Every Sixteen Hours

I am in a cycle that has gotten totally insane. Roughly every sixteen hours, I begin an upswing where I tell myself all of the reasons I can come up with to continue going to my job. Once that sixteen hours is up, I begin the downswing, where I get mired in everything that is wrong and what I have done incorrectly to land me in the job I am in, and the ensuing boredom and irritability that runs through every minute I am there. If it weren't for its constantly manic nature, this would be known as a funk.

These are sometimes waking hours and sometimes they include sleep. I have had days where I have difficulty separating my dreams from my reality, and I get through a workday in a complete fog. Not that it matters, the job is so mindless that a three-legged, half blind lab mouse could complete most of the tasks, if only given a ladder.

This is not news. I wound my way into this mess and I am having a difficult time finding my way out. The struggle is terrible and simplistic at the same time. I know better than all of it, yet if I explained the argument that takes place in my head to a qualified person, it would make me eligible for some really potent drugs. There used to be a clear delineation between the two halves of this argument... Now it is starting to take on the following pattern:

 I am good at my job. Very good. I can fuck around for hours. Every day. Still, everything will get done. Who cares? This is easy. They are essentially paying me to show off my skills at obeying gravity. WHOA! Look at her hold that chair down! What does it matter? I get to write when no one is bugging me, right? Shit... let me guess. You need help loading a stapler? Here ... let me stop what I am doing, disrupt my phone call, email, conversation, anything...so that your day can continue moving smoothly. I went to college, you know. Yeah, I know you don't have a degree. That is why you can't operate the copy machine, either.  Its ok...go ahead, I'll take care of this while you get paid twice what I do...

I hate my job. So much. There is no part of my brain that gets any exercise at all. Only when someone rides my patience due to their incompetence, poor manners or general lack of tact and/or class, do I have to think at all. And even then, it is just about the prison sentence that would ensue from throwing that metal stapler that weighs three pounds straight at their face. And how I don't want to go to prison.... Move the stapler away... good...

My job pays the bills. This is a good thing, especially since I like being able to pay the bills. Money is good. People have to work. We all do things we don't like. This is part of the deal. You are contributing to society. Its part of being an adult. Just smile and nod. Shit, you know what, just wear clothes. Get in there wearing clothes and no one will notice you.

My job is eating away at my life, stealing hours and productivity, my youth, creative abilities, my intentions and desire to do anything else-it is all squandered beneath trying not to walk out of the room every time someone stupid walks in. There are simply not enough rooms.

My job gives me structure and makes it easier to plan expenses due to its stable pay. That is good. I like organization. It is nice to budget and not think much about it....see? That is a good reas...stop stabbing your hand with the scissors! People would kill for this job! Jesus!

My job is the worst part of my life, a failure to push myself to my full potential and a reminder of all that I could have been as well as my worst fears played out. Everyone here is a representative of another person, at another job, or some other worthless part of my life that I have obviously not learned the appropriate lesson from quite yet. I feel like I'm stuck in some weird board game and whoever is controlling this has some shitty dice luck.

Its good to be employed. Great health benefits. Paid time off. Take a sick day and calm your ass down. There are plenty of things to be thankful for. It could be worse. You get paid to do a very easy job. It could lead to much better things. You don't have to do everything in this lifetime. Think about it- if reincarnation is real, you could get thousands of chances to come back and re-do ....oh my god, I hope I'm at the end of this thing and I am not going to come back again and do this over. Buddha, Tom Cruise, are you listening?

And so it goes. Over and over again, like a hamster wheel of bipolar craziness, back and forth, slowly sawing away at my sanity. I know better. We all know better. We talk ourselves into things and out of things, giving our best attempts at justification, knowing just which buttons to push on our own brains. I know my weaknesses and which ones can be exploited to make me rethink a hasty decision. I also know that my 16 hours is coming up again and I will wake up in a frantic dream, where I'm drowning in a sea of paperwork, terrified of what it could be, only to turn the papers over and see that they are all blank.

I have to escape before I forget that it is my job that I hate and not my life. That I am capable of more important things and can be doing them instead. Before sixteen hours becomes six, or one. If you ever find yourself in a situation that you are thinking too much about, the situation is probably wrong for you. My corners are chafing at being shoved into this round hole. I am more of a hexagon, it seems. Don't cut your corners. Build a bigger hole that can fit all of you into it. Including your bipolar alter ego, you never know when it will really come in handy.