Life

[Mangela Lansbury]

I've had a super fun responsibility added to my job: I get to review the reports about sentinel events in the hospital.

 

Sentinel events are what we call preventable errors that cause immediate, serious harm to a patient -- not little things like leaving sponges in the mix when you re-pack someone's intestines, but big things like forgetting to remove the clip that keeps the aorta wide open while you work or rolling a kid off a table.

 

This is a terrible and depressing thing to have to look at.

[Gormongous]

Bummer post, so I'll spoiler it. I just need somewhere to vent.

 

 

I am having a really hard time right now. My girlfriend, whom I had been happily dating since April of last year, moved to Chicago in January for the next step in her career. I was anxious about it at the time, but we talked it out and we were facing it together. There were ups and downs, with low points in February when it hit home with me that she was really gone and in May when she was feeling unsure about our future after the newness of the move had worn off, but it seemed like it was still a strong relationship. July through September were as happy and loving as our first few months together.

Things started to change for us near the end of September, as the furor around the election reached its final stages. We'd had some political differences, with me being further left than her and taking a while to warm to Clinton, but it felt like there was a respectful and compassionate dialogue between us. Nonetheless, by the beginning of October, a fight was breaking out at some point during every visit we were having. She's always had this problem of taking out the anger, fear, or stress that she was feeling on the closest person to her, which I could handle on occasion, but now that the election, along with her job and our relationship, had her perpetually angry, afraid, and stressed, it was getting a lot harder for the both of us. Myself, I've often had the problem of feeling like my partner will leave me if I don't make them perfectly happy, so I was in meltdown mode all the time. The last time that I visited her, near the end of October, we got in a fight over buying the wrong kind of drywall anchors for a mirror that I was helping her to hang. It was awful and she nearly kicked me out when I told her that she had issues with anger management that were damaging our relationship. When she visited me, the next weekend, she was noticeably distant, with her dropping off the radar for hours at a time to make "quick" visits with friends. It was abnormal behavior for her and there was some friction from it, but I didn't want to start another fight, so I waited until she got back home before pushing her on what was wrong.

You can probably guess the outcome. She said that she loved me very very much and that I've been her rock this past year, but that she currently felt like she didn't know where she's going or what she wants, long-term. She asked for a break, while she sees a therapist and works on herself. I agreed, because I really want the best for her, even now. The next couple of months were very confusing. For two weeks, we kept talking as if nothing had happened, but we got in a huge fight on election night, predictably, and she laid out the terms of the break more starkly: not together for the foreseeable future, no promises that we'll ever be together again, she wants as much space and time as I feel able to give her. Since then, we've had only a few exchanges, with it being a flip of the coin whether it's warm and friendly, even flirty, or cold and peremptory. After almost two years of texting every day, it's now normal for her to go four or five days without reaching out to me. Plans, albeit vague, to meet up on New Year's have been brushed aside without much explanation. Right now, I am unsure if I will ever get to see her again.

In short, I am handling this break poorly, as poorly as if it were a full-scale breakup. I was in a bad place when I met her, emotionally and professionally, and our relationship really saved me and gave me a direction in which to head with my life. The suddenness of her one-month reversal from "happy together, probably going to get married someday" to "on a break that might be for good" has brought all of that back and more besides. I am sad every day, often to the point of tears, because I miss her and I don't feel like I can confide in her about anything anymore, especially anything that reflects negatively on me as a putative partner. I am also sad because my circle of friends has contracted recently, with a lot of them starting families or moving away, and I don't have as many people in my life upon whom I can rely with her not around. I am also angry. I am angry because I feel like she was having problems in our relationship beyond our fights and like she let them deteriorate to the point where a break was necessary, rather than communicating them to me and letting us work on them together. At times, I feel like she has sunk our relationship deliberately, to simplify her life and give her more control over it, and that is literally my nightmare made real. I am also angry because I have been unemployed for the past six months, trying to move out of academia into a career that can better support me, and it feels incredibly hurtful to spring a break on a partner who's right in the middle of that transition, especially if that transition is presented as proof of the need for a break because it means the partner's unstable and isn't thinking about the future. However, most of all, I am scared. She has always been extremely proud of how independent she is, to the point that, when they met me, her friends all expressed surprise that she'd be dating anyone seriously. She's shown some restlessness before, but nothing that led me to expect this. Now that we're on a break, she has expressed relief that the stress and guilt of our relationship is off her shoulders, stress and guilt that I didn't even know existed. I think she enjoys being single and no longer being quite so accountable for her actions towards me. She has also expressed a firm conviction that she doesn't know if she'll want to be with me, once she's made progress on her own issues, and when or how things will play out if it turns out she does. Sometimes she makes out as though she's expecting to get back together once spring comes and the sting of the election has lessened. Sometimes she makes out as though she's only planning to reconsider once she moves back to St. Louis after another year in Chicago. Sometimes she makes out as though this break is just a gentle way of giving me time to get over her and find someone else. Whatever way it is, it is incredibly frightening and upsetting to me and, most days, I just can't handle it.

