November 20th, 2023

Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

I can’t believe it’s been nearly a month since my last personal post. Time has just been flying by between school and work and trying to maintain my mental health. Today started week four of my current class (University 103: Student Success). It is 10:30 at night currently, and I just finished turning in two assignments I had that were overdue and I also got caught up with my class participation replies.

At the beginning of the third week of class/end of the second week, I was already placed on academic warning because I missed some assignments while I had a week off of work to go to my brother’s house with my mom to help take care of him since he had surgery on the 8th.

I left work on the November 8th and returned on the 16th. My company currently doesn’t offer vacation, sick, or personal time off that is paid since we don’t have PTO in place, so my paycheck this Friday is only going to be for four days. I’ll be lucky to get $450 in this paycheck. It was a much-needed break away from work though. I came back feeling refreshed.

I’m just going to have to try to figure out how to survive the next two weeks on like $400 while still being able to pay some of my bills since I won’t be able to afford to pay everything.

Back to the academic warning… I got stuck on an assignment and overthought about it until I felt like I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be doing anymore and I froze up on my assignment. I ended up getting some THC Capsules and an extra strength bottle of tincture drops from the dispensary while I was at my brother’s and got faded instead of going back to my schoolwork.

While trying to work on schoolwork while I was at my brother’s house, I also got backed up on my class participation, and that added in with the assignments I didn’t get done left me with an “F” in my first class while only in the second to third week. I have brought that “F” up to a “C” and from there I am going to try working on bringing that back up to an “A.”

I have to maintain at least a “C” average, at a minimum, in order to stay enrolled as a student and have my financial aid available. Working on my time management assignment tonight showed me that I am still horrible with time management. I have to try to figure out how to balance my work, school, home life, and social life.

When I was creating a weekly schedule for the assignment, I didn’t leave myself much time for socialization. Monday through Friday I already know that I need to get up at 7 am to start waking up and getting ready for work. We leave the house around 8:10 am, and I start work at 9 am. Then I get out of work at 5 pm and get home between 5:35 and 6:15 pm.

By the time I get home from work, it’s time to eat dinner (if I even eat dinner that day) and between 6 pm and 6:45 pm, I finally sit down and go on my laptop to work on schoolwork and study. So with my Monday through Friday schedule, I am left with just Saturday and Sunday to socialize and do things that I enjoy, such as blogging and browsing social media.

I should really take my nighttime meds right now, but I haven’t exactly had the chance to decompress after work since when I got home I met up with my bestie and helped her out real quick, then I ate dinner and went right up to my room to start my classwork. I’m now finally able to unwind and do something I like to do before I go to bed which would be writing this blog post.

Nights and weekends have been the most challenging time frames for my mental health. It has officially been over a month since I blocked my ex and last talked to him. Saturday night, I started to feel really depressed and lonely despite being baked out of my mind. I used to hang out with my ex almost every Saturday so I have been trying to find things to do to occupy my time on Saturdays so that I don’t stay laying in bed feeling depressed all damn day.

I had a moment of weakness Saturday night and unblocked my ex. I called him and left him a voicemail telling him that I missed him. But luckily, Sunday morning I ended up re-blocking him before he had the opportunity to unlock me and hit me up. He has me blocked too. I miss the good parts of my ex and just hanging out watching movies and shows together.

I just didn’t like the way he talked to me. It was completely disrespectful. I don’t have much self-esteem but I had enough to know that I deserved to be talked to with respect. I allowed my ex to talk down to me and belittle me for almost 13 years. I know it is going to take time to undo the damage that was done.

It is now after midnight and I finally took my night-night meds a little bit ago. I didn’t even smoke my medical marijuana this evening after work because I wanted to be able to focus on my studies without getting distracted.

My mental health isn’t exactly where I would like it to be. I’m still more depressed than anything else. I do have a lot going on in my life, though. But I feel like I have been depressed for a few months now with a brief one to two day manic episode thrown in here and there to spice things up and give me a reprieve from the bipolar depression.

I feel like I don’t know what I am on this earth for anymore. What’s my purpose? Why have I undergone so much trauma in my life just to still be wrapped up in some of that trauma all these years later? Even though I have gone back to college, I still cannot see a future for myself. Everything ahead of me is in pitch blackness and I can’t see in the darkness to figure out how to navigate a future for myself.

Even my dad reached out to me to see if I was okay because he said my Facebook posts are more on the depressive side. And about a month or two ago my Aunt Kelly reached out to my mom to find out how I was holding up for the same reasons as my dad. I guess I am not hiding my depression as well as I thought I was.

