My-Yesterday, I pushed myself in asking myself if I had anything else I wanted to work on with my episode of Media Maintenance wherein I published all of the essays I wrote on my bus rides into work. The same work I quit. After I completed that recording, I went to bed, exhausted, and on my way to bed, I recognized what I had experienced one week previously: a nervous breakdown caused by my employment.

I might consider this my second work-induced nervous breakdown.

The first was about a year before starting this website and this writing project I’ve put myself fully into, and it’s through this project and lifestyle that I’ve found myself predicting areas of my life that I couldn’t have without writing. Writing about how we’re feeling is an extremely powerful magic, if you will, that will help you predict your future. The more honest you are with your writing, the more insight you can gain. My writing during my conclusion of my contract was one of excitement but also fatigue. This fatigue continued and was amplified during my conversion from contract to full-time at this same company. Would things have been better for me had I had a legitimate break that let me rest more? Would I have figured out a way through the animosity and strife and fear if I had taken more than a day off work, which I spent at a disappointing doctor’s appointment, only to then go to a disappointing concert, none of which helped me prepare for my new job?

In some ways, this was the ideal situation.

Had I more rest period, I might have not noticed as quickly the problems that I was breeding through continuing the work I was once excited for doing. It was the perfect job on the surface, but people – it’s always fucking people, I hate people sometimes – had to go and ruin it. The addictive side of myself lashed out at full force. One week ago, for me, the evening where I was fed up with the bullshit, was an evening where my mind was so inundated with fear and anxiety that when I woke up the next morning at 4am, it was from a nightmare that had scared me unlike anything I ever experienced before, and I can’t even express the details of that nightmare. I woke up to suddenly know that I needed to quit. My addictive tendencies were boiling over and I was getting to a point where, had I not quit, I might have relapsed from my ten-plus years of sobriety by the time I am now writing this essay.

The consequence of my sobriety was leaving a seemingly fantastic rotten job.

I must now figure out how I can move on from this. I feel fundamentally betrayed in so deep a manner as to reveal the true humanity of reality. I gave up a good contract for this full-time job. I met my replacement on that contract. When I went back to hand over the computer equipment that this company owned, that I was lent for what we had hoped would be years instead of days, I was so overwhelmed with returning one last time that I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. They betrayed me. They ruined my dream of working there, of doing well by this company, and getting back on my feet with their help. This life has not been easy to me, and were it not for my sobriety or my writing, what purpose would I have? Life would be easier if I were drunk through all of it. Remaining sober means seeing life as ugly as it is, without even a little bit of relief.

I have to keep working through this nervous breakdown.

When I had my previous nervous breakdown, I had three days to recover my mentality, and my first week back was still in shock. I never quite recovered from a loyalty perspective, and within the next few months, I kept seeing more and more things pile on me, to the point where when I put in my notice to leave, I had no plan except for listening to my supervisor finish complaining to me about something or another and me just feeling fed up by it. I put in my notice there and on my last day, a recruiter scooped me up and placed me in a new role. Maybe full-time work isn’t for me because the people who do full-time work are always so miserable with their lives that they take it out on whoever will be around.

They don’t pay me enough to be their therapist.