Right now I wish I could take a month off to just de-stress from everything that's going on in my life. But I can't...I don't work the kind of job where I can take breaks at all, and I can't afford to even if I did.
In the past I've managed to hold down a full-time job and do really well at it. But then it was a job over which I had a fairly large amount of control over what I did and when I had memory problems I could jot things down in a little notebook and cover my tracks that way. And it was a creative job, which gave me a lot of personal satisfaction. But it was one of those dead-end contract jobs.
Now I'm working at a library - which you think would be really stress-free right? And sometimes it is and sometimes it's a fabulous job. But because I've got a lot of really difficult things going on in my personal life right now, I am about as stressed out as I can get. I'm having problems sleeping. Most nights I feel like I either can't go to sleep or I don't want to. Once I do go to sleep, it's rare that I stay asleep for an hour at a time. I'm usually waking up every half hour to hour, and even though I go back to sleep, my sleep gets really disturbed. And I've started having nightmares every night again. When I'm over at my boyfriend's place, he says if he stirs even a little bit in his sleep I sit bolt upright and start screaming. I don't remember anything about it the next day, but it really scares him.
I think because of my stress and because of my lack of sleep (I swear if I sit in front of a movie these days, I'm nodding off within 15 minutes), I'm feeling tired and dizzy all the time. I'm having much worse memory problems than I sometimes do, and this is causing me a lot of embarrassment at work. I'm fairly new to the job...and one supervisor acts like I'm really stupid or I'm being difficult if I have to ask again about something I've been shown once or twice. It used to be you could just show me once and I'd get it...but these days I'm finding if I'm going to remember what to do I need to be shown a couple times, and then do the task myself 3-4 times before it clicks.
And I work in a downtown library. We seem to get all the difficult people and grouches. Which I find more than a little stressful. And some supervisors are happy to help out if you're unsure of yourself or don't know what you're doing, but others act like it's a huge inconvenience if you ask questions. But then if you don't do something precisely right you really get in trouble.
I'm finding it hard these days to want to even leave the house much less go to work. But I don't have the option of not working. I'm trying to build a career as I want to have a future with my boyfriend. And he has multiple sclerosis and can't work, so it really comes down to me.
Anyway, I'm just having a really bad day today. I have to go in to work tonight, but I'm just sitting here crying and typing. I really have no support either. I can't ask my boyfriend to support me emotionally as he has too many of his own problems. My family tries to, but they really don't understand at all. If I try to talk to them about general stress or work stress they'll say things like "well work isn't fun and games you know".
