I hate these f*cking mental health posts because I’m living it (OCD, anxiety disorder / high-functioning anxiety, symptoms of bipolar, although the TF knows what the current diagnosis would be), but others want to know what it’s like. So.
You want to know what it’s like inside my head? My life?
Every time I feed Zulejka (my cat) her chicken meat or hard food, I have to hold my fingers above it and think good things so that I don’t give her an illness with my bad thoughts.
If I think a bad thought?
I have to hold my fingers above it again. Give the chicken / cat food good vibes!
Bad thought.
Good thought!
Bad–
Good!
Again, again, again!
When I leave the flat, after I put on my shoes, I take them off again and go back inside to:
Make sure the fridge is closed.
I push it to make sure.
Push again.
Push again.
Then I have to think good thoughts at the fridge so I don’t anger it.
Make sure the water taps are off.
Push to make sure.
Push again BUT NOT TOO HARD so they don’t pop back up.
Waggle my fingers around the flat to leave good vibes so nothing bad happens while I’m gone.
Sometimes locking the door once suffices; sometimes twice, depending on whether or not I have an unacceptable thought that could curse the flat while I’m gone. Then a second relock is required while thinking a good thought.
Sometimes I take off my shoes AGAIN to go back and check the tap. The fridge. Or to make sure Zulejka is still there and OK.
When I’m walking down the street: Wait, I walked on the wrong side of the sign and something BAD will happen because I walked on this side.
Back up.
Walk on the other side of the sign.
BAD! You shouldn’t have walked on those cobblestones! That’s a bad pattern.
Back up. Walk around those cobblestones.
No. Back up.
Walk half on th0se cobblestones and half on the ones beside them.
Back up. Go around the original side of the sign again but walk on different cobblestones this time.
People have stopped me on the street before asking me what I’m looking for. If I’m lost. If I’m OK.
Food: When I was getting rolls the other day, my anxiety suddenly told me my coat sleeve had touched one.
“It didn’t,” Rational Me said, “it’s too far away.”
“It did,” insisted Irrational Anxiety.
I bought the rolls but could not force myself to eat them. I threw them out.
After I got a sandwich at a bakery, my anxiety decided it I couldn’t eat it because Unfounded Fear.
I brought it home and threw it out uneaten, too.
I buy pasta, rice, veggies, prepacked food.
Anxiety says NO and it sits uneaten in the pantry. Eventually, I throw it all out.
I HATE wasting food, but when I ask others if they want it, no one does. They have their own food.
It is literally enough sometimes to make me silent-scream and grab my hair.
Other times, I’m fine. On days when I can write and don’t have to work, I’m almost anxiety-free.
Dayjob days are hell. Currently, I’m constantly anxious because I will only have my job until February 29th, but I can’t stomach the idea of trying another dayjob. When I start thinking of trying to look for one, I start panicking. I start internally collapsing. I start thinking: I’ll eat less. I’ll go back to eating 7 rolls a day.
Someone called me entitled yesterday for not wanting to get another dayjob. But the truth is that I have NEVER been a functional worker. I got fired from my first job for falling asleep at a meeting with the company president (because I’d probably been writing till early hours of the morning).
Even after I got and kept a job in Prague, by the time I was 30, I was having trouble getting myself to work because of my anxiety. First, my company decreased my hours from 40 to 32, then they put me on a contractor’s contract where I get paid by the hour, then they just resigned themselves to me coming in to work when I could force myself to, as long as I did the work. Some days I’d work 11 hours, others only the 15mins that was our morning meeting.
In 2020, they changed the management and the team, and everything went south. They eventually fired the whole team except for me and the team leader, but by then, I was struggling from burnout. Only I didn’t realize it was burnout, and no one around me realized I was in burnout, and so I was working both with anxiety AND my burnout getting worse and worse. My friends noticed I was always angry and depressed. Several stopped speaking to me.
However, I did not ask anyone for real monetary help. I could not afford therapy, nor did I believe it would help. Eventually, however, I was working so little and eating so little to try to save money to pay bills that my blood results came back showing I was borderline malnutritioned. That IS NOT a person who is functional in the workplace. I have been barely-hanging-on functional.
You know what I thought when I regained consciousness after fainting in the tram and I resigned myself that an ambulance was coming? I thought with SUCH RELIEF: “Someone else will finally take care of me. I don’t have to do it myself. At least not for the next several hours.” I’m tired of doing it all myself, and trying to do a dayjob is the thing that is destroying me most.
As Jim Carrey said, you can fail at what you hate, too, and I did fail. I’ve actually been failing at it for over 18 years, but my company and I still made it work until I got too broken and the new management less understanding.
Finding another dayjob is not logical; they would only fire me, or I’d start starving myself again to work less.
To me, the logical thing to try is something that is sustainable and will not increase my anxiety as the dayjob has. That is: trying to make my books start selling.
However, several people around me are trying to push me back onto a path that has been hurting me for at least 18 years, and that is not doing anything but making me more anxious and stealing my efforts from the books.
Outside of the dayjob, I am perfectly fine. I pay my rent, my bills. I feed my cat. The vets say her stats for her age are amazing. Radek says she still looks magnificent. I write books.
But that’s not enough. I’m trying, but I don’t know where to go from here. I keep enduring. I keep striving to make interesting book videos for tikTok and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, but nothing is happening with sales. I don’t know if I’m just a shit author or if it’s just that it’s fricking HARD to sell books (for my sanity, I have to believe the latter, which of course is true in any case).
