Why I'm Awesome (Part 16 of 7,412): LIMITS

Everyone's got them. I hit mine.

[ This post is brought to you by my boss. ]

I am a strong individual, particularly in the emotional department. Sure it looks like things get to me easily and whatnot but the truth of the matter is that these things seldom bother me once they're done flitting in and out of my vicinity. I find this to be healthy, because if I don't express my feelings about something immediately, I tend to hold onto it and not let go until I've had the satisfaction of letting the world know how I feel about it... and this is ultimately more destructive.

Anyone who's hung out with or been around me over the last couple of weeks knows full well that I have had a song stuck in my head pretty much every day. I hum it, I dance to it, I try to sing it in my undoubtedly brutal, songbird-butchering voice. That song is The Sweet Escape by Gwen Stefani.

If you don't know the lyrics, here they are:

If I could escape/and recreate a place as my world/and I could be your favorite girl forever/perfectly together/now tell me boy wouldn't that be sweet?/If I could be sweet/I know I've been a real bad girl/I never meant for you to get hurt forever/we can make it better/now tell me boy wouldn't that be sweet?

While I know how unawesome it can be to use a song's chorus as a springboard for the breaking of a dam of verbalized emotion, you are all pretty aware by now that I never do it, so there's a damn good reason I'm doing it now.

Honestly, most of the song's appeal exists only in the very first few lines of the chorus.

I would dearly love to escape and recreate a place as my own world. I don't really to be anyone's favorite girl (forever, perfectly together), but it would be pretty sweet all the same. The rest of chorus I guess is less self-explanatory, so you're going to have to plow through what promises to be a lengthy divulging of my burdens on the written word.

Over the last three weeks, I have been thrown under the bus of life's fagatronics. I know I used that word in last time's post, but here it is again, if only to establish an allusion to that post.

Those same things listed in that previous post (the breakup, the tragedy involving a friend, the effects of that tragedy on a larger circle of friends, work, multiple emotional upheavals involving friends both close and distant) have been trying to beat me down over and over again, trying to crush and bury me under an enormous, steaming pile of life's best work.

Now, I'm not trying to imply that my pain is anymore extreme than anyone else's; everyone has their own little defeats that they take harder than other people would. Your pain is individual, and the degree you feel it given an incident is solely up to you, and no one can judge you for how bad or how well you are taking it. No one knows just how hard that fist hit you, no one knows just how much you loved that dog, no one knows how much of your own pain and sadness you internalize for the sake of the people around you.

I recognize, however, that I am a strong person. After everything happened, one after another, I was still standing. More than standing, I was doing pretty damn great. Hardly anyone remembered what happened unless I told them flat out that it was on my mind. Many people would've been down and out after the breakup. Most certainly would've hit the ground out cold after the passing of a friend on top of it.

And yet there I was, going strong, recovering quickly, with a positive attitude. I took all the positive things about my relationship and learned something from them while recognizing why he broke up with me. I didn't blame myself for it, I didn't blame him for it, I simply understood the reason bounced right back.

As for what transpired after the breakup, well, there isn't much you can do with news that arrives in your Inbox telling you something you just can't believe you're reading. You certainly could not have prevented it, and even if you were not as close to that person as you wanted to be, you still recognize the true impact of what has happened. So what do you do instead? You offer to help the ones who were close to him recover. You are there for them when they need you, and that is all you can do given the circumstances. It is perhaps a small gesture and maybe it doesn't make a difference, but it makes things easier to deal with when you know that you are doing what you can to help others lighten the load.

Honestly, that was the only good thing. I love helping people, I love being there for them, knowing that I am helping them through something they can't get through by themselves.

Please understand when I say what I'm about to say next that I love that people come to me and I would never blame them. It's just that I've been dealing with so much emotion coming from all sides that it's been overwhelming. The irony is, I called it! I knew February was going to be a crazy month and I was fully geared, waiting for it, bracing myself so that I can be everyone's shoulder. But I guess that with all my own shit going on, it takes a lot more to stay sane and stable. Do not apologize for this; if I didn't want to help, I would never have offered. In fact, helping people is what literally kept my head above the water for so long. It's draining in the process, sure, but it is also refreshing and recharging when it's over. I love doing it, please don't deny me that pleasure.

Then there's work. I don't need to tell you guys anything more about just how much bullshit work generates on a daily basis. If it weren't for my coworkers, I don't know how I'd make it through the day.

And, ironically, even though these are the people who help me through each individual day just by being there, even though these are the people I see the most, they are somehow the ones on whom I shit on the most. I resolved to correct this, and tried to approach work with an increasingly positive attitude.

For the past weeks, through the Frogger-like dodging of boss-generated obstacles, my coworkers made it bearable simply by being around. There wasn't anything special they needed to say, they were just there, probably thinking the same things I was, and that made it so much easier to survive yet another day in the office.

Still, one can only take so much bullshit. There's only so much a (unwitting) shield can handle before it buckles, splits, and breaks. I think my shield lost its effects yesterday, and I was pushed into and past my limit into the realm of what I like to call "Armageddon." I tore up a draft of a Powerpoint printout right there at my desk, tearing it to shreds, while I was sure my boss had a clear view of my desk. I snapped at a coworker when, really, all he probably wanted was to get that breath of fresh air I myself was craving. I yelled and screamed when I got home, breaking down in front of my sister and her boyfriend.

It feels easy, even to me, for me to get over things like those mentioned in my previous post. To an outsider and that third eye inside my brain that tries to process everything I do, it is generally surprising how little effort it seems to take for me to recover and come back with a vengeance.

It's not actually easy.

So when you've been doing it a while with no sign of respite to let everything bleed out of you, you just get too tired. Too tired to fight another round, too tired to defend against yet another onslaught of bullshit, too tired maintain the thickness of your shell. It's easier to give in and explode.

To be fair, my limit is very high. Very. I am able to plow through and contain an incredible amount of bullshit. It's just that it's been so much crap happening in such a short span of time and I have had absolutely no time to recharge my batteries. I have kept angry outbursts to a minimum at work for the sake of maintaining good morale, trying to stay positive, and at home I distract myself because I don't have the energy to think about anything more serious beyond "will my little red tanks do enough damage to the big blue tanks to kill it when I have 7 little red tanks and they have 2 big blue tanks?" (The answer is yes, but only if my little red tanks were attacking from the woods.)

On another level, I guess in my efforts to stay positive, it further drained my energy, nor did I afford myself the time to deal with what was requiring me to stay positive in the first place. It's ironic that I know how to take good emotional care of myself, but because I didn't want to step on anymore toes, I internalized everything, which is basically the polar opposite of what I need to be doing, as it does nothing to help me recover from the draining process of getting over everything. I was trying so hard to stay strong that I ended up so unbelievably weak that I am disgusted with my failure.

The breakup does not bother me. Nothing really bothers me, per se, as everything that has happened has been dealt with, recovered from. I just haven't had to time to restore my arsenal back to maximum, and my boss's idiocy has basically quintupled over the last week, leaving me so uncertain about my career, about what I do in my day-to-day life. You can only take so many hits in a row before you finally crumple; even if your injuries are healed, if you haven't eaten or rested, you're going down in the 7,412th round whether you like it or not. I took as many as I could, and I guess my only comfort is that it's a hell of a lot more hits than most could've taken.

I am just so, so, so tired.

TL;DR - oh here you are again hey go fuck yourself