Overtime

Is it normal for your job to ask you to work over time your very first week?  After tonight, I will have worked a total of 56 hours, and seven full days.  I won't be getting a break until Friday, if they don't make me fill in again. Perhaps I won't need to find a second job after all, since this job seems to require all of my free time.  I think the law here in this state is that after 40 hours, I get time and a half.  Time and a half would be nice even though it's still less than I made at my last job.  

Things are very confusing and they cancelled training for next week and have put us to work right away.  No one seems to know what's going on and they have called me a couple times today.  I guess they don't want me to sleep either.  Not sure how I am going to stay up tonight since I barely slept Thursday or Friday nights, couldn't sleep during the day on Saturday and only got about four hours today, partially because every time I drift off to sleep I get call from work.  You'd think I would pass out, but I came home wired, and hyper aware of every sound.  Plus my cat, Sawyer, who I brought back with me from LA has been super obsessive and needy.  I think he misses the dogs or something.  He wakes me up constantly for no reason.  It's like he's literally just checking to see if I am sleeping by waking me up.  He sniffs my eyelids and then bats at them when I open them.  Weird cat. 

Tonight I will be filling in on the main campus instead of my regular place in the group home.  I will be working in the locked until.  I bought myself some 5 hour energy, vegan soup cups, and giant bottles of water.  I hope I don't pass out!

Extremely triggering job training

This poster was in the hallway at work.  I smudged off all the identifying information.

 I have recently gotten a job after so much searching and so many rejections.  This job is at a youth residential treatment center serving many different children and young people from 6-24.  I have been in training this week.  It's been very hard.  Most of the children in this company's treatment facilities are foster children, so a big portion of our training on one day was about foster care.  It was so hard for me not to correct people and launch into lectures.  I had such a hard time keeping my inner soapbox inside.  Everyone who works at this place cares very much about these kids, but even these people say and think things about foster kids that are so untrue and so unfair, and just wrong.  I did mention that I grew up in foster care two times, but did not elaborate or go into any detail.  For some reason I feel like this may be crossing a boundary, but at the same time I am trying to be more open with it.  There is such a stigma attached to growing up in foster care.  We feel shame and want to hide this fact.  I feel like it's important for foster kids to see adults mention that they grew up in foster care without making it a huge deal, good or bad.  I never met ANYONE who grew up in foster care when I was a kid.  It would have been great for me to have someone to look up to and identify with.  Part of our job is to be role models for these kids.  I think foster kids need former foster kids as role models in their lives.  Perhaps this isn't the right setting.  I don't know.  It's not like I want to have it written on my forehead or talk to the children all about my experiences or about anything like what I write about on this blog, but I do want these little kids stuck in this awful system to know that SOMEONE "gets it."  Someone knows what they are experiencing and feeling. 

The other parts of the trainings have also been triggering.  I've had a hard time staying present at times.  We've covered so many topics, like types and signs of abuse, sexual abuse, self harm, suicide, etc...  The trainers really don't sugar coat things, and have shared some really awful triggering stories about children who have been abused.  I get so frustrated with my mind and it's ability to make anything a connection to my own abuse.  While we are discussing signs and types of sexual abuse, my brain decides to flash me some clips of my own abuse history.  It's so hard to pay attention when you're being raped in your head.  Normal people do not think about this stuff all the time.  I didn't just get flashes of sexual abuse.  There was physical abuse, and that way too familiar and so painful sense of never belonging anywhere that follows me, and the disrupted placements, and many other things that decided to pay me visits at the most inappropriate times.  It's amazing how calm I can look on the outside when all of this was happening.

But...  It gets worse.  Today was the first part of our CPI training, which is a training on "nonviolent crisis intervention."  They were teaching us how to physically protect ourselves and not hurt children today.  Part of this training involved all of us pretending to choke, grab, bear hug, head lock, punch, etc... each other.  I was surprisingly okay with most of this.  The only ones I had a really hard time with were the choking and head locking.  I was fine with being the one to assault my coworkers, but being the one "assaulted" was not so fun.  My coworkers giggled and had fun with these practice defensive moves.  I laughed and giggled too, but on the inside I was screaming.  When my tiny female coworker choked me, I saw my foster dad choking me.  When my instructor swung her arm at me in slow motion, I saw my mother swing at me in slow motion.  It was a battle to keep myself grounded, stay focused on the task and actually learn new skills that I may need in this job.

My coworkers invited me to lunch.  I declined.  I drove to a lake, sat on a log even though it was lightly raining all day and cried.  I have felt trapped between two worlds all day long today.  And it really sucks because I felt like I was doing so much better lately.

