This post won’t be pretty. I’m scared. I feel unseen, unwanted, unloved and forgotten. Despite a new community honoring me for this month, despite my therapist reminding me it’s the optimal time to fight for my dreams, I feel abandoned. I feel useless. I feel worthless. I feel weak and pathetic. I feel evil and manipulative. I just want support so I can do what I love, what brings me life and what I am made to do.
I feel like all I can talk about is this stupid company that seemingly ruined my life. The truth is they were ruining my life when I was with them for the chump change they gave me. I couldn’t even afford a home where I could wash my clothes, I had no hope of moving out of this apartment where they refuse to fix our toilet, where I can’t shower without the plumbing making me stand in muddy ankle deep water… Yet like a child in the home that caused my cptsd I had hope that this awful unethical company would be some weird backbone to help me build a better life for my family.
This post isn’t going to be pretty because I just want to get things off my chest and I don’t have any cute photos to share. I feel like my bunny hates me after he got neutered. He doesn’t cuddle me or come over to me anymore despite the fact that now I’m no longer chained to a stupid laptop for a shitty company and I can be with him for as long as I want whenever I want he no longer comes to me and it’s breaking my heart.
I feel like I’m just trying to make people feel pity for me to help me get by doing things that make me happy. Truly if I don’t self advocate no one will help or support me. All the while the same demons I have been fighting for years since starting my business are coming back ready to devour me I have no idea what to say. Recently I play music mostly alone when I stream. I made videos that I was sort of proud of I think but just within seconds I feel that I am fooling myself. I made art that I was sort of proud of and then felt my enthusiasm seep away within seconds.
I’m angry and I can’t stop being angry. I’m exhausted and I am scared to rest. Rest feels like a death sentence. I feel alone and uncared for despite my friends fighting for me to make rent for February.
I fell asleep writing. It is now 11:18 AM… I woke up feeling physically awful. I’m still scared. I still feel worthless. I still feel evil and manipulative. I still just hope for support. In my last therapy session on Thursday my therapist and I discussed my fears and hesitations. She is pushing me to fight for my self employment as we both know it would be the best for me. It would be the best for my family. I wanted to write about it but my mind is a mess ever since that HR woman harassed me over the phone.
I’ve mentioned it in many other places and I feel like a broken record but incase anyone reading doesn’t know I’ll mention it again. I don’t remember what day it was but it was sometime last week, maybe Monday, a week before today. I’m losing sense of time again, probably dissociating… Anyway, the HR woman from my ex employer calls and threatened me with not paying my severence because of some anonymous review on some sort of job website. Yet again $1300 owed to me is just stripped away. Immediately because of her treatment of me, which has always been snakey and manipulative I feel like trash.
I was paycheck to paycheck at the whim of a company that hires crooked people to protect their assets and make you seem like the “crazy and unreasonable” person for standing up for yourself. I’m a trauma survivor. I have complex trauma from years of being subjugated to narcissistic abuse by my father and brother always passive-aggressively attacking me and my sense of self, the family scapegoat, always taking the blame for not drinking the kool-aid. Today, as my therapist pointed out, I am still paycheck to paycheck but on my terms, my boundaries, my standards, my identity. I am free.
The problem is that I’m in a trauma loop with my innerchild scared and wanting to run back to the familiar. This time it’s not reliving my broken relationship with my father and brother through an abusive friendship, it’s reliving that toxic dynamic with a shitty company that doesn’t value my life even a bit. It feels trite and ridiculous even typing it out. The truth is working for these shitty soulless companies keeps me codependent, it keeps me feeding into the demons and lies of my past, it keeps my spirit broken and weak and defeated.
I cannot take it anymore. For a week I’ve been too beaten down to even create anything. Just from one encounter with this bitch from that shit hole I don’t feel like myself. I can’t escape feeling worthless. I feel like I am back where I started. I left my therapy session on Thursday thinking I’m delusional to think that codependency can be had with a system of corporate life… I did a short search online to see if anyone ever felt something similar. Here’s another blog I found. It’s worth a read though it didn’t quite seem like what I am facing at this moment.
I have escaped an abuser. An entity that just used me for its own gain while beating me down again and again so that I would comply and be its perfect little golden child worker. After I lost my emotional support bunny the claws of this corporation came out. It was ready to beat me into submission. Up until then I didn’t have needs that were inconvenient for it. I presented my needs and the rain of guilt and shame started pouring heavily like a monsoon. Once they stole my chance to properly mourn over my loss and they stole my time to stabilize my heart and mind they started berating me for not meeting their expectations.
