her clients, etc. what’s been happening, due to the weird scheduling decisions, is that the bossy coworker comes in half an hour to an hour early, near the end of my shift. after me and my other coworker have worked our butts off all day, keeping the house spotless, all records up to date, and there’s nothing left to do. my amiable coworker is usually on the couch reading a book, and i’m in the back room reading a book or watching something on t.v.

so, as i mentioned, there’s been, for a 1-2 hour period in the afternoon, too many people on shift. such was the occasion on monday. there are three people in the front room, sitting on the sofas, nothing to do, so they’re chatting, and have been chatting for half an hour, as we all wait for the shift change. they’re not doing anything, just yapping, one’s talking loudly on her telephone to a friend. given there’s nothing to do, i’m in the back room, staring at the t.v., waiting for the end of my shift.

the bossy coworker, 5 minutes til my shift ends (at 2pm), asks me where my 8-1p client is. she says this in an accusatory tone. i don’t know, i say. she frowns at me, asks me why i’m not paying attention to where he is. i don’t like her tone, and i say that i’m dedicated to him til 1pm, but not from 1 til 2p. i’m about to say that from 1 til 2 he’s all our responsibilities, but she instantly lays into me, what am i even doing there, why do i even bother to show up. when people start attacking me i get pretty dismissive. she asks me why i’m even there, i say dismissively, “because i’m on the schedule.” she walks away in a huff.

it turns out that they’d all been in the front room, yapping, not paying attention to any of the clients, and this one specific client had wandered thru three separate doors they’d left open (which are supposed to remain closed, but they continually leave them open while i continually shut them), into the backyard. no harm done, he usually goes into the backyard to walk around, just thru another door. and they were so bussy yapping that they weren’t paying attention.

and she came back and blamed me for them not knowing where he was.

i was pretty annoyed, but the only reason i brought it up to the house supervisor the next day is to cover my own butt. i told her about the incident, explained what happened, she said oh, ok, you didn’t do anything wrong, i’ll explain to the other coworker that you’re only dedicated to that client til 1pm. what i found out when bringing this up that the bossy coworker had filed an incident report saying that i was endangering the client, never did any work, did nothing but watch tv, etc.

i’m pretty pissed at this, but am not going to get into it, i already talked to the supervisor, she said she understood, no harm, and i just resolve to avoid the bossy coworker completely from now on.

3 days later, the program director, a person above my supervisor who runs several homes in the district, is at the house to take care of some work, and at one point my supervisor comes to me, says the program director wants to talk to me, and i am led into a closed door situation with her.

…

she has me sit down, and looking at me starts with social niceties, coming from a weird place, that i never know what to do with. asking me if i’m happy with the job, where i’m at, etc. instantly i’m feeling twilight zone. my instincts are already aware that something bizarre and unstable is coming up. i’ll explain more about this later.

she finally starts in. she’s heard several people complain that i don’t take care of my one-on-one client like i’m supposed to, that i frequently leave him unattended, and that all i do is sit around and watch tv.

which is a bald-faced lie. i ask her what people. she says she can’t tell me that. i think this is grossly unfair, but just say, is this related to the incident with [bossy coworker]? she says yes, that was the only person who’d made a complaint. so i explained to her what’d happened. we’re in there for 5 minutes, and at the end of it she says, oh, ok, overstaffing, the other people weren’t doing their jobs, you didn’t do anything wrong, we’re cool now.

but i walk out pissed, and am instantly out the back door for a cigarette.

the twilight zone feeling? the ground opening up to swallow me whole. black turning to white, parallel dimension opening up, fucking up everything. i get instant dread, paralyzing dread, the kind of feeling other people get when they discover a family member has died, or their house has burned down, or they’re being followed down a dark alley by someone very dangerous. i used to experience something similar as a kid, everytime a family member would go psycho out of nowhere, usually involving beer bottles smashed into walls and held to peoples’ throats, being knocked down in the middle of streets, cops showing up.

now this paralyzing ground falling underneath me happens whenever i get called into a closed meeting with a supervisor. because the closed meeting with the supervisor, i always know when it’s coming the minute they sit me down. i will have been doing a great job at my job, flawless performance, *but*… coworker are talking about me behind my back. i make people feel uncomfortable. some politics ambushing me. they don’t think i’m a good fit to work there, do i truly want the job? always the paralyzing ground opening up, that things had been going well, as far as i knew, but wham, blindsided by job dissapearing, when i had no clue.

