Another Night, Another Laptop

Whelp, I am typing this on our new MacBook Pro. For those that don’t know, we have quite the laptop collection.  There’s Janet’s gaming laptop, little carol ann’s old Dell with a pen and touchscreen, my System76 Linux laptop, our work computer, and now a MacBook.  We also have a gaming desktop and a Linux server.  Some of them are 4-5 years old, but still, it’s a lot.  And that’s after we’ve given 3 others away in the last couple of months!  With the exception of the gaming PCs, none are top of the line… but yeah, that’s what we spend money on.  We work with computers for a living, so maybe it’s natural, but the truth is we (mainly Janet & I) usually buy laptops when we’re either flying high or deeply stressed out and depressed.  They don’t tend to appear when everything is alright.

And things aren’t really alright.

We just had a four-day weekend (Friday – Monday), in theory anyway. From Thursday night to Sunday night, I worked every waking moment, with maybe 6 hours of sleep total across three days.  I didn’t have to.  But I couldn’t stop.  On my vacation weekend, I put in 60+ hours. And I would have worked Monday too if Sharon hadn’t been so adamant she would throw my work laptop out into the street if I so much as touched it on Monday. I don’t think it was a joke or an idle threat.  

Then last night was therapy, and we were in such good shape, Therapy Guru (what we call our therapist) suggested we have therapy again tonight, and therapy 2x next week as well. 

So what’s going on?  It’s mainly to do with work stress, and how I (don’t) deal with it.  But it has deep roots in a traumatic past.

I grew up in the family business. My father, who was the main terror in our life, was The Boss.  A lot of why I’m a workaholic goes back to that.  I was operating machinary while unsupervised and using strong solvents in poorly ventalated conditions when I was still a single digit midget age-wise.  I had my work ethic drilled into me by blind rage.  

Only in the past few years have I started to reflect on how messed up my relationship with work is, and that I associate work with abuse.  Like the CSA and other shit wasn’t enough, right?

As a child, I remember working to the point of collapse when my father was on the warpath, and my mother was off doing whatever the hell she did when she left us with him.  So, here I am, 40 years later, still working to exhaustion like my life depended on it.

But it doesn’t.  Oh sure, I’m not rich, I have to work, but not to the point of collapse, and not driven by a fear so intense I can’t sleep or do anything to combat it but work.

And man, I have some really bad heartburn starting up.  And I’m starting to get spacey. sigh. 

When there is a threat to my job, it feels like a real, physical threat to my wellbeing.  And, so much of who I am as Saoirse is bound up with work.  It’s who I am in our system.  The one who works.  It’s who I’ve always been.  Who I was made to be.  If I’m not working, what’s the point of my existance?

yup, even more spacey.  trying to stay on topic.

….and its now 6 hours later.  Oops.  I’m going to post this even though its unfinished.  I may circle back to this topic in a subsequent blog post.