I'm sorry if this is oversharing. I haven't really told anyone about it—only a couple of friends whom I can trust just to listen, partly because I don't want to be comforted and partly because I've been unwilling to accept the truth of the matter. I've also told my parents because I'm tired of them asking after her. I'm still applying to jobs and making plans with friends and going home for the holidays, but I feel like a walking corpse doing it all. None of it seems meaningful if the one I love is going to leave me out of nowhere. I just don't know what to do or how to feel good about myself anymore. What's more, I don't know if I want to know, if it involves me being without her.

[clyde]

Thanks for sharing.

I've been thinking about you for the past few days because I'm reading a lot about the Byzantine Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries.

[osmosisch]

I'm sorry to hear you're in a bad place Gormongous. The way you tell it it indeed sounds like she's got some serious issues to work on. The upside might be that if she's really going to see a therapist things could still work out for the best, though it's not sounding likely.

 

Have you sent her a message similar to what you've posted here? It might help to have things so clear for her as well, though obviously I don't know her well enough to estimate how she'd take it.

[Roderick]

Rooting for you, Gormongous. I hope things'll go better soon!

[Gwardinen]

Sorry to hear about the stuff you're going through, Gormongous. I really hope things take an upwards turn for you, whatever shape that might take - if the last few years of my life have taught me anything, it's that we never really know what the turning points in our lives will bring. I hope you'll get to look back on that post in the future and think, "Wow, I never could have imagined all that would lead to <insert excellent situation here>!"

[Treasure Goblin]

Sending love your way Gormongous, I hope things pick up for you soon.  

 

I'm posting here because I don't really know where else to do it.

The good news is that I realised as of today I have quit cigarettes for two months after smoking for 7ish years.

 

Wall of text about reasons why I'm sad in spoilers
 

Christmas time always fucks me up though.  It's my birthday coming up (on the 25th) and even though I have a good family this is the time of year where I feel the most alone.  I'm sure that is not an unusual sentiment, but you know.  I have some friends I see once in a blue moon, but regular contact is really hard.  I've always struggled a lot socially and other than my partner I don't have regular social contact with anyone.   Even then, I see him usually about once a week, after knowing each other for six years and dating for about three he's still reluctant to consider us in a relationship.  I get a lot of excuses like 'I thought you were above labels', etc.  I went to his birthday party a couple of months ago and no one knew who I was, and that felt pretty shitty.  

 

I've been trying to stream to have some more time to talk to people and make friends, and a couple of thumbs fans have popped in to say hi, but I can't really ever get a conversation going that often.  Streaming is pretty big for me because my social anxiety is so bad, and I'm happy I can do it but sad that I'm so shit at it and fundamentally unlikable, online or offline.

 

Also it's impossible to get help for my mental state, I keep going to different doctors who keep referring me to psychologists who just want to do breathing exercises, or psychiatrists who aren't taking patients.  I told one doctor at the ER I was suicidal and he told me to take up photography.  Our healthcare system here is good don't get me wrong, but it still has major failings when it comes to the treatment of mental health.  
  

