today was so chaotic
\nand yes that means I drove almost 6 hours today
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-31T03:01:13-05:00", "url": "https://needing.space/2025/12/31/chaos/", "tags": ["mental health","elias (husband)","shopping","work","physical health","alter: octavia","Longform"] }, { "id": "http://lovely.micro.blog/2025/12/22/another-job-offer-mental-health/", "title": "another job offer (mental health tech)", "content_html": "so, I got another job offer. and the offer letter is signed & accepted which is nice. they do have mandatory drug testing which is kinda like duh for this type of position
\nit is a mental health technician at a local(ish) inpatient hospital. it is locked down, but it is part of a bigger hospital system/not a standalone. I will be working PRN/scheduling myself 3 days a week, 12 hour shifts 7am to 7pm. I am allowed to take more hours if I want. the pay isn’t great but that’s fine because I have really really been wanting to get into mental health.
\nI hadn’t felt nervous for an interview in a long time, but I did here because I actually cared about the job. the lady I interviewed with was extremely nice! there are two units each with 20 beds, and those you have to do 15 minute rounds on. then there’s a bigger unit for people trying to become competent for trial because they have been accused of a crime but a judge has found them mentally unfit to stand trial
\nI am excited because it feels like I will be able to help people. I know it will be a pretty tough job at times. I honestly think the fact that it is gonna be tough at times is making people… hesitant to celebrate my offer/new opportunity? I think people just think I’m going to quit right away. which I mean, I have quit jobs right away (I just did dominos a few months back lmao) but this aligns with what I want to be doing. they even have scholarships and will help me navigate the college system if and when I want to go back. if I do well and like this then I’d likely be a good social worker which honestly was my only dream growing up anyway.
\nI have watched lots of tiktoks and YouTube videos and read a lot of stuff online about how MHTs feel about their job. I genuinely do think I will enjoy it despite the craziness. I love working on teams, I love being social. I am one of those rare people where talking to someone for 12 hours a day sounds fun and energizing and not draining.
\nI am honestly a little sad that it feels like people don’t want to celebrate the opportunity with me at this point. I actually ended up dropping one of my friends over this (she was already on thin ice for months with just being generally selfish but her just plowing past me talking about my life to talk about some shitty anime was too much for me lmao).
\nI really do think I will enjoy this job!! I was calling my old job “the dungeon” because it was so socially isolated and WFH. for some mega introverts I am sure that’s a great opportunity, but for me it’s torture, especially when my garbage ex boss was like actively ignoring my suggestions about team cohesion (and then implementing them a year later & not crediting me but.. that’s a different story)
\nand it’s not like its my first rodeo with mental health. I myself have been in the hospital for suicide attempts in the past and all of my friends and family are mentally ill. my dad was in and out of the mental hospital for being bipolar type 1 his entire life. like… I know how to treat people having a mental breakdown w dignity & respect even if they can’t do the same for me at that moment. and I think that’s a kinda rare quality…
\nbut anyway look forward to my update where I quit in a week ig. I mean it doesn’t start until like Jan 12 which I’m grateful for bc it probably means they’re waiting until the holiday craziness is over. and then there’s a full week of training and three weeks of shadowing which is! more training than I’ve ever gotten at any other position ngl lmao. they do have a shit ton to train me on tho like BLS, daily needs, restraints, etc.
\nand for my own mental health, I have my therapist who I have been with for several years by now & she also worked inpatient mental hospital before so she knows what’s up. she knows she is gonna have to support me esp at the beginning
\nso yeah I am super proud of me and excited even if no one else is that much lmfaooo.
\nthe bottom line is that I care so much about people and want to leave the world a little better than I found it. and for that I think I could be extremely impactful in this position in particular so long as it’s not too triggering or overloading…
\n(it does suck to have to take such a big pay cut tho. mental health hardly ever pays anything unless you get into the very high positions like psychiatrist, sigh. oh well)
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-22T02:50:14-05:00", "url": "https://needing.space/2025/12/22/another-job-offer-mental-health/", "tags": ["work","alter: octavia","Longform"] }, { "id": "http://lovely.micro.blog/2025/10/15/i-quit-dominos/", "title": "I quit Dominos", "content_html": "dominos
\nI quit dominos halfway through the shift. Absolutely fuck that shit. My life is too short and valuable to spend it like that.
\nalso worth mentioning that they didn’t have me on the schedule for any other night besides tonight which leads me to believe they have a lot of people quit after their first day.
\nI’m not saying I’m above any job, but at this point in my career, this is not a job for me. Maybe if I was a teenager/as a first job? but not for someone who has been working white collar jobs for 15 years. I’ll wait a few weeks for my medical stuff to be done and find a white collar 9-5 again.
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-15T22:44:41-05:00", "url": "https://needing.space/2025/10/15/i-quit-dominos/", "tags": ["mental health","work","Longform"] }, { "id": "http://lovely.micro.blog/2025/10/15/new-job-hopefully-for-more/", "title": "new job, hopefully for more than 5 min", "content_html": "new job, hopefully for more than 5 min
\nso I start a new job tomorrow. it’s just a really simple one, delivery driver for dominos. I’m going to continue doing TMS through the next few weeks as well. so, it’s going to be a LOT at first. I’m hoping that I can make it through the first few weeks without getting too burnt out. especially since it’s SO MUCH driving.
