I need a word for how I feel now. "Brainburn" will do. There's a hot sheet pulsing at the top of my school and a heaviness in my skull. My eyelids are heavy. Thoughts are sluggish. I am tired, maybe a little sleepy, and I generally feel bruised. I took emergency meds yesterday to stop the slide when panic set in and I seriously envisioned what would happen if I lost my house (modest as it is).
The new counselor is good. She's not aspie and not educated about it, but she does listen and she doesn't argue with logic. Meltdown isn't her fault. Part of her job is to let me lose it so that I hold it together for my family and through various collaborative processes: recruiters, interviewers, and the miserable process of sifting through corporate language. I've told her this explicitly and to her credit she let me, just fed me tissues and a real cup of water, not the flimsy paper swallowcup clients usually get.
And I howled while griefwires cut and cut my throat, as I described a couple of blogs ago.
She fed me the usual lines, which are true but somehow magically not relevant: intelligent, well-read, well-educated, autodidactic, job history, solid portfolio, and unusual achievements in my profession and out of it mean...not very much.
We've already done the re-education thing; I personally have owned five career identities in thirty years. I succeeded at all of them, but I can't keep up with them all simultaneously.
I've had four oral offers cancelled on me in 13 months. None of these is for failing a background check, a drug test, or lying on an application. It's been some accountant flipping out and canceling positions, except for the NT narcissist with OCPD--nothing I did was right---and the power play in which someone who was introduced as a peer turned out to be senior and took issue with my lack of deference and I was out a week after I started. A week. I wasn't even in the office. I worked from home, by order.
I don't know what to learn from these experiences.
I cannot stop blaming myself for failing to support my family. That responsibility primarily falls on me and I'm not doing my job.
And yesterday it all went to hell in a seven-layer deathcake. Conversations are starting to fall silent in my house; the good-natured banter and silliness that both my husband and son are masters of, and which I am the "straight man" for, have stopped. We are more subdued. We are both unemployed, my husband and I, and the most intense makeovers and efforts to ensure that we interview in the language of the corporate domain we're trying to enter are ongoing and ineffective; there is always someone who says it better, or who manages somehow to finesse the interview, or who is just more likable. Because employers use different words and don't recognize synonyms, I have to conclude that an applicant that tries to describe relevant experience in another corporation's language--because that's what's in the portfolio--is doomed to fail.
The employment department wants me to self-employ and write a business plan because their jobs can't help me: I don't get ruled out on competence, I get ruled out on being too: too well-educated, too well-paid previously, and of the course the normal sort get unnerved by all those contract gigs, which looks like "too many jobs" if you're the average person who sits at a job for years before going to sit at another job for years.
To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to write a business plan if it starts with the goal of becoming a selling writer. What do I have to set against this? One miserable story in competition and two more in progress, a couple of theological essays, and a couple of metaphors knocking around trying to become "sticky." You writers know what I mean.
I've started to answer ads in other parts of the country. Washington DC isn't going to work---way too expensive to support myself there as well as support my existing house. San Antonio TX might work if I can get a relo package and learn to eat barbecue without wearing it. Seattle is potentially a go, again if I dissolve my last IRA/401(k) and use it to live on, but that seems dicey for a job likely to be temporary and assuming I even get an offer. (See offer history, above.)
My husband and I would have to live apart. He's not going anywhere. He has a church group and a choir space, and it's inconceivable that he move.
It has been a bloody, mind-raping, bone-splintering slide and I can't do it anymore. What do people do? I'm afraid to ask gonzerd, who'd recently posted something to the effect of being homeless.
I do have an interview tomorrow that I heard about just five minutes ago.
I feel hope and fear. I'm afraid my desperation may show, that I'll miss the cues, that I will again fail to connect and watch this slip out of my reach while the other candidate just makes friends and money.
I can't make friends, apparently. All I can do is solve problems. That's worth nothing in a world that appears to be committed to teamwork as a definition for conformance and common language.
Maybe, now, I can sleep.