I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep the next few months or years away and pray that I wake up to something better than this life that I am in right now. My mom has a lot of medical complications going on right now and it’s only a matter of time before I need to figure out other ways to get to and from work.

I can’t afford to Uber to and from work every day. If I were to take the bus, I’d have to get up earlier than I already do, and I am not trying to do that ever since I had to get up at 3:25 in the morning for work every day when I worked as a store manager at Turkey Hill. I need all the sleep I can get with all the medication that I am on.

My ex used to be an alternative transportation when my mom either couldn’t take me to work or pick me up for whatever reason. But now I don’t have him to fall back on. I’m not just worried about the ride situation, but I am also extremely worried about my mom’s health. I feel like every time my mom goes to her specialists, they find something new that is wrong with her.

I am confused about something. Back in April, my sister talked to me and said that she was planning on moving out with her girlfriend in a year. She told me that she would most likely be bringing our mom with her. That had left me and my one brother without a place to go.

So now, I have a co-worker who wants to get an apartment with me and he’s looking to move as soon as possible. My sister told me that if I move out, I am not allowed to come back. And this co-worker isn’t used to my ups and downs so I don’t know how moving in with him would go.

Now, I am scared to even give it a shot because if I move out of my ‘mom’s house and in with him, and it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, I am left with nowhere to go. Just like if my sister moves out and takes our mom with I am still left with nowhere to go.

I’m stuck with so much uncertainty that has the potential to greatly affect my life in a negative way. The universe has thrown so much on my plate and I am trying not to let everything I am dealing with break me down completely.

Some of the obstacles that have been thrown my way aren’t even things I need to currently worry about in the present moment but I can’t help but jump ahead to the future so that I can try to prepare myself. But how do you prepare yourself for the unknown?

I have exactly zero dollars in my savings account. I was finally starting to build up my savings while I was making good money as a store manager. But as soon as I left that job, I quickly depleted that savings. I didn’t realize how much of a pay cut I was actually taking until I went back to salary office work and had to go back to bi-weekly paychecks without overtime.

The one thing I liked about being salary at Turkey Hill was that I still got paid the same amount even if I didn’t make my 48 hours per week quota. I am once again salary at my current job, but with this company, they take away time that you missed even though you are supposed to be salary and get paid the same amount every pay.

I feel like I am still trying to maintain the same lifestyle I had when I was making good money even though I am making about $800+ less a month now. I could’ve been able to live very comfortably if I would’ve stayed as a store manager but I mentally couldn’t handle working 70-80 hours a week since I was short-staffed all the damn time. Being a store manager with staff that didn’t listen ate at my mental health until I finally had a breakdown. At that point, I knew I had to look for work elsewhere.

I can’t stay at a job if it negatively affects my mental health to the point of nearly needing to go inpatient and stay at a Behavioral Health Unit. The first time I worked for my current employer back in 2021, by the end of my run with the company I was severely depressed and would even end up having panic attacks before work because I never knew what kind of mood my boss was going to be in. I would get yelled at all the time. I just started to shut down.

That is why I started looking for other jobs until I came across the store manager position; which was a big life lesson that I learned from. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. However, after dealing with things as a store manager, I felt like I was more equipped to handle things differently since I ultimately ended up going back to the job I left on September 16, 2022.

I am currently not thrilled with some of the things that went down/are still going down at my current job, but I am able to tolerate my 8-hour shift without going into panic mode and having anxiety that is through the roof. My job isn’t as mentally and physically demanding and exhausting as being a store manager was. I feel like I needed that one year break away from this company in order to be able to come back and handle situations and my bosses’ yelling much better.

Back in 2021-2022 when I first started my job at UCCH, I would get so overwhelmed, anxious, and nervous all the time. My mental health was so bad that I would even have breakdowns at work and just start crying in my little cubicle with the door closed. Back then, it would only take a few moments before I realized I had to get up and get ready to go to work and then the anxiety would start setting in just moments after waking up from a nice slumber.

I was withdrawn, anti-social, and paranoid that I was always doing something wrong. I couldn’t tolerate my boss yelling at me without the waterworks starting. Even though I should have just accepted that my boss was a yeller when she was angry and that is just how she was, I would let it get to me and make me feel like I was about to shut down or burst into flames with how bad my anxiety was.

But after having to deal with a district manager who always seemed to be displeased with me, having to work 17 days in a row and they were 12+ hour shifts, dealing with staff that would only do the bare minimum, dealing with shit head customers that were jerks, and having to deal with all the upper management, I feel like I can handle certain stressful situations better now because being a store manager really put my mentality to the test.

