This is my only job....

Well, tonight I was supposed to be getting together with a friend for an evening of drunken Scrabble but it turns out that he had to stay at work for more overtime. I suppose it's just as well since I didn't get enough sleep last night and woke up crabby, sore, and already wanting to go back to bed. If only there had been a screw it button next to my bed; I surely would've pressed it today.

Then again, had I done that, I would've been skipping out on pretty much every responsibility entrusted to me, and I can't have that. It's not like life is really asking all that much of me right now anyway. I get up early, drive the neighbor (who's moving across town by the first of October *sniffles*) to work, sometimes catch a nap, help get her kids off the bus and then cart her back across town. After that, I do my chores and the rest of the evening is all mine. So yeah... life's really not asking too much right now.



I've been feeling a little out of it lately, though. Even though everything's finally settled into a routine around here (it only took a year and a half to find said routine), something's amiss. Nothing's going wrong, but I still have an uneasy feeling. I don't know if it's anxiety creeping up again (as it does from time to time) or just stress over not working. It's more likely a combination of the two -- by not working, I'm feeling as though I'm not doing enough to contribute towards the "common good" of the household in any tangible way. Marco reassures me that I contribute very well, although I kind of still feel a certain inadequacy. I just wish that it was easier for me to manage my emotions and keep them from intruding on my thoughts and actions when I need my focus and adaptability once. Because of my Borderline Personality Disorder, however, I've always found it rather difficult to hold down a job and keep my emotional balance in check. I've worked at three different places since I've been here and walked out of the last two whereas the first one I was fired from.

When something rubs me the wrong way, it can be nearly impossible for me to keep from having a "moment." What I mean by that is that I often get sidelined by a wave of emotion so large -- and keep in mind that just about anything can set me off sometimes -- that I have a hard time focusing my patience and let things just "roll off" my back. It's so similar to a knee-jerk reaction that I don't even really have time to think my actions through; I just go into auto-pilot. I can't even name an instance off-hand when I flew off the handle about something, if that tells you just how insignificant the things that set me off can be.

Until I'm able to better manage my emotions, I feel it would be downright foolish of me to start yet another job that I already don't like just to end up screwing it up somehow. I've worked somewhere around 10 or 12 jobs so far and have managed to have the same results every time. I've only ended employment on good terms once, although I still technically walked off of that job, too. When I moved down here, I left a week earlier than originally planned -- Marco and I missed each other an awful lot. At any rate, I'm hopeful that I can has out my problems by thinking through them more, a task that is greatly aided just by writing my thoughts down here. I feel I can contribute better if I recover a bit more and practice my strategies for self-soothing before moving to another job. I'm also finally getting some much-needed structure -- between "the Job Jar" and chauffeuring my neighbor to and fro, I've got a fairly decent schedule going, and that helps quite a bit, too.