💾 Archived View for germination.systems › ~vidak › old-blog › end-of-september-checkin.gemini captured on 2022-04-29 at 13:48:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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generator: pandoc
title: End of September Checkin
viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'
---
2018-09-23T13:45:46+10:00
Hello everyone. Blair here.
I have worked two weeks of this job, and I am enjoying it greatly. If
you didn't know already, I have been working as an apprentice auto
mechanic at a workshop here in Sydney. It is a very big workshop, with
around 30 to 40 mechanics. I am in the Peugeot/Citroen team, and I am
having a really good time. I have made many friends among the other
apprentices, and we all support each other and help raise each other up.
I still have anxiety working in this job as always, but I am dealing
with it a lot better now that I have some new medication. I am taking
Abilify and Lexapro now, where before I was taking Latuda instead of the
Ability, before.
I was feeling very suicidal at the beginning of August because my PhD
was going nowhere, and I had not been able to find a job. I had found a
job in May as an auto mechanic, but the leading hand at that workshop
was a real bully and a brute, and was tormenting me with mind games,
alleging that I was not really interested in the job, and that if that
was the case "I was not lying to him (the leading hand), I was lying to
myself".
Because I feel so anxious in the job sometimes, I tend to make very
silly errors, and say very unintelligent things. It makes me look like I
know less than I do. When I feel more comfortable, I do a much better
job. In any case, the anxiety I feel on the job is only about 10% of the
anxiety I was feeling before. I feel much, much better now.
The reason I feel better, and that I am on different medication now, is
because my family flew me back to my home town of Perth to get
hospitalised for my high level of suicidality. There, I did therapy and
changed my meds. I had a much better psychiatrist looking after me, and
she actually seemed to care a great deal more than all the other
psychiatrists I had seen before.
It turns out that the two medications I had been on before, Invega, and
Latuda, had been sedating me for the past 5 years. They had crippled my
energy levels and left me sleeping somewhere between 18 to 20 hours a
day. How I had gotten through my PhD as far as I did is beyond me.
Anyway, I just wanted to write a short diary/journal entry to let you
all know that I am doing very well and am enjoying my job to a very high
intensity :-)
Blair.
mastodon: [\@dirtycommo]{.citation
cites="dirtycommo"}[\@anticapitalist.party]{.citation
cites="anticapitalist.party"} email: vidak\@riseup.net