Trauma is in the past and I feel great and am making good decisions!

Note: there is some mention of cults and bodily functions

I am strangely doing really well overall. I feel emotionally healthy. I am making really good, wise-mind decisions.

I actually applied to a job and had two rounds of interviews and was offered the job!! It is very exciting! But there are also some things that didn’t feel quite right to me. And then when I got the formal job offer letter, it was a long contract, which I wasn’t expecting. I had been planning on going to a training for the job this weekend and starting, like, now (part-time, I’m still in school).

BUT I listened to my gut. I realized that saying yes to the job right away is really tempting because having a job and making my own money will make me feel really secure, especially since I am graduating soon, and I want to be more independent from my family (rely on their money less), and this job would guarantee that I would have something to do with my time and (what seems like) a good group of people to spend time with. So, I was tempted, and I was able to figure out and acknowledge why.

I also did a little google searching and was reminded that it’s okay to not say yes to a job offer right away and to take time to think about things. And to take time to figure out if the job is something I actually want to do. I was thinking that if I hate it, I can just leave, but one video said that if you leave a job after not being there long, it can have a “black mark” on your resume. I hadn’t thought of that. And some parts of the contract “survive” even after “termination,” apparently, so I could still be affected by things in the contract even if I left.

Anyway I was feeling some peer pressure and time pressure to start now, and there are some things I don’t like in the contract about not saying bad things about the company, and non-disclosure agreements and non-compete agreements. I was also getting some pyramid scheme vibes, like they were trying to recruit me right now to meet some quota. I once accidentally joined an intense Christian group that bordered on a cult, and this was reminding me of that whole experience.

I made the really good decision to just email and ask my questions, and to postpone doing the training instead of doing it literally tomorrow. I will have time to talk to my family and friends and maybe other people and get their opinions before officially committing to this.

I feel like this is a really reasonable thing to do. I didn’t let myself get peer pressured into joining too soon, and I’m also not ditching the whole thing and ghosting my interviewer without an explanation. I’m cautiously, maturely, wise-mindedly investigating more so that I can make an informed decision. I am listening to my emotions and checking the facts on them. This feels really good!! 🙂

And I also feel like, it will probably all turn out okay. Non-disclosure agreements are probably standard. I’m just new to them. And so it’s okay for me to ask questions and get more information and make sure I’m okay with stuff. And if I’m not okay with stuff, I can just decline the job offer. People won’t harass or pressure or keep calling me if I decide not to join. They are professional people in a real, reputable company and not sketchy bordering-on-a-cult members. Either way I am safe and can make a good decision and be okay.

It feels really good!

Elsa dramatically throwing away her crown and singing, “The past is in the past!” (Screenshot from this Disney UK Let It Go Frozen Sing-along video)

Other stuff in my life is going well, too. I made some other good decisions. 🙂 Last semester, classes on zoom were kinda awful, and I was not in a good place. But, there were two classes that I did enjoy and did do well in. They were both project-based classes, they both had group projects, and they both had me do stuff with my hands, instead of staring at a computer screen.

So, this semester, I made the really good decision to take entirely project-based classes. And I am loving it! I am thriving! I am so sick of zoom and cannot stand zoom lectures anymore. And I don’t have to! This semester I don’t have any problem sets or exams! It’s all project assignments, presentations, small quizzes, and reports.

Projects seem much more meaningful than normal school. I understand that I have to do the steps along the way in order to end up at the final product of the project. Like, I’m building a robot (!!), and it makes perfect sense to me that I have to design the parts, figure out what hardware I will need, test things out, etc in order to build the final robot. So, I’m motivated to do these things. I don’t procrastinate them. I’m even excited to do them. I’ll do them in my free time, or at 3 am, because I want to. And having group members that I am accountable to helps a lot, too. And it gives me built-in social time. Less loneliness for me! And regular, scheduled times to see people!

