It didn’t really occur to me until after I became silently relient on it that I just lived out of OneDrive during the pandemic.
I stopped scanning my art religiously in 2016, which aligns with a date close to when I was promoted to QA Lead, so I think the pressure just got to me.
I was the only afab QA Lead currently employed at the time, and I had come out as non-binary on the internet as well. Everything was uncomfortable. I was fresh off quitting FF7 after a bad altercation with a person I was training to be my replacement who tried to tell me FF7 House was my fault. I was freshly cracked open, and I tried to fill the discomfort with new things I hope would make me happy, but my baseline had been shifted and I was deeply disturbed.
I stopped letting myself slow down to acknowledge the work I did from year to year. I used to be obsessed and intensely proud and protective of my websites until I got my current job, but my current job is so computer and internet that it’s very difficult to bribe myself into doing anything related to websites during my off hours.
But that is changing because of the company that owns my company, and I’ve decided not to use myself up so much that there’s nothing left over when I clock out.
I want to get back to keeping my own brand, sort through my archives and rebuild the systems I’ve been putting to one side in the name of paying the mortgage. I need to live in the place I pay for. It is my home. I want to make it comfortable.
OneDrive felt like comfort, and it had me taking so many pictures all of the time, but there was no incentive to organize or sort anything my camera had produced. I posted everything directly to twitter, where it scrolled out of memory so quickly, even my own memory, that it seemed to matter much less.
I feel like I wasted a lot of time, but that’s not the end of the world.
I’m trying to go back to college just to give myself something different, another destination to obligate myself towards, instead of my work from home rig. I do prefer to work from home, but I find that I do miss the comeraderie of seeing people in my office, but I want to put school ahead of my job.
When my company was privately owned, I considered myself as having a career. Now that [company redacted] owns us, I might as well work at Wal-Mart, and I need to treat it like the job that it is. It’s not in a position to give back. This machine doesn’t love me enough.
But I can be good to myself and my spouse and my friends. I can rebuild my personal community back up around things I can do. I am still capable of bringing good to the world despite the world going all out trying to scare me.
I also recently found strength in the thought that I can’t be destroyed in a way that matters, despite being so scared all the time, and bombarded with bad news. If I can’t be destroyed as easily as I’ve been worried about, then there’s less reason to be afraid in general. Even a slight reduction in general “panicked because people are bad to each other and that might include me one day” is a reduction in cortisol eroding my willpower, even if it’s less heroic.
Trying to be a hero has put me in much more real danger just due to the unfair expectations I set on myself and the physical side effects of always being in a panic.
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