I asked for accommodations because my cptsd was incredibly hard to manage, more than it usually is, my sense of stability (I have emotional support animals in my life for a reason) and of course they diminished me, dismissed me and wanted to bully me into ignoring my needs.
First my coworker who claimed to care about my mental health and claimed to be a supportive part of the team went behind my back and told my manager that I was suicidal as if I was attempting suicide. I set boundaries by refusing to speak to her except about that job, blocking her an all social media because she was using my posts about my mental health advocacy and raising awareness for cptsd as a way to attack me because she was always gaslighting me and acting like she was the only one doing the job saying backhanded shit like “I know you’re slower than me so I have to make sure I don’t so all the work.” She also constantly manipulated the manager taking over the meetings and bulldozing her. They were all white. I had no chance as a Latina to stand up for myself without being labeled as “aggressive.”
Which brings me to my next point. HR got involved because the management refused to let me take the rest I needed to manage my cptsd. I asked to work more at night to have more time to sleep properly and also to be taken off phone calls because they induce trauma responses. Work that was never on my contract when I signed up for the job. They refused wanting me to work MORE hours and not let me retain the proper sleep and rest I needed for my disability. Since I am Latina HR started gaslighting me saying I wanted to get paid to “not work at all” and they tried to bully me into taking a pay cut by either going to hourly wages (which they were already discussing budget cuts in the company so I knew they would then cut my hours) or force me into FMLA instead of simply accommodating me. They made it seem it was too much to ask.
They implemented unlimited PTO with careful snakey wording to simply say it was limited to the favorites and the brown nosers. They insisted on guilting me any time I pointed out the fact that my coworker had taken at least three weeks paid leave with very little notice yet I was being harassed fkr asking to shift my hours to accommodate changes with my disability as well as changes with my mother’s health to whom I am a full-time caregiver. They insisted that this micromanaging manipulative coworker was doing all my work to “help” me while I did the same workload when she was out sick over and over and over again much more than the week I took off to nurse my dying emotional support animal.
This post is incredibly long but I only had my therapist and one friend supporting me through all of this for the last year of my life. I felt like too much of a burden on a community that eventually was just taking me for granted and ended up being just as awful and toxic as my workplace was. I have a few friends that still speak to me from that community but even theyw didn’t know everything I was dealing with because I was too scared to talk about it. I constantly feel that my struggles shouldn’t be heard. That I’m a cry baby. That I take more than I give.
Now here we are with my only means of income being in my broken and beaten hands and I am scared. Here I am again feeling worthless as I have said over and over in this post alone.
Do people care if I am dead? Do people care if I am weak and hungry but tool sick to cook? Do people care that every day even with my friend Fern pushing her community to help me for February that I feel guilty and ashamed that she cared enough about me to ask others to care? I don’t believe it will happen again. I am fighting to believe in my work and everything I have to offer. Even after working hard for my friend Davey. Even with the support I have I am struggling to find hope and light and I feel ungrateful. It makes me believe I would be better off disappearing if only I knew my mom and my bunny would be okay. It seems unfair that they have to rely on me. A pathetic, mentally and physically disabled women who can’t even get out of bed today to feed herself because her whole body is tired and exhausted from that call with that HR women.
I just want to scream. I just want to help people. I just want to make art and music and advocate for people fighting like I am. I just want to rest and and a day where food is made for me without feeling like I am stealing from people who helped me already. I just want to invest in my business without feeling the same. I’m scared to buy batteries for my keyboard. I’m scared buy toilet paper. I’m scared to do my laundry because it costs money. I’m tired. I’m sick. I’m fading away. Does anyone care?
To my fellow disabled people, have yoy felt this way? To my fellow trauma survivors, have you ever felt invisible? To my fellow minorities have you ever felt unheard and silenced being told you’re seeing things that aren’t thete? To my fellow human beings have you ever wanted to be loved and cherished and valued and supported? I tell this story for you , for me, for my mom and my bunny. I’m asking for help with all the fear and guilt and shame weighing deeply on my soul because I want to believe and fight for life, love, peace, joy, kindness and light. Never give up. Fight for your dreams and your heart. Thank you for reading my ugly long story.
Please support my kofi, even a dollar monthly adds up. Monthly support can help me feel less alone and less afraid. Thank you so much to those of you who supported me even as a one off. Today I am still here because of you. I promise to do my best to honor your love.
Current BunSupporters:
- TheAncientOne55
- Prymos
- Fern
- Teklynk
- RichardsPet
- Lunchbox Sculpts
- Aideen
- Nick D