 

Also I said I would improve my diet but I just ate a lot of biscuits and tea all day today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[YoThatLimp]

5 hours ago, Roderick said:

Rooting for you, Gormongous. I hope things'll go better soon!

 

Ditto, I know it's cheesy but time takes the sting out of all wounds.

 

Keep your head up!

[Gormongous]

Thanks, everyone. I've been through enough breaks and breakups to know that there will be a point, an unspecified amount of time down the line, where either I will be back together with her or I will be okay with not being with her, but it's really not feasible for me to do much more than just keep my head above the water right now.

 

11 hours ago, osmosisch said:

I'm sorry to hear you're in a bad place Gormongous. The way you tell it it indeed sounds like she's got some serious issues to work on. The upside might be that if she's really going to see a therapist things could still work out for the best, though it's not sounding likely.

 

Have you sent her a message similar to what you've posted here? It might help to have things so clear for her as well, though obviously I don't know her well enough to estimate how she'd take it.

 

Yeah, the fact that she's actually getting help is encouraging, but her behavior towards me since the break has only intermittently reflected that. Overall, it feels like it's been a slow retreat from warmth and friendliness and, while it's less painful than being frozen out entirely, it's still causing me a high degree of distress. I think she knows, but I'm not sure she understands.

 

In our latest conversation on the phone, a few days ago, I did say basically everything that I posted above, except for the part about how it's shitty to break things off with someone who's unemployed when they supported you through a similarly lengthy job search the previous year, because it would accomplish less than nothing to point that out to her. Her response was... I don't know, I guess it was kind of her on paper, but I didn't find it very comforting. She reiterated that she loves me very much and that she wants me to be happy, and she's willing to do literally anything for me, short of getting back together. On that latter point, she said that she honestly doesn't know what's going to happen with us, but that she doesn't feel close to reconciling with me right now, because it doesn't seem like I've made much progress on getting work or going to counseling, and that she needs time, possibly a lot of time, anyway. After some back and forth, I settled on asking her if we could just go back to talking on a daily basis, even about dumb stuff like her dog or work, and she agreed, saying that she'd been wanting to text me more the past few weeks but had been holding back. That's been the last I've heard from her, so fuck if I know what's going on there. I've been trying not to let myself fall into the delusion that, if I find a job and leave her alone, I'll be getting a surprise visit on Valentine's Day or our anniversary, but it's hard, because that delusion gives me happiness when it's in scant supply.

[Bjorn]

Gorm, dude, I've barely been on the forums (or chat) for over a month, just the holidays and work crushing me.  But feel free to pm me either here or on Slack if you want to chat.  That's rough, and I've got lots of thoughts, but not necessarily ones to drop in the public forums. 

 

Love you dude. 

 

I may have also been out drinking this evening and this is making me a bit more emotional than I would normally be here. 

[YoThatLimp]

Starting a new job on Jan 2nd (with the same company, but different group), first new job in 10 years. Scared and excited,and nervous!

 

I feel like an impostor, hopefully I can fake it until I make it.  

[Rilen]

@YoThatLimp That sounds amazing, congrats! I've never worked anywhere nearly that long, I imagine that must feel crazy to make a change after that long.

@Gormongous I'm so sorry about what your going through, it sounds rough in every way. My only advice would be that hanging on is probably hindering healing and causing you more pain. If you can find a way to call it 'done' in your mind then you can start to recover. Otherwise it's slowly bleeding out, from the sounds of it. Please take care of yourself and I hope that the sense of renewal at New Years helped. One of my resolutions for the new year is to out loud say nice things to myself from time to time, even if it's just thanking myself for remembering to take advil when I have a headache. Self-care is important in these times.

[Lechimp]

On 12/29/2016 at 4:12 PM, YoThatLimp said:

Starting a new job on Jan 2nd (with the same company, but different group), first new job in 10 years. Scared and excited,and nervous!

 

I feel like an impostor, hopefully I can fake it until I make it.  

 

 

I've felt that way about every new job I started. You'll be ok. It will just take a couple of weeks to get used to it.

