Descent Into Madness - Tumblr Posts
It was a bit of a difficult day. Scratch that, it's been a difficult few weeks. I have balanced on the knife's edge of exhaustion with any teetering leading me into the abyss of emotional meltdown. Bridges collapse under the cracking point of stress. After a full eight hours of sleep that did not feel like nearly enough (I love you, Inventors of Zzzquil!) and one crying jag at work (how very embarrassing but what wonderfully compassionate co-workers), my state of mental balance was somewhat less teetery. Somewhat. It was clear I dearly needed the weekend to hurry up and get here. I arrived for my shift early, always a plus. It means I have enough time to get something done before the barrage of customers. But the mail deliveries that are supposed to arrive at 10 or 9:30 at the earliest, had already begun arriving before me! This frustrated my manager and perplexed me. The next atypically early letter carrier was Kyle, arriving ten minutes before we'd even opened our doors. I pounced: "What's going on?" "Trying to beat parking. The Fruit Guy's here." Okay? Fruit Guy has been setting up his mobile kiosk in our expansive parking lot for years. I hadn't noticed a correlation between his popular stand and our delivery times. Mind you, things can sit in front of me for hours before I notice them. Besides, my pet theory was Friday. So I had a deluge of parcels already before opening, minutes before the doors swung to release the flow of customers stomping up to my indefensible desk. My wonderful manager had taken my paperwork with his own sizable workload, and there were few problems left in our official sticky note format all over my desk and back wall. I can handle that.
The problems began.
Canada Post informed us back in April that our recalled stamps credited us with about $16 000 but the credit memo they sent a month later was only $8 000. No further money or communication was sent so our head office wanted to know where the missing $8 000 went! Suspicions of theft were implied and security measures taken. Knowing that we are not thieves, and certainly not of that inconspicuous amount, I waited for my partner to arrive to cover me from customer fire while I entered the enemy camps of Canada Post. I called Canada Post five or six times. I could get no further than the automated messages. It seemed that no matter what button I pressed I always wound up on the same recorded voice cheerfully asking me to press one of three buttons that did nothing. "Just get me a person! Please!" But the unsympathetic and cordial voice just reminded me that I could press one for technical difficulties... As I cursed the recording both with inside voice and outside voice (my partner cast a few glances at me) the computer my partner used froze twice, lost connection with our vital barcode scanner, and refused to obey the touch screen three times. Never mind the customer questions that were either answered with "write your name here and the addressee here" or "yes, that's the actual price of a stamp". I hung up the phone after the third failure and prepared myself for the fourth. My manager had sauntered into our corner at some point to watch the daily chaos and deliver my finished paperwork. I fixed the scanner, my partner collected the money for a stamp, and the computer screen was unresponsive once again. "Not again!" my colleague yelped. I grabbed my much smaller manager by his little bony shoulders and shook him while loudly lamenting to the heavens. In front of customers. Yes, I'm still employed. Probably because he has watched my ambiguous mental footing over three weeks. Probably because this was out of character. Most definitely because he is the most forgiving manager with extensive patience and possible contention for some kind of sainthood. Eventually things began to work in our favor. Slightly. There was a definite atmosphere of careless desperation veiling our corner of retail post.
feminine dread
an alternate face to the renowned feminine rage
aka sad girl core or feminine torment
ROMANTICISM MEETS EXISTENTIALISM
key attributes: crying in your room, late nights spent thinking, staring vacantly at the ceiling; never feeling like enough - not pretty enough, not female enough, not smart enough, not human enough, not kind enough, not tough enough. hot-girl summer sad-girl always. loner. standing at the margins. no one sees me, gets me.
i feel nothing and the weight of everything pressing over me all at once.
i'm a void, a crater, something carved out and left incomplete, something that's lacking.
a lifelong quest for something to fill this void but nothing suffices, it all just pours right through me.
my sense of identity is fragmented such that i've never held my entire reflection - some shard's always amiss. the painful absence impales me and leaves me gasping for breath, crawling and choking. the tension of a ghost limb, but the limb is something deep within me that i can't name or palpate. instead, it rattles like a can with a single coin, the echoes mocking the vacancy. i worry the outside world can hear it as i brush shoulder with strangers.
will i ever come to know the feeling of normalcy or was I only ever mean to exist like this? to feel like an anomaly? a glitch?