\nI’m annoyed because I’ve almost hit the 95k driving milestone on my car which means the big expensive maintenance is coming up :/ probably at least $1,000 and that’s a very generous estimate. and on top of that with having to buy new non slip shoes, pants, etc. feels like I’m going to be in debt just trying to pay off the start up costs for the job…
\nI think the fact that I get to sit in between walking to doors and also in between working in the store will help me ramp back up and hopefully my fatigue won’t take over too much. however, I haven’t held a job in a few months at this point, so I already know I’m going to have to get used to sitting at work for 8 hours with no distractions. (especially since, maybe worse! I haven’t worked outside of the home since COVID in early 2020. whenever I’m not working from home the hours seem to go by so slowly…)
\nI promised e I would be really careful about watching my mental health and quitting if I felt too burnt out. so I will give myself permission to do so, though I don’t intend to. I’d at least like to give it a few months.
\nI sincerely hope they realize that me having the Crywolf day off and also my anniversary off are non negotiables. I’ll be magically sick that day if they don’t approve my PTO, I don’t really care.
\nanyway. it will be nice to get out of the house a little. and jobs like these are so make or break based on the team/coworkers there! so I won’t know until I’m properly on the job. all things considered/all in, I think I’ll make about $15/hr average which is… fine, acceptable, whatever. for now a job is a job and it works with my treatments (even though nights and weekends is A Lot)
\nI’ll try to remember to update more frequently (famous last words)
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-15T01:16:08-05:00", "url": "https://needing.space/2025/10/15/new-job-hopefully-for-more/", "tags": ["mental health","elias (husband)","work","Longform"] }, { "id": "http://lovely.micro.blog/2025/09/30/tms-is-kicking-my-ass/", "title": "TMS is kicking my ass", "content_html": "man. TMS has been rough. I know the first 2-3 weeks usually have the worst side effects and it’s normal to experience what I’m experiencing but since it’s so slow acting, the side effects are also slow to go away.
\nlike several weeks in.. I’m having trouble thinking straight, having memory issues, insane fatigue etc which are all apparently side effects that I wasn’t really warned about before starting. which is fine but actually the depression is worse because of all the side effects, also just becoming worse I think before it gets better because of depression, trauma being shuffled up and etc.
\nI actually ditched an interview today just because it was giving me a weird trauma trigger reaction and I don’t know if I would have had that otherwise. then I feel guilty and like a piece of shit because I know I should be looking for work right now ugh.
\nat least it’s not a placebo effect I guess? I mean it’s definitely doing something to me for better or worse. I was a little afraid it would end up being a placebo. they had me take this long ass questionnaire today about the side effects and I’m just… yeah I don’t know.
\nalso there are hobbies that require other people that I would like to be doing but I’d have to go find people to do it with me bc E and all my family and friends aren’t into those hobbies. and I just don’t have the energy to go meet new people right now.
\non top of that all I might be starting Spravato soon (ideally) and I can’t even get the energy to contact the coordinator. e was supposed to be figuring it out for me but I don’t know if he’s had time to send over my release of information.
\nand of course the Starbucks next door to TMS that was my little treat afterwards, shut down this week! urgh… I’m just going to lie down forever now
\n", "date_published": "2025-09-30T16:00:33-05:00", "url": "https://needing.space/2025/09/30/tms-is-kicking-my-ass/", "tags": ["mental health","work","Longform"] }, { "id": "http://lovely.micro.blog/2025/09/29/mostly-just-tired/", "title": "mostly just tired​ ", "content_html": "Hi all. I find myself mostly just tired lately. It’s hard to explain how fatigue inducing TMS has been for me. Really, it’s been the biggest negative side effect, which is hard to push through when there have been virtually no positive effects just yet. It’s three hours round trip every single day for six weeks (200 miles round trip), and I’ll tell you what… I would not be doing this unless I had absolutely no other alternative. Because right now, it is so exhausting. But what is the alternative? Not getting better?
\nIt gets even more complicated when you realize that it’s making work awful too, or the lack thereof. There are no “normal” 9-5 jobs that are going to work around me needing to take half the business day off to go run to Dallas every single day. So, I have been looking into part-time/weekend/nights jobs. I got an interview at a grocery store for overnight stocking, but they took one look at me and how short and chubby I am and instantly decided I wasn’t right for the job. Which is awful. Like, they tried to say it was because I had “no overnight experience and no stocking experience.” You saw that on my resume. You just wanted to discriminate against my physical appearance. So pathetic.
\nI have another interview tomorrow, though I doubt it will go anywhere. It’s just for a job that is two Saturdays and four Sundays a month, just filling in for another person for a driving position. At this point, I’ll take just about anything. I even set up an appointment to sell plasma to help get us through and help pay for the copay and gas to get 200 miles every single day. I thought about doing Doordash today, but turns out, when I’m driving like that, I just want to get home and sit down in a chair and stop driving. I might do that a little bit later… not that Doordash is particularly worth it, honestly.
