Over the my past few weeks, my mental health has taken a decline thanks to a job I quit to avoid breaking my sobriety. Were it not for avocational endeavors like “The Story,” “Novel 01,” and “Novel 02,” would I remain as sober as I continue to be? Without access to recreation, would I dive into negative pools of reality? These are things where my vocation, avocation, and recreation all serve each other, mostly in equal balance.

Major spoilers after the jump.

I don’t know how to translate my experiences into “The Story.”

I’ve thought about how “Novel 02” would effectively be a reduction by ten, a decimation if you will, of the reality I’ve experienced. Sammohini has it, effectively, ten times easier than me. She will still go through strife, but her strife won’t be years-long endeavors through which she’ll encounter hostility from all angles, all the time, always, forever, and ever. She will have it significantly easier than me, because if I were to inject more of my experiences into hers, there would not only be that break between writer and character, but her experiences would no longer be believable.

I suppose, then, I live an unbelievable life…

It is my birthday after all, so I can afford some degree of ego my-today.

What I’d like to do going forward with my vocation is find work that won’t make me want to quit instantly. Contract work has been nicer in part because the management style for contractors tends to be less shitty. I wonder if it’s a power trip of employers, managers, or others – in my situation, it was my trainer that pushed me out of my recently-adopted full-time employment role from a contract role on another team – that causes people to go from hypothetically saying, in summary, “you’re just a contractor, you could leave at any time, so I can’t treat you poorly,” to saying, also hypothetically, “you’re stuck here with me now, and I’m miserable, so you’re going to be miserable, constantly, and forever.”

Well, I don’t want to be miserable with my work.

My work, my vocation, might eventually overlap with my avocation of writing, however, I can’t fully integrate the two because of the nature of IT. I have recognized for years, now, that doing anything related to writing within the field of IT is a lost proposition. Documentation is always appreciated but always the first to get scrapped. No one cares about documentation until they need it, and even then, they never read it. I wrote a document for the sole purpose of explaining a process to the team I ended up working for, for less than two weeks, and they still looked at the documentation and said, “Legal-Name-Redacted knows how to do this, contact Legal-Name-Redacted,” instead of literally reading the document to understand how to do this…

So, how does this turn out for me going forward?

I’ll be looking for work that will pay my bills and allow me to sustain myself long-term. Whether that’s picking up another contract that has low stakes, low pressure, or picking up an equivalent full-time employment role. I know that I must put my sobriety first, as if I don’t, then I’ll find myself into significant trouble. So, my sobriety will shield me from major trouble, but I must get into minor trouble in order to get the paychecks I need to survive. Life under capitalism, accidentally written as crapitalism, sure is fantastic in that regard, isn’t it? I’m not sure if the alternatives could be viable, especially with our addiction to materialistic things, so I have to work within this system as best I can, resting when I can, and working on my fiction, when I can.

All told, I’m just doing the best I can with what energy I have.