For
anyone distressed by anything in this post, or for any other reason considering
seeking support, resources are available in Australia here, here, and here. In other nations, you will have to do an Internet search using terms such as “mental health support - <your nation>” (which, for instance, may lead to this, this, and this, in the USA, or this, this, and this, in France [biased towards English-language - my apologies]), or perhaps try https://www.befrienders.org/.
Posts in this series are now listed at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/p/recovering-from-corporate-life.html.
Just a few quick points:
- Something I have alluded to before, but wish to express slightly differently, is that many of the coping strategies I have used to get through my corporate career, such as breathing exercises, meditation, exercise, etc, are now tainted by the near irrevocable association I have between those and a nightmare work environment.
Thus, when I start to meditate, what comes to mind is not a meditative state but the association with severe working conditions - flashbacks, in a word.
To try to break that, I am irregularly doing a little of these when I am in a good frame of mind - not for long, just enough to start rebuilding an association between those exercises and feeling good.
I could force the exercises, but that simply reinforces the association with unpleasantness.
- When I was working, I was extremely busy, and I still have that as a habit - of self judgement, if not activity.
As an example, today (actually, I just noticed that is yesterday, now) I completed eight blog posts and two candles, as well as other activities, but felt that I hadn’t done much - because I was judging myself against the levels of activity demanded by the modern corporate world.
Awareness is a first step in breaking that - and my partner has promised to help as well 😊
PS - I have been accumulating a sleep deficit since the late 80s/early 90s. It is only now, eight months after retiring, that the quality of my sleep has improved - with notably better (or easier to acheive and keep during sleep) physical relaxation, in particular, but also much better dream recall - to the extent that I feel I am starting to reduce that sleep deficit.
PPS - my daily habit targets are now two meditation-breathing-colour visualisation sessions of around one hour each, and two formal physical exercise sessions of around half an hour each + some Tai Chi in-between those
Blessed be.
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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our MÓ•gan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).
Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024 NO AI I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product. Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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