\nI’ve also been supplementing with Prolific. E says that I shouldn’t be so much worried about jobs and money right now and should just focus on getting better mentally. But how can I focus on getting better mentally when I know we are still negative every month? I don’t want us to have to start dipping into our super emergency. Right now, we have only been dipping into our “backup funds”, aka Elias' money, but we do have an actual emergency fund that I’d rather leave untouched if we can.
\nI’m probably going to try and transfer over all the posts from the other blog to this one today. But man, it’s going to be hard to look at them. I had such an “easy” life when I was a teenager, and seeing me whine about things like Gears of War versus what’s happening today is a little bit difficult… ahaha.
\n", "date_published": "2025-09-29T13:58:12-05:00", "url": "https://needing.space/2025/09/29/mostly-just-tired/", "tags": ["mental health","alter: anastasia","elias (husband)","work","Longform"] }, { "id": "http://lovely.micro.blog/2025/08/15/why-are-steno-machines-like/", "title": "why are steno machines like shiny pokemon", "content_html": "…or better yet, like trying to find a car during COVID???
\nI got told by five people last week that they had sold their machines to other people and that they had been swamped with DMs. one of those people was someone who hasn’t even posted publicly, it was just me being referred by someone who had sold their machine and had a coworker looking to sell! @_@
\nIt’s been an actual nightmare trying to find something. I managed to find one, but jeez…
\nI also had a really good interview. we will see how that goes. I haven’t been having any trouble getting interviews, but I’ve been picky about where I’m applying so I’m getting less and less. which actually is a good thing because it’s been crazy overloading.
\nI’ll just paste what I wrote to E about the interview:
\ninterview went really well. we ran out of time because both of us were talking a lot, that kind of how it ends up when you build rapport haha. the person i interviewed with is from a small town in western michigan, about 30 minutes north of where we were born and raised so we had that in common.
\nthey actually are open to me being in either position (the customer service or the back office position), but they wanted to meet with me and talk to me about the realities of both positions.
\nthey seem really nice and the work seems easy. they said they might need to schedule more time with me because there was supposed to be a mock call, but we didn’t get to it because we both were asking each other a lot of questions and speaking with each other a lot/connecting.
\ni think if they don’t give me an offer, it’s because they genuinely feel that my personality wouldn’t be a fit. I was very, very honest about our personality, in that I am the first ones to talk when there’s an awkward pause during meetings of 20 people and the facilitator says “any questions?” and I am the type that gives a lot of feedback when I am fully trained and have mastered everything.
\nThe interviewer also was like “we don’t mind occasional attendance issues as long as you’re really honest, I can help you out more, I really appreciate honesty” so i put that in the back of my mind and when she asked how I stayed on task, I was like, “well, this might be too much information, but I used to be really bad with this because I had unmedicated ADHD. I’m medicated now, so it’s a lot easier, but I still have XYZ process to help me stay on task.” just showing her that I am very honest in general. I was like, for better or worse, I am honest.
\nshe asked “what are some times that you being late has affected your job performance?” and I was like, I wish I could tell you, but this has genuinely never been an issue with me, aha.
\nit was a huge green flag that they seemed open about accepting feedback though, as I honestly told them that that was something that we struggled with at my last position, where i felt like my feedback was hitting a brick wall a lot of times. I also told them that I struggled with a position where I am alone a lot, so in all truth, the customer service oriented position might be better for me. it seems like their other team, the back office one, has a lot of people like at merit… super introverted people who don’t really want to interact, they just clock in, do their work, and clock out. whereas the customer service position has a lot more team camaraderie, people talk a lot more. the customer service position seems to have a bit more oversight, but that’s just because the manager is more extroverted so reaches out more.
\nthe back office position seems also a lot more like merit because they have flexible hours, whereas the customer service one, you’re pretty much clocked in and then clocked out at the same time every day. I told them that I always clock in and clock out at the same time, I wasn’t really the type that utilized the flexibility of the position unless there was some sort of medical issue happening, and then I let my manager know. whereas I know some people will clock in and clock out at very different times at merit as long as they’re still within the window. we pretty much always have worked 10-6 without any variation.
\nalso I tried to dictate this entry and talk about actual nightmare. Google’s Android keyboard is literally broken for voice dictation lol.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-15T13:26:00-05:00", "url": "https://needing.space/2025/08/15/why-are-steno-machines-like/", "tags": ["elias (husband)","shopping","work","Longform"] }, { "id": "http://lovely.micro.blog/2025/08/04/two-interviews-today/", "title": "two interviews today", "content_html": "Dental interview tl;dr
\nSecond interview tl;dr
\nso, pretty successful day for job interviews, if you ask me.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-04T19:34:00-05:00", "url": "https://needing.space/2025/08/04/two-interviews-today/", "tags": ["work","Longform"] } ] }