I am terrified about tomorrow.  Tomorrow is the day we are going to practice holding/restraining.  I do not have an issue being the person to restrain a child in danger of hurting themselves or someone else.  But I am freaking out about the idea of my coworkers holding me down tomorrow.  I still have flashbacks about those seven staff (six large men and one woman) that held me down and removed my clothes at UCLA last July.  I still have flashbacks of Tim holding me down.  I still have flashbacks of being restrained and put in isolation for stupid reasons as a little girl.  I'm afraid that I will have a flashback, or dissociate, or otherwise lose control in some way while I am held down tomorrow.  I know it's only practice.  And I know I can stop it whenever I want to.  I know it's not real, and I know that I have control over the situation, but that doesn't mean my screwed up brain knows that too.  How am I supposed to keep myself grounded and in control, to keep my PTSD crazies calm and hidden, when I am essentially going to be acting out some of this stuff in real life?

Is this the wrong job for me?  I don't have any anxiety, other than the normal anxiety about being hurt or hurting a child while putting a child in a hold.  I will be working with the young adults, who don't need physical intervention, but I will be covering shifts with younger children often.  I don't have any other job prospects.  Maybe I'm not the one to be the former foster kid role model to these kids.  I thought I was doing a lot better, but after today I realize that I'm still pretty screwed up. 

$tarted working

I started working today.  I went to orientation at 8 Am this morning and will continue with this schedule for two weeks until I start working at my actual placement, which will be from 11PM to 7AM.  I'm so happy to have a job but I keep having mini panic attacks about money.  I don't know how I am going to survive on the amount they will pay me.  It is literally half of what I made at my last job.  They will offer me benefits after two or three months of employment, but that would cost me about $100 a month out of my already super low paychecks.  There is just no way I would be able to afford therapy on that.  Plus if I ever need to be in the hospital, it will cost me a $3500 deductible.  How would I pay that on my tiny hourly wage?  I actually thought about just going on disability because I would make almost the same amount of money and I would have free health insurance.  It would be the easy way out.  I'm so paranoid about medical bills right now since I still owe the hospital about 100k for my stay and surgeries in March.

I mean, I don't think I will ever go back to therapy again.  Now that I have some space from it all, I realize how bad CT was for me.  So triggering and harmful in so many ways.  I am doing so much better without therapy.  I don't think it's for me anymore.  I tried to get help, but it ended up sending me into this very dark place for a couple of years.  I'm doing much better now, but I am having crying spells that are increasing and lots of anxiety and nightmares.  I think some of that is just situational, but I am sure some of it is just from my crazies.  I am almost totally off my meds.  I called and begged my old doctor to write me an RX for some of my meds because I can't handle the serotonin discontinuation syndrome that I've been having, but I am literally only taking 1/4 my dose every 3-5 days just to keep the brain zaps away.  I got some ambien as well, but only half of my normal dose.

But back to the money thing...  My heart rate kept raising every time we talked about that stuff in orientation today.  I'm so worried about supporting myself.  I don't know how to pay for rent, bills, food, student loans, medical bills, etc...  on what I will be making.  Not being able to provide for myself has triggered a whole bunch of crap for me.  I don't want to live with my sister, but I feel like I have to because I can't afford to live on my own, but if I live with my sister I am going to end up being more of a mom to a twenty-something with Schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder.  I can barley care for myself. 

I have so much I want to write in my blog all the time, but it's like I've lost the energy for this, and I worry about who reads it these days.  I want to write because I feel like I have lost a friend when I don't.  This used to be a place that I came to vent, blow off steam, process, find support, have my ideas challenged, etc...  But it's also been a source of a lot of pain.  A source of a lot of rejection and getting myself in trouble.  It's done probably just as much harm as it's done good for me.  

Candles for Janet

My trip to LA is coming to an end.  I visited with my dogs and several friends the last couple of days, and I will be heading back to Quirky Town in a van with my stuff and one of my cats in the late morning.  My ex gf will be bringing the dogs in a couple of months.  I want to write about my trip, but it's hard to focus on anything other than my friend.

SM and I wrote notes on candles for our friend, Janet.  We lit them and talked about her for a long time.  We cried.  We laughed.  We talked about how angry we are that she hurt herself.  We talked about how guilty we feel, and about how angry we are with Janet's family.  She was such a hilarious, generous, caring person and I'm so sad that she's gone.  She deserved so much more.  She was too special to have died alone, and not even have a service to honor her.  SM and I did the best we could, but we're just two of many who really cared about and miss her.