i never know. i usually know something’s going down, discomfort i feel, but when it hits, it’s like it ambushes me out of nowhere. people’ve been talking about me behind my back, silent machinations, irrational politics, and apparently everybody knows what’s going on but me. and then i get the call into the closed door meeting, where i’m asked if i really want to work there, it’s really not working out. not because i’m doing a bad job, no, i’m actually incredibly qualified, do good work.

and each time it’s happened i’ve never done anything wrong. each time it happens, the reasons i get singled out is because i’m the quiet one, i’m the unsocial one, i’m the person who doesn’t good with small talk, don’t join my coworkers for kitchen conversations. all my coworkers connect, bonding, trading some sort of balancing political knowledge, that i’m never part of.

and i get pulled into closed door conversations where i’m told “it’s just not working” and the ground open up, swallows me, black turns white, i’ve suddenly lost my job.

which happened today (not the losing the job part, but the beginnings of the end), when i got called into the closed door meeting with the program director. i’m sitting there and on a subconscious paralyzed level of absolute dread, son of a bitch, it’s happening again. HOW did this HAPPEN? why is this always happening?

so i’m out back smoking, processing, venting to myself, afterwards. and i do what i usually try to do, which is step back in my head, get some distance from the situation, look at it objectively. what was i missing, what could i do, etc. and as i’m doing this, wondering how the entire paralyzing ground opening up happened, i realize what’d happened:

there were 4 people on shift. no work to do, house spotless, clients all taken care of. 3 coworkers were in the living room, chatting with each other. not working, mind you, not doing a lick of work. but they were all in the same living room, chatting with each other. for 30 minutes. me? i was in the backroom, in view of the common area, but by myself.

the person who got singled out? me, the person sitting by herself. i can guarantee you that if i’d been in the front room for half an hour talking with them while the client wandered into the backyard, if i’d been up there chatting, socializing, the entire incident wouldn’t have happened.

so i’ve got an official complaint lodged against me, when i didn’t do anything wrong, precisely because i don’t like hanging out & talking, because i just like to show up, do the work i’m supposed to do.

like what happened at my last job. and the job before it. and the job before it… these paralyzing quicksands of dread opening up, one after the other, in a long line.

i had some lofty essay prepared about this, where i tied this incident up into a nifty, well-polished summation of a particular aspie topic, but… i’m unsure what other political machinations are going on behind the scenes at the job now, no longer know what people are saying, what is in play. i naively assume that if i show up, do my job, then i’ll be okay. but i’m always proven wrong in this.

what i now know is that i can show up on time for this job, at my scheduled shift, take care of my client during our one-on-one time, keep the house spotless, work my butt off, but now, because i’m not social, incident reports and official complaints will come at me from unhinged coworkers, going on my record. and i am not deft enough politically to ever see it coming, or know what to do about it, how to stop it.

neurotypicals, yes, so logical, and right, and orderly, and yes the way they go about things makes the most sense. of course.

so now my mind deals with the fact that this minimum wage job which i was going to depend on for the next month or two and figure out how i’m going to make the move back to sf for the sake of my own mental and economic survival… i now might not have this job for much longer, because it’s happening again, what always happens with every job i’ve ever had. and i don’t know why, i quite simply don’t understand WHY.

emptying into the empty stream

i am working for an organization that deals with people with developmental disabilities/mental retardation. i feel very bad using the phrase “mental retardation” but that’s the official terminology they use. am i even allowed to use the R word, tho? i’d been two months into this new city, not able to find any jobs in my line of work (primary: web and print design, secondary: word processing, geeky things with excel & powerpoint). out of desperation, i applied for one job where they made it sound like i’d be taking adults with autism and down’s syndrome out on day trips, to malls and parks and such, helping them with their finances, skills training.

what the job has turned out to be is, instead, working at a home, with severely disabled people, non-mobile, all non-verbal. a task assigned to me my first week there was to read thru their medical records, and it made me cry, what i read, the amputations, the physical abuse, the not able to communicate, stuck in the mind of a 2 year old. i change diapers, bathe, spoon-feed. someone else administers the various medications, as i haven’t been trained on that yet.