I think, I'll wear a business suit tomorrow. Please send me spiritual/virtual support tomorrow morning if you are able. I need my God, who knows what I need before I even ask it--but I ask.
The new counselor is good. She's not aspie and not educated about it, but she does listen and she doesn't argue with logic. Meltdown isn't her fault. Part of her job is to let me lose it so that I hold it together for my family and through various collaborative processes: recruiters, interviewers, and the miserable process of sifting through corporate language. I've told her this explicitly and to her credit she let me, just fed me tissues and a real cup of water, not the flimsy paper swallowcup clients usually get.
And I howled while griefwires cut and cut my throat, as I described a couple of blogs ago.
She fed me the usual lines, which are true but somehow magically not relevant: intelligent, well-read, well-educated, autodidactic, job history, solid portfolio, and unusual achievements in my profession and out of it mean...not very much.
We've already done the re-education thing; I personally have owned five career identities in thirty years. I succeeded at all of them, but I can't keep up with them all simultaneously.
I've had four oral offers cancelled on me in 13 months. None of these is for failing a background check, a drug test, or lying on an application. It's been some accountant flipping out and canceling positions, except for the NT narcissist with OCPD--nothing I did was right---and the power play in which someone who was introduced as a peer turned out to be senior and took issue with my lack of deference and I was out a week after I started. A week. I wasn't even in the office. I worked from home, by order.
I don't know what to learn from these experiences.
I cannot stop blaming myself for failing to support my family. That responsibility primarily falls on me and I'm not doing my job.
And yesterday it all went to hell in a seven-layer deathcake. Conversations are starting to fall silent in my house; the good-natured banter and silliness that both my husband and son are masters of, and which I am the "straight man" for, have stopped. We are more subdued. We are both unemployed, my husband and I, and the most intense makeovers and efforts to ensure that we interview in the language of the corporate domain we're trying to enter are ongoing and ineffective; there is always someone who says it better, or who manages somehow to finesse the interview, or who is just more likable. Because employers use different words and don't recognize synonyms, I have to conclude that an applicant that tries to describe relevant experience in another corporation's language--because that's what's in the portfolio--is doomed to fail.
The employment department wants me to self-employ and write a business plan because their jobs can't help me: I don't get ruled out on competence, I get ruled out on being too: too well-educated, too well-paid previously, and of the course the normal sort get unnerved by all those contract gigs, which looks like "too many jobs" if you're the average person who sits at a job for years before going to sit at another job for years.
To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to write a business plan if it starts with the goal of becoming a selling writer. What do I have to set against this? One miserable story in competition and two more in progress, a couple of theological essays, and a couple of metaphors knocking around trying to become "sticky." You writers know what I mean.
I've started to answer ads in other parts of the country. Washington DC isn't going to work---way too expensive to support myself there as well as support my existing house. San Antonio TX might work if I can get a relo package and learn to eat barbecue without wearing it. Seattle is potentially a go, again if I dissolve my last IRA/401(k) and use it to live on, but that seems dicey for a job likely to be temporary and assuming I even get an offer. (See offer history, above.)
My husband and I would have to live apart. He's not going anywhere. He has a church group and a choir space, and it's inconceivable that he move.
It has been a bloody, mind-raping, bone-splintering slide and I can't do it anymore. What do people do? I'm afraid to ask gonzerd, who'd recently posted something to the effect of being homeless.
I do have an interview tomorrow that I heard about just five minutes ago.
I feel hope and fear. I'm afraid my desperation may show, that I'll miss the cues, that I will again fail to connect and watch this slip out of my reach while the other candidate just makes friends and money.
I can't make friends, apparently. All I can do is solve problems. That's worth nothing in a world that appears to be committed to teamwork as a definition for conformance and common language.
Maybe, now, I can sleep.
I think, I'll wear a business suit tomorrow. Please send me spiritual/virtual support tomorrow morning if you are able. I need my God, who knows what I need before I even ask it--but I ask.
