I meant to write a letter to my aunt (the one who I’ve decided to stay in contact with because she’s been pretty good about everything). I even have most of it written! It’s five pages long, so far. Single-spaced. Which means it’ll get quite a bit longer whenever I edit it. Whenever that happens. I didn’t really choose to stop writing so much as… well, struggle to write it at all. It’s exhausting to talk about family stuff at the best of times and these are not the best of times. So I sporadically worked at it for a while, went on vacation, got sick, and now it has been a month and a half, at least, and I’m finally turning my mind back to it (assuming, of course, that my brain fog continues to diminish). I wish I’d been able to focus on it more. I wish I’d been able to spend more time on it. I wish a lot of things, to be honest, and none of them are going to happen. All I can do is carry on from where I’m at and hope that I can get it written by the time you’re reading this [which I’ve managed] so I’ve got time to edit and then print it before I leave my workplace for two and a half weeks. That’s the only place I’ve got access to a printer, you see, and there’s no way I’m writing all of this by hand. I lack the strength-of-writing-hand for that in any kind of quick or even legible manner. So I’m on a bit more of a deadline unless I want to let this time grow into two and a half months. I didn’t even want it to grow into three weeks back when I was still working on it, and yet it did. You would think that, given how much writing I do, something like this would be easier, right?
Continue readingCommunication
Visions Of The Past In The Reflection Of An Arcade Cabinet
After seven years, my coworkers finally fixed the arcade cabinet one of us designed back in 2017. The computer powering it got bricked in 2018 for reasons still unknown but one of our out-of-town coworkers was in town for a week and decided he’d spend his spare time fixing it up. Now it’s working again and my team has slowly begun to gravitate back towards it. It’s currently running a different version of Galaga than we all used to play, but the few interactions with it have quickly resurrected the ol’ competitive spirit of some of my coworkers in a way that I find mildly frustrating but ultimately not worth my emotional effort. I’ve got much better reasons to be frustrated with them these days and it’s not like I’ve got the time for Galaga anymore. Back when we were all playing it, there were four testers on my team. Now there’s only three and we’re doing more work than ever, so taking even half an hour out of my day to do something simple and fun like play a round or two of Galaga isn’t really something I can afford to do most days. I might have a bit more time on Fridays, given that I’m usually less productive then anyway, but I don’t think I can pursue my old records as much as I used to. I’m not even sure I want to, to be honest. Not just because of my difficulties with my coworkers, but because I’m doing a lot of learning things these days and am very aware that I have a limit. I can only learn so much on any given day–and that’s a lot less than I’d like thanks to how draining work often is–and I’ve got more important stuff to remember than enemy appearance and attack patterns in a game older than I am.
Continue readingUnwelcome Invisibility In The Workplace
I seem to be unable to have a normal week after a vacation, still. Antidepressants and taking time to rest haven’t helped at all with that particular problem. At least this time, it’s a problem I can roll with, to a degree. To a degree. See, I had my usual Wednesday of meetings, but I discovered that there was yet more stuff going on that I didn’t know about and got to witness multiple people assign credit for the work I’d been doing the past three months to my senior coworker. Who, thankfully, spoke up to say he didn’t do it, but it shouldn’t have happened from the beginning considering all the people in that meeting knew about the issue at hand because I told them about. I am also on the record just two weeks prior saying that my senior coworker, due to the timing of his vacations, was relatively uninvolved in the related testing (though I left out that he found the first hint of this problem and promptly dropped the entire thing on my lap rather than continue to work on it himself). But no. Everyone was operating under the assumption that my coworker was the person who knew what was up and had been doing the three-digit number of hours of testing involved. All of which came around and made a pretty fine point as a plausible explanation for why people were being so weird about me working from home and not having some kind of publically available accounting of my work. If everyone assumed that most of the work I’ve been doing was done by my senior coworker, it would explain a lot of stuff going back a few years.
Continue readingLove Languages Are No Substitute For Good Communication
Today, as I waited for a response from someone I know is not typically a swift responder to text messages, I started thinking about love languages. The whole concept is a pretty useful shorthand for talking about the ways in which people show and feel love, but I’ve grown to feel that they’re more limited than useful when it comes to communication in a relationship. Sure, a lot of people’s modes of affection, given and received, can be captured in one of the five categories (acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation, physical touch, and giving/receiving gifts), but they’re collectively broad enough that pretty much every type of action someone might take can be lumped into those categories. Where they become limiting is in the idea that people tend toward one over the others, sometimes with a secondary or tertiary option, and that this answer is, actually, an answer that will stay true for an individual. Most people are not boiled down so easily and I, personally, chafe under any attempts to take something as complex and nuanced as the ways people express and feel love and reduce it to a personality quiz where most of the questions can be honestly answered with “well, it depends on the situation.” Most of which means that I don’t particularly enjoy the whole concept, even if I can see it as a useful tool for opening communication or giving people a resource to express themselves while they’re still working through how to communicate better.