[SecretAsianMan]

My daughter is teething and refuses to sleep until well past midnight.  I don't think she's in pain really because she's not crying, just being generally fussy.  As tired as I am I feel worse for her mother since she's the only one who can get her to sleep and has to watch her while I'm at work.  I try to watch her as much as I can to give my wife a break but sometimes she just wants mommy.

 

Also Gorm, I meant to reply to you but life got in the way.  Sorry to hear about the troubles you're having.  Hopefully you're a bit better now but if you need someone to talk to you can message me on Steam.  Maybe we can even break out an old chestnut like Monaco if the sun, moon, and stars somehow align.  Man I'm old.

[undermind9]

teeth suck.  my kid got 2 right away, then another 4, 1, and now has been dormant for a month or two - and has the luxury of an asymmetrical top/bottom smile

 

if she's not in pain then its a learned habit/trained sleeping problem.  being only 6months old might be a little young to start, but come march if its still a problem i'd recommend seeking some sleep training books or parenting blogs.

 

Depending on the kid it could take 1 week...or much longer.  I think it was harder on me to listen to him cry for a half hour while i knew if i just went up there and rocked him for a few it would be all better.  But now he just says "nigh nigh" and lays down in the crib and lets me tuck him in, minutes later out cold

[YoThatLimp]

On 1/2/2017 at 11:01 AM, MechaTofuPirate said:

 

 

I've felt that way about every new job I started. You'll be ok. It will just take a couple of weeks to get used to it.

 

Good advice! A month in and I'm feeling more sure of myself - still have a lot to learn, but i'm feeling better and haven't screwed anything up in a major way yet hah. 

[Mawd]

I set up a hang out with a mate I hadn't seen for a while and I ended up asking if I could bring some veges over and cook a roast I'd been planing to do for myself. It ended up being a great idea! It felt so much more fun than the standard "lets heat up some frozen junk/takeaways" way I usually doe when caching up with people and I'm kinda going over how good it would be to set up more impromptu dinners in future. There's a few people I haven't had much to do with for a while despite being really close with in the past and I'm just mulling over the idea of using cooked meals as a way to reconnect with people.

 

Anyway I can't wait to move into my new flat next weekend so my boyfriend and I can stop having to live with my family members and actually spend more time with our friends. It's felt too weird to really have anyone over but moving into a house with chill people we both know super well makes ideas like that so much more inviting.

[SecretAsianMan]

One of the engineers that I work with is leaving the company in a couple weeks.  Normally this wouldn't be that big a deal, except that in our group there are literally only two of us that do what we do and now that he's leaving it's going to be just me.  I'm already super busy with my own stuff but now I get to handle his stuff and mine.  I've talked to my supervisor about it and he's aware of the insane workload I'm going to have now but unfortunately there's really no way to fix it.  The company is in something of a budget crunch so they're not looking to hire.  Between that and the number of retirements our numbers are swiftly dwindling down to barely manageable levels.  Pulling someone from another group into ours to help me out means hurting a different department even more than they already are.  I've been wanting to get out of here for a while now but this might be the final straw.  It's likely going to completely screw anyone who takes over for me (if there even is such a person) but I'm past caring at this point.

[Dewar]

Ouch, definitely get out of there if you can. The rush of getting out of a place you don't like is incredible (as someone who was laid off last week.)

[Twig]

Yeah man you've shared enough horror stories about that place, haha. LEAVE!!

[Gormongous]

1 hour ago, SecretAsianMan said:

One of the engineers that I work with is leaving the company in a couple weeks.  Normally this wouldn't be that big a deal, except that in our group there are literally only two of us that do what we do and now that he's leaving it's going to be just me.  I'm already super busy with my own stuff but now I get to handle his stuff and mine.  I've talked to my supervisor about it and he's aware of the insane workload I'm going to have now but unfortunately there's really no way to fix it.  The company is in something of a budget crunch so they're not looking to hire.  Between that and the number of retirements our numbers are swiftly dwindling down to barely manageable levels.  Pulling someone from another group into ours to help me out means hurting a different department even more than they already are.  I've been wanting to get out of here for a while now but this might be the final straw.  It's likely going to completely screw anyone who takes over for me (if there even is such a person) but I'm past caring at this point.