These days, working at UCCH, I now try to not take it personally when my boss is mad or yelling at me. Sure, I’ll get annoyed or pissed off but after that I pretty much let her anger and words roll right off my shoulders and try not to pay too much attention to it. At the end of the day, there is still a lot that I am learning to do at UCCH. A lot has changed since I worked there back in 2021 and 2022.

Even though I was demoted from HR to Office manager, I am completing some HR tasks for the girl they replaced me with. The woman who took over my HR position is the Program Director’s sister or other relative. I feel like it was planned to have the director’s sister take over the HR role from the day the girl got hired. I mean who gets promoted after being with a company for just two weeks? Usually, employers will try to feel the person for about a month and see how they have been doing. But nope.

Just like the Program Director got her husband hired at UCCH as a supervisor and, like with what they did to me, they gave the director’s husband someone else’s position and then demoted the girl who was originally the supervisor of the one residential group home. I feel like they are trying to have a fucking family reunion at the office.

Most of the staff at UCCH seem to be from Nigeria and all go to the same church and know each other very well. I feel like the odd man out. Out of over a total of 50 employees or more, there are literally only two white people who work for the company and maybe a handful of Hispanic people. It’s an African-American owned and run company. Then I recently found out that yet another new hire in office management is related to the one program specialist and could also potentially be related to the Program Director too.

Shouldn’t having the Program Director’s family come be management within the company be considered a conflict of interest? I really feel the favoritism within this company. Even though I am not as stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed as I was the last time I worked at UCCH, I feel like employees don’t get feedback about what they are doing right and it’s all focused on what they are doing wrong. That can make a person feel like no matter what they try to do it’s just not good enough.

When I get negative feedback or get in trouble for whatever reason that causes me to feel some type of way, I’ll just take a five-minute break, go smoke a cigarette, and call either my mom or best friend to vent but then afterward I try to just let it go in one ear and out the other and pay no mind to it and go back inside and get back to work. I’ll try to laugh it off, say fuck it, and move on.

I just wish I could figure out how to let mean and negative comments and remarks that people say to me, about me just roll off my shoulders like I learned how to do with my boss when she is displeased with me and/or yelling at me. But it appears that I can’t get over those negative comments as easily. It did take working under extreme pressure under shitty circumstances to be able to just accept that my boss is a yeller and that is just her personality before I was able to get to where I am now with my boss.

People call me beautiful all the time, but I have a hard time believing that after being called names and being bullied since elementary school. I’m holding on to almost 30 year’s worth of negative remarks about how I look, act, and the way I talk or do certain things. I figure since I’ve been told I’m ugly by so many different people, that it must be true.

I feel like some people only call be beautiful or pretty because they are trying to be nice and it’s as simple as that. I don’t know how to believe the people who say nice things about me. I need to learn how to find my own self-worth without having how I feel about myself come from others’ opinions of me. When will I get to the age where I no longer care what people think about me?

I need to find some kind of self-care/self-love workshop that can help me work on my self-esteem. I wonder if there is anything like that out there that would be available to me that doesn’t cost you a limb, everything in your checking account, and sacrificing your first-born child in order to attend.

I think my racing mind fought off my night meds. I took them shortly before midnight and it is now almost 3 am. I still feel pretty much awake too. To my surprise, I’ve actually had enough energy to get me through the day at work, through my homework, and now beyond. But I wish the energy would’ve worn off around midnight so that I could have gone to bed and been able to fall asleep.

Part of me just wants to stay up all night and deal with the consequences tomorrow at work when I start to crash mid-day. There are only four hours left until my alarm is set to go off. I really should try to at least get a good cat nap in before I have to wake up and start getting ready for work. Some sleep is better than none at all.

Wednesday, I get out of work at 1 pm. My boss is giving the office staff a half day since Thanksgiving is this Thursday. I just don’t know if I have to take the loss of four hours out of my check or if we will get paid for that half day. Either way, I am glad that I only have to work 2.5 days before getting the day off for Thanksgiving, then I go back to work for one day on Friday and have off the weekend again.

In a way, I am glad that work and school take up a good majority of my time. If I am focusing on those two things, it leaves less time for me to think about my ex. But I can’t rely on just those two things to take my mind off of all my life stressors. I should really start to utilize the My Bipolar Mind Facebook Mental Health Support Group to be able to vent about the shit that is bothering me so that I could get some feedback and advice from other members.

Even though my ex and I weren’t technically an item anymore, we still hung out and said I love you to each other. We still kissed each other. It was almost like dating without the label but we were definitely more than just friends. I knew that we couldn’t keep things up at the pace we were going. My family and friends hated him, and his family and friends hated me. There was so much damage done between the two of us that we both kinda knew that we could never be in a full-blown relationship ever again.

