cosmolinguist | I'm just complaining today (Reply)

Technology hates me.

My work computer is so idiosyncratic that my manager (who's been making fun of this for months) has recently started calling it a Fisher-Price computer.

My phone is so slow and freezes dozens of times a day, I have to remember to restart it every few days. Also now I'm having to use it for some work shit, it's so bad that today I've actually formally requested a work phone, something I should have had all along but didn't get when I started for Reasons.

My own laptop can't recognize video and audio devices at the same time. My mom complains if she doesn't get to see me on video every week, as if I'll look drastically different, and my attempts to get through eight Teams interviews in one day were deeply thwarted by this. I've done all my personal video chats lately on my phone, which I hate. And today when I tried to write a more substantial blog post on my laptop, Firefox immediately crashed three times in a row, losing my open tabs in the process.

Typing on my phone is fine, I've written a lot of blog posts on my phone, but somehow I feel like I can't think the same kinds of thoughts. It's easier to hold some ideas in my head if I can see more than the last few lines of text at a time, and it's certainly easier to include links and quotes and stuff.

So on my phone it's easier to write short things about how my day went. And...I dunno.

My ankle is really hurting the last few days, out of nowhere. I haven't done anything unusual and it's hurting in ways it hasn't previously, mostly a dull throb but with moments of really quite stabby pain.

It makes me feel like I've done something wrong somehow and I'm regressing -- however unlikely I intellectually know that to be. And then I spiral quite quickly into some pretty unhelpful thoughts that boil down to "I mostly don't have a very good relationship with my body."

Also I still have the new-glasses headache, it's been really bad today.

So I'm generally feeling pretty sorry for myself. And then annoyed at the self-pity. Or so I called it at first, but a friend said

I think self-pity is an unfairly demonized emotion. It's only a problem if there's a solution in front of you and you're ignoring it because you're wallowing in your feelings, or if you're using it as an excuse to ignore someone else's needs. Neither of which sounds to me like something you're doing. So I say let yourself feel what you're feeling.

Work continues to be pretty tough, in ways I don't even know how to begin to describe. Even before Christmas, I was like huh, I'm showing some of the symptoms of burnout without the feelings of burnout, I love my job! And I still love my job. But now the actual elements of burnout are happening and it's really hard when I already wasn't feeling overabundant in "resilience" or whatever we really mean by that.

It will get better. There are already signs that some things are starting to. But it's rough.

The fourth anniversary of the start of the pandemic, and today being Long Covid Awareness Day which has led many online friends to share moving and heartbreaking details about how different their lives are from what they were before, have solidified my ever-present loneliness and grief for what I lost: friends, partners (good riddance for the most part, but there's been little chance to replace them), an in-person social life, travel, the chance to embrace hobbies that might give me that better relationship with my body, like exercise, disability-specific events, most trans stuff, etc.etc....