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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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I'm having a crisis of employment.
My cycle has become:
The most dramatic instances of this are actual breakups; in 2019 I was seeing someone wonderful and really flourishing as a person, having fun athletic passionate sex with my best friend (her words), doing stuff together, feeling supported and loved. I was motivated to acquire and save money for normal human things like sailing outings, vacations, larger apartments, rings, and such. Then I said "I love you" slightly less than a year in. Three weeks later, she ended it. It turned out, she ended it to go back to her abusive ex-husband, who she also told all about us so he could track me down and mock me. I went from being in the running for a manager position at work to being shuffled off to a dead-end location. Then COVID happened. With absolutely nothing worthwhile tying me to my current life, I bailed and moved to a larger city.
The last "good" job I had was still incredibly stressful; host (floor manager track) at a trendy downtown restaurant. But a major stressor on me was that women were suddenly flirting with me. I was getting unsolicited compliments and weird lingering looks and other foreign experiences, which didn't make any fucking sense; women much less affluent and attractive than these ones were still reacting to me with fear/contempt in my personal life. I have no fucking idea how to react to being flirted with by a customer beyond exiting the situation. Then I had a particularly bad personal-life encounter with someone neuro-atypical; she spends an evening calling me pretty as we make sci-fi references together, I kiss her, she holds my hand on the walk back to her place, I get another kiss and wish her good night. The next day she's angry that I kissed her and complaining about how straight guys are always assuming she isn't asexual and she "already has a crush, anyways," which broke several things inside of me. Then the floor manager training me leaves on vacation and I'm reporting directly to the insanely demanding micromanaging owner, and of course suddenly my "excellent" performance takes a nosedive while remaining the same. I become an anxious wreck at work, get worse at eye contact than I already am, have a mini-panic-attack every time a woman smiles at me or any time the owner is around, then apparently someone with more management experience submitted an application and I was out on my ass.
I can handle a stressful and chaotic workplace OR I can handle soul-crushing loneliness and mistreatment. I can't handle both at once. It turns out that human beings seek relationships for emotional support and comfort, and without them, they become brittle and despondent. Who fucking knew? Sometimes I worry I'm absurdly fragile; then I hear other people complain about their own life-deranging stressors and it turns out I just have it really fucking rough; people have tried killing themselves over stuff that's a Tuesday for me.
It's the dead of winter and there are no hospitality jobs. Anything in my actual field (zoology) pays literal dogshit if there were even any openings, which there are not at any level I'm qualified for. I CANNOT do sales anymore; I have no tolerance for scummy practices and refuse to become a human spambot. Unemployment runs out in two months. I don't know where all these "cozy boring jerkoff office jobs anyone with a bachelor's degree can get" are supposed to be hiding.
I have absurdly low cost of living; my entire rent/utilities/food/basic fun money requirements are under $1500/month, so I really only "need" $2K monthly to consider myself acceptably getting by, which is supposedly easy in a major urban center. Yet here I am, having to countenance liquidating investments to cover vet bills. What job am I supposed to be looking for?
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