 

Yeah, that really sucks, SAM. Hopefully you can make an exit plan and don't feel too guilty about leaving, since it's been their decisions and not yours that pushed you to this point.

 

My ex had a similar situation with her company, the year before last. Her company had a non-essential hiring freeze that was aggravated by a manager who was so afraid of disappointing people that he refused to interview new candidates, even when ordered to do so by the top brass. When she finally got out, for a company that paid her a full third more than her salary there, she was the last fully-trained member of the training department in a branch that was at forty percent of paper strength. The only other employees left under her manager were two off-site contractors who'd never been trained and whose work she'd been covering in addition to her own (at the manager's behest, because he didn't want to disappoint them) for almost a year. Clearly the place hasn't burned down, but I wonder what it's like to work there now. Do these companies just reach a point where it's a bunch of managers milling around?

[Roderick]

Oh boy, I finally have a thing that totally warrants a post in Life again!

 

Last week I was on the Dutch Yaycon convention, which is a small Japanese festival with a focus on LGBTQA themes and a handful of quality lectures and panels. I gave a writing workshop there and my newest book launched during the day, but that's not important. I attended a panel there on asexuality, featuring some of my friends. And the discussion there kind of hit me like a truck. The panelists were extremely frank and open about their bodies, their preferences, their attitude towards sexuality, masturbation, etc. I had a real lightbulb moment there, until I started feeling weird, possibly also because I had a livecast in the theater right after, so I fled the room to get some fresh air.

 

I've known ever since my first girlfriend that I have a somewhat ambivalent relation with sex. Even though I like it in the moment, it doesn't really do a whole lot for me, and I don't really need to have sex all that often. Low drive. But I couldn't ever really bring myself to adopt the asexual moniker: that's just plain not me. I am sexual and I usually enjoy it to a certain extent, whenever I have it. I just don't need it that much and it's not a big part of my personality. My girlfriend knows this and it's not a problem, not an issue, we've established a rhythm that takes both our needs into account.

 

But after the lecture I felt a need to reassess all this, because I was suddenly opened to how this panel of asexuals was very different in make-up: some masturbated a lot, others indulged in sexuality from an aesthetic viewpoint... I suddenly realized the whole thing was much wider than I thought. Today I visited one of the panelists in person and we had a long, beautiful, sincere conversation about all of this. And I dug through the AVEN archive to research a certain thing called Gray Asexuality, which I discovered kind of fits me. It's an intentionally vague umbrella term that seems perfect for people who affiliate with asexuals, like I do, but who still have a sexual side to them that they also pursue and nourish. I'm kind of happy with finding this term, because I always felt a little caught in the middle between either people with (I assume) normal, healthy sex drives and asexuals.

 

I know in the end all of this is just another silly label, and it doesn't change anything about me. But sometimes a place to belong can go a way in making you feel a little less... unaccounted for, I guess.

[Patrick R]

:tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup::tup:

[Patrick R]

tup tup tup

[Roderick]

Thanks, Patrick! Strange addendum to what I wrote above: I just realized that my views on my own libido being lower than average are actually based on highly subjective thoughts and observations, but no real evidence. I mean, they're formed primarily on:

 

1. The way sex is portrayed in media, spoonfed from an early age (men as hypersexualised people who'd love nothing more than to have sex at any time, any day).

2. Observations from my own life, where I have, in fact, met my share of people who at least profess to desire sex a lot, and an earlier relationship that ended because my then-girlfriend was way more sexually driven than I was.

 

That one-two-punch, coupled with the sudden realization after losing my virginity that I wasn't, as I had assumed all my life, all that interested or affected by actual sex, consolidated my impression that my libido was significantly lower than the norm. Now I'm wondering if this is actually true. What if my feelings towards sex are actually shared by most people, and we're all burdened by inflated notions on how much others desire it? How could you even measure this - since it's not just about how often you want sex, but also your enjoyment of it, the reasons you partake in it and in whatever way fantasies do or do not count?