Salon post: December 14

[jenett]

Yay, it's Friday. It's my last day of work for a bit (I'm taking next week off for the solstice, then have a three day work week, then another three day work week. Whee!)

Topic of the week
What do you do when things are up in the air and unsettled? What helps? What doesn't help? (And what do you find yourself doing anyway, and going "Oh, self....")

As always, any other topic welcome.

What I've been up to
I am not in fact moving apartments in my building. I am looking at other options. (This saga, such a saga.) Meanwhile, my life is in boxes, and the lack of information and lack of knowing what my life is going to look like in a month or two are getting to me. This is suboptimal.


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Comments

[senmut]

Currently up in air about job. Current one ends Feb 8. Have phone interview for the one job outside of my field I applied to. Have already interviewed with the company that bought mine.

Coping? Not stressing until the deadline (21st this month) for offers comes around. Setting deadlines on how many applications per week will suffice. Plotting how to spend the severance money to best keep afloat should no job happen immediately...

And hoping.

[jenett]

That's such a complicated place, yeah.

I found setting guidelines on how many apps, and then batching them (since for me, I was applying for jobs in different kinds of libraries) helps a lot when I've done big job hunt pushes.

[senmut]

That makes a lot of sense!

[finch]

Oh, good luck with that!

[senmut]

Thank you!

[cjsmith]

Ouch. Best of luck!

[senmut]

Thank you!

[finch]

Depending on how much I feel like I can affect it, I'll either completely ignore it la-la-la or plan excessively. Also if I have to ignore it I usually end up planning excessively in another area of my life. (See also: my Anxiety Prepping Scale, where I know I need to make adjustments based on how many doomsday prepper videos YouTube is recommending me, because I know that's based on my recent video consumption.)

[cjsmith]

I think I mainly cope by picturing possible futures. Like sharpest_asp above (I don't know how to tag, apologies) I am in Job Uncertainty and in fact Which Field Will I Be In uncertainty. I picture widely disparate possible positive outcomes, from the plausible to the wildly improbable. Perhaps I could write code that runs on satellites! Five years from now might I be helping to make self driving cars safe at night? I could do veterinary relief work on weekends! What if I worked for the fMRI people and they made a hat that turned us telepathic? Imagine what it would feel like to be paying off my student loans! ...that kind of thing.

[jenett]

Username tags here in the FAQ (Though they just make a nice link to that user, they don't ping people like an @ on some sites.)

I do a lot of that rehearsing too - I do a lot of talking to myself while driving when I'm in in-between mode. And playing "What if, what would my life look like?"

A lot of my magical work is also very practical: I am very much a "What do I need to make this work" sort of person, so for example, in the current apartment hunt, it's been "place I can be healthy and comfortable that fits my budget and location needs, and has space for me, my cat, and my coven" rather than being really specific about details.

[cjsmith]

Thanks for the FAQ!

My visualizing is not necessarily meant to draw me closer to an outcome (or draw an outcome closer to me) as much as to make me comfortable that there are indeed many possible good outcomes. The triage stage of stress-reduction, if you will. :) Practicality such as you describe is very appealing to me, too!

[senmut]

BEST of luck to you!

[cjsmith]

Thank you!

[jazzyjj]

I think my iPhone has definitely helped me cope with the travel anxiety. I still haven't had time to sit down with someone or myself and learn how to use talking GPS or anything like that. But I am now able to call and text people more when I'm out and about, and that inandof itself is a step in the right direction. Pun totally intended. I just took my first Uber round trip this morning with the help of a fully-sighted tutor, and had a good experience with both drivers. In addition, the Uber app plays very nicely with Apple's on-board screen reader. I'm still not quite there with respect to typing on my iPhone, but my tutor helped me out with that part of it.