Yayyyy! I am feeling pretty good about myself, lol. I am proud. Of course I have to acknowledge that a lot of this is luck, too. If this wasn’t my senior spring, I probably wouldn’t have much, or any, say in what classes I got to take. And there was some luck in how I found this job, and privilege that I was able to go to a career fair to find this company.

I got an unpleasant reminder recently that my wellbeing is largely based on luck and not the hard work I do. I had been feeling better, physically, for a couple months. I was eating dairy-free probiotic yogurt every day, and my diarrhea had disappeared. But then my yogurt was too close to the back of the fridge, and the temperature was too low, and it all froze. I don’t really know what happened to the yogurt chemically/biologically, but the consistency changed, and it made me gag, and the bits I did eat didn’t seem to help my stomach like they used to (maybe the good bacteria died). My diarrhea came back. All that “hard work” went down the drain. It was sad, but it was a good reminder that there are things out of my control. The probiotics were what was helping me, not that I was going on walks or just magically making myself less stressed or healthy or something.

So, conversely, when things are going well, I want to be careful to not be proud of “how well I’m doing.” I can be happy that I’m doing well, and I can celebrate it. I can be proud of actions I took or decisions I made. But it’s not healthy for me to be proud of things that are out of my control. Because then when they go wrong, it feels like it’s my fault, when it’s not. It’s still out of my control.

So right now, when lots of things seem to be going well: I am proud of how I handled this job offer, and I am happy that I was offered the job in the first place. I am proud of the healthy habits I am keeping up with (like the action of eating my yogurt!), and I am happy that not many things are going wrong right now and that I am doing well overall.

Working through my coronavirus worries about going back to college

Note, this post contains lots of talk about coronavirus and hygiene, and some talk about the nasal swab test and death, among other things.

(I wrote this about a month ago in the middle of June! I recently found out that, since I’m a rising senior, I am NOT going back to school in person this fall. (I don’t know about the spring yet.) I will do college online this fall. I am relieved that I won’t be putting myself at more risk of coronavirus, but doing everything online will be hard in its own ways, too… Anyway, even though I know I’m not actually going to be living at school this fall, I decided I can still post this. There are other people (including my brother!) who are going back to school in person and who might have similar worries. (scroll down past the worries for ways to cope… advice and positive things))

I’ve managed to not worry too much about the coronavirus in the past couple months. The Black Lives Matter protests have kept my mind occupied for the past two weeks, and before that, I had final exams. I have been mildly worried about it, and worried about the general state of the world, and worried about many other things (as I normally am haha), but the initial stress of the first couple months (March, April) had died down. Plus, I’ve been at home, not interacting with people outside my family. I generally feel fairly safe here.

But now I have to consider going back to college in the fall. My school has not announced yet what its plans will be. They are supposed to be telling us soon, and now all my friends are talking about this all over again. I am stressed. I had avoided thinking about school for a long time. That was partially a good decision because it wasn’t worth it to worry when there was so much uncertainty, but I also just haven’t thought about going back to school in a while. Part of me thought that I would be stuck at home until January for the spring semester. But it looks like my school and others are trying to reopen in some form in the fall.

Should I go back to school if classes are in-person? Is it safe? It feels like a death sentence honestly. But I tend to worry a lot about health issues and think that death is more likely than it is (due to trauma).

I wrote out some of the things that worry me and the questions I have:

Things that worry me about the fall:

• not being able to go home — in the past, I have gone home about once a month. This has helped my mental health a lot in the past (especially in contrast with my first year, when I barely went home at all and got very depressed)
• the nasal swab test — I have heard that this is very uncomfortable. I am not okay with things being inserted into my body. I have had a lot of trouble with it in the past at doctor appointments and on my own. We might have to have this test done every week or so in order to make sure we’re not getting sick. That sounds very scary to me. But maybe I would get used to it? Maybe I could learn to cope?
• intense rules and regulations over my personal habits — this just makes me feel powerless and unsafe and reminds me of bad stuff which I don’t want to go into
• constant threat of death of me and my friends — obviously I am scared of this! I think I would be devastated if one of my friends died.
• not being able to live with friends — currently I’m planning on living in a dorm with several close friends. I have been looking forward to living with my friends for months (maybe almost a year). The housing arrangement could change if we have to live in individual rooms with individual bathrooms. I’m not sure how I could manage living alone, especially if I wasn’t allowed to see my friends either because of social distancing. I’ve really appreciated being able to hug my family the past few months. I want to still be able to get hugs somehow at college.
• not being able to partake in all the things I enjoyed — I loved dancing at school. I wonder if that will be cancelled now because there are too many people. Is rolling around on the dance studio floor safe? What about all the other events I liked attending: performances, lectures, events? Friendly get-togethers with friends? Will all my favorite parts of college be taken away? If they’re not there anymore, is it worth it to go? Would the in-person experience be any better than the online experience if those things don’t exist?
• therapy? virtual still? privacy? — I don’t know how safe I would be traveling to my therapist’s office. It requires public transportation, and I would likely be with many people (probably not 6 feet apart) in a confined space for a long-ish time (half an hour?). What if I took a taxi? Would the surfaces be clean? What if the taxi driver was sick? Could I still have therapy virtually? If I did, would I be able to find a private space? If I was living with friends, would they overhear me? I have done therapy virtually at school before, but I didn’t like knowing that my people could probably hear me. But I could probably make it work.
• bathroom cleaning? — my school website says that custodial staff will clean the bathrooms in my dorm once a week. On second thought, I think this is probably okay. If they’re cleaning the bathroom, they’re unlikely to make it dirty. Just having someone not in my less-than-six-feet-apart bubble (assuming I’m living with my friends) regularly entering my living space is a bit scary. But if they’re wearing a mask, hopefully it will be fine.
• how would I do laundry? — my dorm has communal laundry facilities.
• how would I get food? — I used to eat in the dining halls/cafeterias for most of my meals. Those don’t sound safe anymore, especially since you can’t wear a mask while eating. Will I cook and eat all on my own? I think I could manage that, but again if I’m doing that anyway, why not just stay home and do school online if that’s an option? (To be clear, I don’t know if it’s an option yet)
• elevators? — I would likely have to use the elevator often to get to my dorm room and to class. Elevators are supposedly places where you can catch the coronavirus easily.

Okay, so, those are my worries. Naming them helps. Then I started looking up more information (which I had kind of been avoiding for a couple months). There’s a lot more that we know about the coronavirus now than we did a couple months ago!

I learned some things that I can do:

Things I can do:

• stay 6 feet away
• wash hands often (and use lotion afterwards)
• avoid touching face — practice not doing this in the months before
• wear a mask — make some masks
• wear gloves on public transportation and in elevators
• don’t get in elevator unless everyone is wearing a mask
• wash clothes in warm water and dry thoroughly
• clean the laundry basket
• line laundry basket with bag? have separate bags for clean and dirty clothes?
• don’t shake clothes
• do one large load of laundry less frequently
• change clothes when I get home
• buy gloves
• buy hand sanitizer
• buy a thermometer
• buy ziploc bags

These are tangible steps I can take. Many of these tips came from these pages: NYTimes Coronavirus Q&A and How should I do laundry now?. I can do these things and protect myself as best I can. This is shaping up to be a plan.

I also learned (from the Q&A list linked above):

Factors that affect whether you get coronavirus:

• how close you get to an infected person
• how long you are near that person
• whether they expel virus droplets on or near you
• how much you touch your face afterwards

So, I can minimize these factors, even if I am around other people. There are things I can do to prevent coronavirus. It’s not all out of my control. It’s not impossible to control either. If I do those things, I can mostly prevent getting coronavirus.

And finally, some positive things. (I actually wrote these first, but I’m putting them last here because it’s a nice note to end on.)

• Lots of people are working hard to fight coronavirus.
• We may have a vaccine one day. — This is something to look forward to!
• Sleep, stress reduction, and exercise are good for my immune system.
• People are making changes to improve the world. (Here is a nice list of changes that have happened as a result of Black Lives Matter.)