Time for a Little Brutal Honesty

E-book is here.

First off, thank you to everyone who’s written in or emailed with suggestions about what to do with my liiiiiiiiiiife.  I haven’t given you guys nearly the attention and credit you deserve, and I’m sorry about that.  I really do appreciate the time, the effort, and the advice—especially the stuff that’s not all, “Rah rah, quit your job!” because I know that wasn’t easy to write.

And now, on to the part where I more fully explain my reasons for quitting said job.

Being bored with my job is not what’s driving me out of it.

Knowing that I need to leave this job if I’m ever going to do what I want with my life?  Also not what’s driving me out of it.

Don’t get me wrong:  those are factors, and they are important to me, but at the end of the day?  My full name is actually Talulah Inertia Mankiller.  I hate change, absolutely hate it, and fear of the unknown has kept me from taking a risk or making a switch that almost certainly would have benefited me more times than I can count.  I.  Don’t.  Like.  Change.

But the truth is, I am mentally ill, and that trumps everything:  my hatred of change, my job security, my desire to succeed as a “normal person,” everything.

For a long time after I began drug therapy, I honestly thought that I was a success story.  In many ways, I was.  For a good nine months or so, the medications I’m currently taking eradicated my symptoms.  I slept fine, my nervous tics toned way down, and my social anxiety was pretty much nil.  I experienced a hiccup in late July, but that eventually calmed down.

And then last month, everything went to shit.

I don’t want to get into the why or how, but yeah:  I was presented with a situation, and my brain overloaded and could not handle it.  Which means that I stopped sleeping unless I took a metric fuckton of Klonopin or busted out one of the Lunesta samples my quack GP gave me a few months ago.  Last Friday, I experienced what I am pretty sure was a wee bit of a panic attack (there was hyperventilating over a cat toy.  A CAT TOY.).  I have been fighting with my insurance company for over a month—I’ve been trying to get a new doctor, they’ve been feeding me misinformation and the occasional outright lie.  You know the deal.  And in all honesty?  This is just not fucking worth it anymore.

I know that there are a lot of people who are sitting there thinking that I’m a weenie, that I should suck it up and deal because so many people are out of jobs right now and I’m damn lucky to have health insurance, even if it’s total shit.  And I largely agree with those people, which is what has made this decision and what is making this process so difficult.  But at the end of the day?  I would rather not drug myself into a stupor to keep a job.  I would rather not live in misery and pain—yes, physical pain, I claw the holy hell out of myself when I’m nervous—because I’m too afraid to take a chance on something that might be more my speed.

If I fail, then I fail.  I’ll find a new job (and no, I don’t expect that to be easy, either), and go back to working 8-5 (because no one works 9-5 anymore, trust).  In the meantime, I’ve got savings and a support network.  I don’t have as much in savings as I’d like and I don’t like asking for help, but life is what it is.  Right now, today, this is a move that I need to make for the sake of my mental health.  And also so that I can spend all day staring into Oliver’s beautiful, terrible eyes.