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Wellness Wednesday for December 4, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Update on my economic and personal malaise. I wound up sticking with the beer line cleaning gig and got promoted to service tech faster than I found the motivation to job hunt (My self-imposed deadline there was Jan 1.). It wasn't great, but about another month in I improved at it enough that it became dead-easy and never difficult unless I slacked badly and backed myself into a deadline crunch to hit the bonus.

Apparently I interview better than I thought, as I was the "emotional choice" by the service manager who hired me (backed up by my immediate supervisor whose coattails are a good place to ride behind). This is good because I'm going to have to be the emotional choice a few more times until I earn myself a better resume. I'm not exactly brimming with excitement about the new position, but it's a rational step forward. If it goes well, I'll make enough money to make my life a bit more tolerable. At worst, I'll at least break even compared to the line cleaning gig (and I get a company truck, so I won't have to worry about commercial insurance and running my 15 year old car into the ground) and should make more money if by virtue of getting more hours if nothing else. Overtime is a useful antidote to crappy hourly pay. I care less about beer the older I get, but IMO learning how to fix anything to do with a draft system and demonstrating competence at it would be useful for the purposes of either moving into a gig with a distributor or making a career change into some other variety of repair work (I’m told that the usual career trajectory with this company is that people put in a year or so and then bail for a distributor with better pay/benefits.). I'm currently training for the new position at the company HQ for a month and my trainer is good. I like him, and he strikes me as doing a commendable job of being demanding enough that I actually learn quickly while not being an abrasive dick about it.

The not-so great news is that my suspicions about it not being a great pay boost appear likely to be correct. I was pulled aside by an assistant manager in my market and told not to take the job because the sales quota to actually earn commission is impossible to hit in my state's relatively poor, low-density market, and I likely wouldn’t be able to beat a retreat back into line cleaning without relocating unless the guy replacing me doesn’t pan out.). I don't know how it's all going to work because the company is presently restructuring the service department's role and pay structure. My first service meeting was...something, almost unnerving, dominated by 45 minutes of heated back and forth between a disgruntled tech and the new big boss/designated scapegoat about recent changes in pricing, low service call volume, and being diverted into non-billable (aka. line cleaning) work are going to fuck himself and several other technicians out of hitting commission right before Christmas (The consensus seems to be that said tech was badly lacking in tact, but wasn’t wrong.). I didn’t know that one could speak to a superior like that and remain employed outside of the restaurant industry or construction site (Then again, this is still food and beverage.).

I spoke with my trainer about this and got the following: The restructure is probably going to lead to his exiting the company, as it appears that it will badly limit his upward mobility within it (The management role he was being groomed for will no longer exist, and he’ll be stuck competing for other management roles that have far longer tenures with the company and thus deeper personal relationships with upper management.). The technicians’ complaints about changes in pricing and so on are valid. My predecessor (who was with the company for almost a decade) often missed the quota to make commission and he wishes he could’ve swapped markets with my predecessor to find out how much of that was him being too lazy/hungover to get out of bed on time versus the market itself being challenging.

Whatever happens, I figure that this is worth doing because even if it isn’t what I want to be it’s unlikely that I’ll wind up making less, and I need to push myself and become vastly more familiar with stepping outside of my comfort zone because being spending far too much time being overly comfortable, complacent, and okay with a mediocre but overpaid and easy job is how I got myself into the predicament of having mostly wasted the last ten years of my life in the first place.

How’s that for a segue into my personal life? It’s somewhere between “not great, but manageable” and “a falling apart disaster” depending on how neurotic I’m feeling on a given day (In therapy speak this means “I am struggling with emotional regulation and poor coping mechanisms that aggravate it.” or “I am presently realizing that I am not sufficiently functional to make the sort of life that I would like for myself. It only worked with the cushy delivery gig and easy financial situation.”). There was another roommate (I wasn’t looking, but it fell into my lap and I was sufficiently stupid/intoxicated at the time to agree without any vetting. 11PM on Friday night at the bar isn’t the best place to go roommate shopping, who would’ve guessed?). The good news is that I realized that she was insane (The worst alcoholic I’ve ever lived with and the most blindingly obvious case of Borderline Personality Disorder or something along those lines I’ve seen in almost a decade, one of three that I’ve met in my adult life that gave me the vibe of “RUN, NOW!”.), told her that she had to go, and after a few weeks of temper-tantrums and pleading left in peace.

The bad news is that between that, the job transition, and a rough Thanksgiving visit with my father I am a shaken-up mess in dire need of a hug/some serious reassurance. This is far from the first bad visit with my father but it just gets worse every time. He’s in his mid/late 50s and it’s now plainly apparent that if he makes it to retirement he’s going to drink himself to death within a few years or doing so, and that’s the optimistic timeline in which my stepmother’s codependence exceeds her self-respect (This is likely to remain the case.) such that she doesn’t leave him (If that happens, my sister will regret being his favorite child. I was our mother’s and she was/is awful, but is mostly the VA’s problem now.). There’s nothing I can do to stop it. The cool and adventurous if neglectful and a stereotypical bad divorcee (exceeded by my mother’s “monstrous divorcee” conduct such that I feared getting the Medea treatment long before I’d ever heard of the play) father that I grew up with is mostly gone, replaced with a rapidly deteriorating drunk whose only desires are to enrich Miller-Coors’ shareholders while chain-smoking and blasting Fox News in his garage or to go to the one bar in the godawful desert town he lives in where he is only tolerated because he throws tons of money at the bartenders. At least I didn’t have to defend him in a bar fight this time (Like fishing stories, that one grows more exaggerated with time; the latest version I’ve been told is that I brandished a barstool in his defense. I did nothing of the sort, just very loudly made it clear that we’re leaving and the fight was over, and if it had come to that I’d have gone for something less unwieldy as a weapon than a barstool.). Oh, and he’s hooked on crypto speculation now (and has made more on Dogecoin since the election than my entire debt burden. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a touch jealous.). Yay.

I’m going to have a bunch of free time sitting in a hotel room during the workweeks for the rest of this month, feel desperately compelled to vent (That’s the polite term for emotionally vomiting on people/exploiting anyone willing to lend an ear as an unpaid therapist.), and need to stay away from the bars around here so it’s likely that /r/raisedbyborderlines is going to get the story about my mother burning down our house for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and that the fine people are going to get my take on Hillbilly Elegy and Borderer honor culture as someone whose background was “Hillbilly Elegy, but in rural north Alabama and with more domestic violence and dead pets”.

Last thing: I feel a lot better having finished typing this out than I did as I was starting and doing it, like the storm has passed. I just feel tired now and am phoning this paragraph in. I am frustrated by the fact that I am not “over it”. This stuff comes and goes and sometimes I go long periods of being okay before getting smacked in the face with it all over again. I think it happens less as time passes or when my life is more in order. I’m going to make it.

Wow. I read the whole thing man. I feel for you, and tbh reading this made me feel less alone so thank you.

Feel free to message me if you ever want to talk.