i’m going on 3 months now. the 1st month, it was surreal. i tend to think a heck of a lot, the typical meta-meta stuff, like the nature of consciousness, perception, cognition, etc. and my 1st month at this job, i was struggling with that. when you talk about disabled people, disabled rights, typically shown are pictures of smiling kids with down syndrome, a gifted though socially awkward kid with autism, a bright shining person with cerebral palsy, leaning on crutches. but then i look at someone who, in the medical reports, has the mental faculties of a 2 year old, can barely recognize shapes, has to be led from bath to chair to wheelchair, and that is it, the sum total of this person’s existence…

i don’t know what to think anymore. all i know is to be gentle, to be kind, but i can’t think anymore on the nature of cognition. but y’know how the disability rights movement tells you not use use the words high and low functioning? that it’s an insult? ideally, i support that cause, as a matter of semantics. but… when you’re working in homes like this, high and low functioning, those words, they suddenly hold realistic, practical value. not pejoratively, but factually. high-functioning, you let them go to the store by themselves. low-functioning, the almost legally blind person with severe mental retardation will stumble into the street straight into traffic. to take care of severely disabled people, you wind up having to focus as much on their abilities (one likes music, another likes to laugh) as much as on their inabilities, because to not be aware of their inabilities puts them in grave danger, a door left open, silverware left in view, a diaper unchanged.

and it’s odd, being someone with asperger’s, doing this kinda work. it doesn’t pay much, barely above minimum wage, but it’s the only stable income i’ve been able to find given the economic mess that’s been going on. i have a hard time with it because… i’m a computer person. i need things to be fast, hyper-organized, very procedure-oriented, constant creativity, problem-solving, blazing mind speed stuff. this job is very slow. sitting watching tv, not moving. going to check on a bedbound person to see if she’d wet the bed. changing diaper is needed. go back to watching tv if the trash doesn’t need to be taken out, or dishes don’t need to be washed. again, and again, and again.

my mind is having a hard time with it, but… i don’t know, just been in a surreal space. everything got very bad late last year, what with not being able to find a place to live in sf, and that whole mess that happened with the job last year, trying to get accommodation for having asperger’s, and them refusing. and moving up here and able to find a good sublet, but not able to find a job, and trapped, money gone, scraping by, barely able to survive. it puts a strain on one, and one starts to think of maslow’s hierarchy of needs. and so i stop, let go, stop thinking, i’m not here, i’m not here. sitting staring at the tv doesn’t bother me, i stare for hours. i take clothes out of the dryer very methodically, calmly, fold them very slowly. i set up a routine for checking all the trash cans, very slowly, very methodically. it is what it is, and i will think of nothing else, this is all that exists in the world.

and it’s interesting, being so quiet, not a very people person, and the nature of the job is working with people. there are usually 2-4 people on staff at all times, and you work with them. and i, as usual, am the person sitting off by myself, not talking much, head down, eyes averted. but it’s not as big a deal here. the strange thing is, i thought i was doing so horrible, cuz of the usual social anxiety (i’m failing, i’m failing, i never fit in), but i find i’m getting rave reviews from several people because… i clean. because i have a strong work ethic, they say. because i’m reliable. i can’t tell them that the reason the first thing i do when i come in every morning is clean the home so it’s spotless, the reason i’m continually straightening, putting things in proper order, is because of ocd-ness. my dysfunction, in this one respect, is somehow an asset, and so it slides by.

so i’m trying to bury my mind, stifle it, not allow thoughts to happen… but i can’t do that for very long. i need to be the kind of person who is DOing something, exploring, accomplishing, learning, growing. so i entertain thoughts of redesigning my portfolio, updating my resume, creating new business cards, marketing materials, trying to find another in-house design job…

and at that point my mind stops, won’t go any further. because all i can see is what happened with the job last year. that i was an extremely good designer, got rave reviews for my work, but i got attacked over and over because i didn’t smile enough, wasn’t good with small talk, because i somehow made people feel “uncomfortable.” i was the square-edged creature in their round world, and cuz i was different, they made sure i knew it, made sure how unwelcome i was, and despite how i tried to communicate, cross bridges, it somehow become my fault. and i *can’t* go thru that again.

and my mind doesn’t want to deal with that, so i pull the fold back in the mind, nope, not going there. and instead i will go in tomorrow to spoon-feed a human being very gently, very carefully, my mind emptying itself into the daytime tv stream.