Regarding employment, everybody wants me to stick with voc/rehab but I don't. I haven't heard from them in awhile once again, and I think it's pretty obvious that the state agency is not in good shape at all. Yet I keep hearing time and time again that we the job seekers absolutely have no alternative. As a matter of fact I was just talking about this with my neighbor from across the hall. The one who is starting up a cooking business. Yet people want him to pursue voc/rehab as well. It's very disconcerting. Illinois ranks rather low on the totem pole when it comes to state services for those of us who have disabilities, but people just aren't sure what in the world to do about it.

[batrachian]

Wrangling, as seems to be traditional, with a large interrelated soup of sexuality, gender identity, and spiritual foo.

My typical approach was and remains to either try to ignore it entirely (usually by distraction with video games) or obsessing over trying to organize things into a coherent Dreamwidth post.

The absence of said post should be evidence enough on how successful those efforts usually are.

[cjsmith]

Generalized random noises of support from over here. I too am wrangling with a big chunk of that. Virtual internet hug offered.

[batrachian]

Hugs appreciated. It's not anything terribly new (i've been trying to unpack this soup for, um, well, at least since i met jenett back in 2013). Though that is perhaps part of the stew, in that i feel that i "should" have made more progress than i have.

I try to remind myself about journeys, destinations, and such. It's hard some days. And I don't have a definitive end goal in mind, either.

[cjsmith]

*nodnod* I don't have a definitive end goal in mind either, except perhaps peace and acceptance. (If it makes you feel better, I've been trying to unpack since I was nine. I'm 51.) I suspect one of the finest things we can do is help and support each other along the way.

[batrachian]

That does help a great deal, yes.

[cjsmith]

Oh good! (I was hoping it didn't come across as Give Up Now There's No Hope It Just Plain Takes Forever.) ...may I friend/follow? :)

[batrachian]

By all means! :)

[hrafn]

I try to identify what parts of the unsettled thing I -do- have control over, and take steps there. But if it has to do with material sorts of life changes (moving, jobs), that's rarely enough to help me cope with the anxiety about things being uncertain. There's just too much time involved before things settle down, and the things I -can- control just don't end up needing all that time.

I do a lot of divination/meditation to get reassurances that things are going in the right direction, and/or to get advice about what I can do to make the process better. Perhaps I do too much of that, but it helps, a little, even if it's just getting the 200th response that I'm doing the right things and should just stop worrying.

Distracting myself with a lengthy work of fiction helps most, because I can't spin in anxious circles while I'm reading. If not reading, I try to refocus my thoughts onto things that are presently good and comforting, with mixed success.

[silveradept]

Uncertainty eats at my brain in large quantities, and it seems that my two main coping mechanisms are to plan out (and sometimes do what I can for) the likely scenarios until the uncertainty resolves or to say "forkit, too many variables" and wait for the uncertainty to resolve some before attempting option one.

If I've gamed it out as best I can, and there's nothing I can do, I tend to try and distract myself with things like books and entertainment until there's something to do.

I do not have much ability to examine the thoughts as they come and then let them go as thoughts without investing energy in them.

[jjhunter]

I try to put what's unsettled or unsettling into words - poetry is usually the most useful, precise form for doing so, but any kind of articulation helps the anxiety-inducing ambiguity settle into known contours, or at least my mind more in the frame of 'explore' than 'aaargh / panic!'.

More generally, I create (if I can).

I run or do other cardio-intensive movement if I can. Moving my body combs my thoughts into something like coherency, and puts all that extra jangling energy into a channel of use and exhaust, which in turn helps me ply feeling data into strings of sense and judge their heft for valence, their tensile strength for truth.

I consume things: books, fic, food, comfort stuff. This is helpful in moderation, unhelpful in excess.

I try to get other things done; somethings getting momentum on something else makes it easier to turn back to the hard or unsettling stuff and make progress.

I try to be kind to myself. I try to remember it's okay to ask for help.

Extra attention to basic health & self-care; seeking out good smells, strong colors, and powerful tastes.

I'm still experimenting, honestly. It helps me stay 'raw awake to choose'.