We have gone looking for one of Janet's cats who got out of the apartment when the police came.  The other cat was very sick for a long time and Janet's sister put her to sleep.  Janet was about to stop medical treatment on her cat as well, and she was extremely sad about it.  But the other cat was younger and healthy.  She's been an indoor cat her whole life.  I'm so worried about her.  Janet loved her so much and would be devastated to know that she is lost.  We have looked for her everyday, but I am going back to Quirky Town tomorrow.  I was hoping to find her before I left.
I keep wavering between very sad, very hurt, and angry.  I'm sad/hurt/angry that my friend is gone.  Sad/hurt/angry that she hurt herself, that she was hurting badly enough to hurt herself, that she didn't reach out to me or SM or 911.  ANYONE.  I keep wanting to go back in time and tell her that it matters to ME if she was alive.

Janet deserved better...  From the mental health industry, from her family and from herself.  It's so strange and feels just wrong not texting with her all day long everyday and playing 'Words With Friends' at three in the morning.  I miss her so much and I will NEVER forget her.

I'm thankful for the time I got to call her my friend.

Death of a close friend and a trip to LA

A couple of hours ago I learned that a friend passed away.  I had been emailing, texting, calling, and sending messages through Facebook for over a week, very worried about her.  Today, her family friend wrote to me and told me that they found her in her apartment but were pretty cryptic about how she died.  She talked about suicide A LOT, so I am worried that she actually went through with it.  I met her in the partial hospitalization program a few years ago.

She had her problems, but she was such a sweet person.  She would do anything for anyone.  She sent me an online Starbucks gift card a few weeks ago just to say she missed me.  I'm pretty sad.  I lost a really good friend.  A friend that concerned me, frustrated, and irritated me at times, but a friend I really cared about.  I am upset that her family isn't going to have a memorial service for her and the fact that no one updated her friends, either through facebook or another means.  I have sent her dozens of texts, emails, FB messages, messages through the Words With Friends game we played together.  I've called her and left voicemails.  I called the hospital and left her a message, knowing they wouldn't tell me if she was there or not.

I'm really sad.  Why does life.... suck so much so often?

Tomorrow I am flying back to LA, thanks to a really awesome friend I have up here in Quirky Town who used her frequent flyer miles to get me a ticket.  I am going to visit friends, and pack up as much of my stuff as I can and drive back before I begin work on Monday, the 13th.  I am really freaking lucky and feeling extra mushy and appreciative of these friends today.  I am very excited and equally as sad to spend time with my friend, S, who was also friends with the woman who passed away.  We used to be kind of a "trio" at times since we all met at the partial program.  I can't believe I'm not going to see my friend tomorrow.  I really thought she was back in the hospital.  I wanted to just show up and surprise her at visiting hours.  But now I am faced with the realization that our last interaction will truly be our last.  

Our last interaction:

ME:  Oh, it's because fucking LAPD accidentally put a warrant out for my arrest for that time they picked me up for a welfare check.  It's fixed now, so I am waiting to hear back from the background company.

J:  Yikes. Total nightmare. Let me know what I can do to help. Xo

ME:  you can't do anything, but thanks for wanting to. 

J:  Always happy to hold your hand if that's all I can do.

ME:  You are the sweetest.  How are you doing?  Feeling better?

J:  "My voice has substantially returned in the last couple of days which is nice.  Now I can clearly state just how bad I feel mentally.  It's a trade off. :-)"  

I did not respond to her last message.  I'm an awful friend. 

Another reason why I can't have friends...

Why do people, my friends, even if they only know a tiny bit about my life, always start our talks with something like this, "I know it's nothing compared to what you've been through" when they are confiding in me?  I always tell them that you cannot compare pain. Everyone's pain is valid.  I get so tired of convincing people that they are allowed to talk about their issues and that there is no "worse" pain or stress.  Why do people project those feelings onto me?  Why do they assume that I wouldn't care or would compare my life to their issue?  This comes from people who barely know the basics of my life, but it also comes from people who know a lot.  I am hyper aware of this and get really defensive about it.  My pain does not supersede theirs.  I have never felt that way about my friends.  I have felt annoyed in group therapy when someones problem was really minor, like a girl who cried because her mom wouldn't pay for her nose job, but did pay for her boob job, but never I have never felt that way about my friends or people who are really upset and confide in me.

Why do people feel insecure about their problems because I have had a shitty life and why do they project those feelings onto me?  I think I'm a pretty compassionate person.  I listen to my friends.  I value their pain.  But I always have people comparing their problems to mine, even when they don't really know much about them.

It's not fair to think that I would dismiss your problems because I had a hard life.  When you do that, you are saying that I could never be a good friend.  You make me feel like a selfish person.  You make me feel like a freak and that you believe I could never understand what it's like to be a "normal" person.  And you make me feel like you think I don't care about you.  It's not true and it's not fair.