Continue readingWaiting Beneath A Heavy Silence
I spent most of my idle thoughts today thinking about someone I haven’t spoken to in almost nine months. I have a lot of people from my past that I haven’t spoken to in various lengths of time, most of them greater than nine months, but this one occupies me in ways that the rest don’t. Most of the rest of these long silences are the result of walls I built or deliberate choices to make a change in my life that took me away from people. Some are the notable ends of long-running and incredibly unhealthy codependent relationships that I was unable to change for the better as I changed for the better–it takes change on both people’s parts to better a relationship like that and I’ve only ever been able to control my own behavior. Some were relationships I ended because they were unhealthy for me, because the other person only ever took from me, because it was clear I could not rely on them when it really mattered, or because I simply grew tired of needing to overlook the ways they frequently hurt me without ever learning to treat me better. Some just faded into silence as time and distance took their toll. Only one was because someone else set a boundry and I have kept my silence for these past nine months out of respect for their request.
Continue readingSometimes You Have To Argue Even When They Won’t Listen
My most popular post over the last two years is “Don’t Argue If They Won’t Listen” and I honestly find it kind of funny how perennially relevant that is to my life. I was spurred to write that post after being talked over by someone who continued to insist I was wrong despite having no evidence or relevant experience to back up their claim. They were never able to provide a reason for this assertion and their subsequent insistence on ignoring my advice (that they had solicited) on a topic I happened to know a lot about forever changed the nature of our relationship. I was no longer willing to engage with them on anything but a surface level and I let distance grow between us since, prior to that point, I was the one doing most of the work to keep conversation going and make contact. Now, we rarely talk (this greater distance helped by the fact that this person also moved away a few months later) and while I miss the friendship, I do not miss the way it made me feel all the time. Unfortunately, as I’ve come to realize in my professional life, walking away or keeping your silence isn’t always an option.
Continue readingA Lot Of Good Things Have Happened This Year
I have written fairly extensively about the unfortunate, frustrating, and bad things that have happened to me this year. I have also written about some of the good things, but much less extensively. While I’m definitely not recovered yet and have enough other BS going on that my recovery is going slowly [I even had stuff that happened the day after writing this that set me back a couple weeks], I wanted to take a little time to focus on one of the best things that has happened this year. As I’ve mentioned, the exhaustion and burnout I’ve been recovering from hasn’t been a result of constant unfortunate events, but because so much stuff has happened. Once you hit your emotional capacity, you’re just as overwhelmed and unable to cope whether the thing that tipped you over was good or bad. The bad stuff just tends to seem more prevalent and constant because part of my emotional processing involves writing about it here. Good stuff doesn’t really require that kind of emotional processing, but I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned three of my top four things scattered throughout the last four months. Number one is being a part of my friends’ wedding. Number three was the trip to Spain I went on with those friends and the entire wedding party. Number four is definitely moving into my current apartment/out of my old apartment. Today’s post, to formally write about my number two thing that I’ve only mentioned in passing (if I’ve mentioned it at all), is about the surprising, powerful, out-of-nowhere friendship I’ve developed with one of the people I met on my trip to Spain.
Continue readingAvoiding Codependency And Fighting The Habits That Enable It
Content Warning for discussion of codependent relationships and the unhealthy habits that create them; non-specific mentions of childhood trauma that makes codependent relationships seem fine; and discussion of the struggles inherent in managing those things while under a great deal of stress and anxiety.
Continue readingThe Splatoon Comm Error Saga Continues
After spending a week struggling to find every single possible issue that could explain why I kept getting an error claiming my Switch had lost connection to my router, I spent the first twenty-four hours of the most recent Splatfest trying to enjoy myself between instances of getting temporarily banned from continuing to play. Nothing I’d done had worked. It had maybe decreased the frequencey of the issues, which was probably enough to hide the problem in the week leading up to the Splatfest, but with all of the heavy traffic and multiple hours of playing that weekend, the lost connection issues resurfaced. I spent time on Saturday doing more research, once I’d gotten so sick of being banned that I decided to call it quits for the night, but it was one of my friends who gave me the tidbit I needed to confirm the actual source of the issue.
Continue readingConnectivity, Instant Messaging, and Taking My Time
As a modern citizen of the world, I’m used to being constantly connected to something. Be it various social media platforms, a media streaming site, or just a collection of friends via whatever chat app is currently the cool place to hang out, I always have some kind of mental space devoted to providing access to myself at short notice. As I’ve gone from a student to an employee, a teenager to an adult, my relationship with allowing other people access to me has changed, but it hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it has grown stronger, especially in these pandemic years of mostly digital connections to the people I care about. While I’m a bit undecided about whether that level of access is good or bad (which, to be honest, probably just depends on the context), the way I think and feel about it has changed pretty significantly in my work and personal lives.
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