I should have known that things were going south when we went from spending an entire Saturday together, to spending half a day together, to only spending two to three hours together at a shot. We went from seeing each other two to three times a week to once a week. That only totals four days out of an entire month. But I looked forward to spending time with him even though he would talk to me disrespectfully.

Every Saturday, I would get up between 11 am and noon, and then within an hour of waking up, my ex would already be at my house to pick me up. I’d wake up, smoke a cigarette, feed Jasper, and then get dressed and brush my hair. By the time I had all that done, my ex usually wasn’t too far from my house.

Since my ex and I broke up in June 2021, I’ve done everything I could to keep him in my life in one way or another. He knew me so well and knew all of the things I tried to hide from the rest of the world. He could go to a store and pick out things that I liked without even having to ask me what I wanted. I tolerated the verbal abuse for way too long all because I wanted to keep my ex in my life.

I know it wasn’t healthy for me to put up with so much disrespect and belittling. He constantly made me feel horrible about myself. Even though I still have to deal with my mental health disorders, mood swings, and bipolar episodes, I am still so much more mentally stable living with my family than I was living with my ex. I think we would trigger each other. Like my dad always said, two sickies don’t make a wellie.

I always held on to hope that my ex and I would be able to be a normal couple again one day. That hope is no longer there. After my last conversation with my ex (the day I blocked him), I started to realize that everything was one-sided. I loved him, and he just used me up like some toy and then he got bored with me and he threw me in the garbage without a second guess. He wasn’t in love with me anymore like I was still in love with him.

I don’t think my ex even really understood what loving another person was really about. He did say several times that he didn’t understand what love was. I just hope he’s happy now. He finally pushed me to my breaking point and I got fed up of him talking negatively about how I looked, calling me names, and how he would always talk about wanting to fuck other women that looked better than me. My ex always told me that I would never stay away from him so it was okay for him to talk to me however he wanted. He got his wish and I finally walked away after 13 very long years.

I never thought that I would actually ever get up the courage to block him. And now it’s already been a month since I blocked him and last talked to him. I am trying to stay strong but it gets hard sometimes. I just want to hear his voice. I’m lonely. I’m heartbroken. But I just have to try to remind myself of the hell I went through and continue to tell myself that I deserve better.

I’m not good with letting go and moving on. I have abandonment issues that make me feel like I have to cling to a person or else the person will disappear. And that is what I have been doing with my ex, clinging on to him with all I have. Now that I have let him go, I have to stop looking in the rearview mirror and try to take the defeat and move on with my life. That’s all I can really do anymore.

I feel like I have wasted so much time and effort these past 13 years. That is a good chunk of my life that I wasted so much time on. Unfortunately, you cannot control other people’s actions and words so I have to take the hit and keep going. I am just trying to survive day to day. At this point, I am no longer living life. I am just trying to survive life until my time is up.

I am now not the only one awake in my household. I can hear my sister and her girlfriend getting ready for work. This means that my alarm is going to go off within the next two hours. I probably could have used a full night’s rest but it is too late for that now. I have to wait over 15 hours before I can get another shot at this thing people call sleep.

I really don’t feel like going to work today (I supposed I should say “today” instead of “tomorrow” since it’s well after midnight.). But I have to. Last week I only worked two days since I was on vacation until I came back last Thursday. I’d for sure get written up if I called out today. I feel like I need a mental health day every other day.

Since I had a good amount of energy yesterday, I’ll probably be fighting to keep my eyes open today. It’s about 4:45 am. If I were to lay down at 5 am for two hours, I probably actually wouldn’t be able to fall asleep until like five minutes before my alarm is scheduled to go off. My problem is that I can’t get my mind to stop racing and shut down to allow me to fall asleep. Insomnia sucks.

This post was originally supposed to be a short read because I had planned on going to bed around midnight, but that never happened so this post grew longer and longer with each passing hour. I’m starting to feel the lack of sleep cloud my mind. I am starting to feel a little zombie-ish. I took a handful of pills (all my prescribed nighttime medications) and that still didn’t put me to sleep.

I think I am going to go lie down for the next two hours until my alarm goes off. I’ll aim for a nap, but if that doesn’t happen at least I can give my body a break since I have been sitting at my laptop since like 6:30 pm. And the chair I am using at my desk hurts my ass so much. I have three pillows on top of my chair to try to make it more comfortable.

I hope everyone has a good day/night! Wish me luck with getting through my work shift that I’ll be starting in just four hours.

Much Love,

Samantha ❤