At the same time, the world is f*cking burning, and I’m sure there are so many people besides me who are breaking down from the soulless drudgery of their dayjobs and from constantly having to DO. EVERY. F*CKING. THING. Themselves. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this system [capitalism] was NOT made for humans. It was made to make greedy, heartless people rich, to pander to the ambitious who want to be above others, those who don’t believe everyone deserves to do what they enjoy in life (well, to do what they enjoy with the caveat that it doesn’t hurt anyone else).
Like, everything is so messed up. Corporations should NOT own land. No one should be denied a place to live (even if they don’t have money!). Everyone should have free access to food (no one should starve; ‘scarcity’ doesn’t exist [yet], but is manufactured by people wanting profit margins). No one who didn’t ask to be born should be expected to ‘earn’ a living in a world we could structure so that we all benefit each other.
Medication should be without cost. Nowhere should anyone have to make the decision to either go into debt or die.
The world needs to change. People need to realize that so many jobs are BULLSHIT, that pandering to the economy is stupid. Get rid of banks. Get rid of investments. Get rid of private property owned by companies. Instate Universal Basic Income. Give people stability so they can regain their sanity, and let us start doing things that further humanity instead of locking us inside worthless spreadsheets.
You think no one would work with UBI? False. No one would work the bullshit jobs. People go stir-crazy when they’re doing nothing, and those who love what they do would keep doing it. The menial and unwanted but necessary j0bs can be automated. Every programmer I’ve met LOVES to program. They would eat automation up!
And don’t bother commenting that change is not possible, because it IS possible. The current system has been around a lot less time than more humane ones.
People just need to stop pointing fingers and stop hurling hatred at each other and start realizing that we are all on this freaking planet together, and no one is escaping. We need to start working together finding new solutions instead of letting trolls and bots distract us with false division.
THIS. This whole blog post is is why hate thinking about everything that is messed up, including myself, the world, and why I’d rather focus on books and videos and things that don’t upset me.
Because I feel utterly helpless. How do we get from where we are to a real future for everyone?
Hoomans! My hooman has rambled into depressing territory and has given up, which means it’s up to me, super-cat Zulejka, to salvage it. Behold me:
I trust you, hoomans, that you will be okay and find a way to a better world. You will do it for the pets and people you love.
We have to trust you.
Okay, Sonya here again, back behind the mask of normal. I’d better wrap this up. If you’re still here, here are three videos where Zulejka chastises me at the end (and also the final three videos where I use AI. After these, I plan to avoid it for reasons I don’t want to get into):
Here is one I did WITHOUT AI:
Thrice the shadow, y’all. As always, be kind this week; you never know what others are battling behind their smiles.
If you want to support me, read my books and recommend them to those you think will like them. Or, monetarily, you can ‘buy me a coffee’ via buy me a coffee or support me regularly via the patreon (though I never post anything there).
When I was twenty-two, I ran away to Prague, where I now sing to my black cat (who collects dustballs in her whiskers), eat chocolate for breakfast, and have lemon tarts every Thursday.
Sonya Lano 
What this post started from and where it ended up. Then again, the train of thought makes perfect sense. And it’s a great piece either way, and so true, from the depiction of severe OCD and anxiety to the awful concept of “earning a living” to the world’s problems to some obvious solutions that were already possible and ready to be implemented decades ago, so we could no work on the even better next steps, if only there was the will for either, or any level of society… As the also all too true parts about what the people around you say also prove. (“Making a living” from art though… In this society, as it functions and considering what it values now… There may be better odds of winning the lottery, sad to say.)
But herein lies the problem. People won’t stop pointing fingers or hurling hatred or start working together. Never have, most likely never will of their own accord. Those, relatively few, who are different in this way need to figure out how to enforce those behaviors, and the solutions, without qualms about the methods. It may not be exactly impossible, but in a rotten society and with mostly rotten people, it’s highly improbable to do great good while also being good and ethical, and the risk of failure of such attempts is far too great to be affordable anymore.
Rather baffled that nobody wants free food though. At the very least, are there any homeless people anywhere? Or shelters or such things that’d take it as donations? Throwing away food is such an awful thing. Yeah, I’m also strict about food hygiene, if anything that I can’t thoroughly wash and/or cook afterwards touches potential hazards, it’s a problem, but otherwise I’ll eat stuff expired for weeks, or cooked way too long ago, sometimes even when it looks and smells past suspicious, tend to know for how long anything can be kept and how bad it can get, and ways to extend that period and mitigate the ill effects, way past any listed dates or recommendations. And a solution for many things is when I make mamaliga and mix whatever else in it, boil it there for an hour or more, should kill anything several times over. As for toxins, I do tend to eat small quantities at once, and, you know, do this frequently over many years and I guess you build a certain resistance even to those. Been doing this since living with Andra, she was saying that instead of making her pay attention it had the opposite effect, since she knew that I’ll take anything that goes bad, so she only ate the newest and freshest things, never looking at anything left over even for a little while, and I always ended up eating things that’d be going bad as a result, and the same thing tends to happen since I got thrown back here, with dad. But so be it. And he also keeps bringing things, from my mother, from his mother or sister, and most frequently from a woman from his theater group, plus stuff bought to munch on while they rehearse and which is left over, and I’ll usually pick one thing or two that I’m actually interested in, maybe, but then usually still end up eating most, whatever and however it is and despite serious misgivings over how they were made, transported, touched, whatever, since he might take something over the first day or two and then leave the rest and say they’re old.
And I rambled… Ah well.