Last day

Lights out Alice!

It is my last day here at Cipla. My team doesn't really care and that's fine, it wasn't a happy relationship in the first place which turned sour when I dropped my papers. A few people did feel sad for a bit and that's more than I could ever hope for and that's more than what I need.

I wasn't really feeling anything as my body went into the default mode blocking any emotion whatsoever. However, listening to MPS and TS about how they would miss me (even if it is 1% true) did make me question if I was blocking emotions or actually not feeling anything.

I will miss this place for what it stood. I will miss a few people, definitely, but just like with any other place, I like the routines I create and the mundane. The trees, the paths, the walks, the routes I take, a cool gust of breeze on a warm day, sip of a good cup of tea after a hectic session.

I will also miss MS and all that it could be. I am still a bit sore about it and probably will be for a while.

But, what I actually wanted to write about was: Being unchained and unattached to any job at the moment, since Cipla has ended and the new one| hasn't started yet, I could immediately feel a sense of relief. That somehow that the pile of dirt that was clogging the pipeline of ideas was flushed open. That there was nothing weighing me down. There lay endless possibilities on the horizon and I could choose to pursue anything that I could set my mind into.

Why do I get tired in a corporate scenario?

How did I run out if ideas?

I used to be good at thinking, whatever happened to that?

I used to push the room to be better, now I am just drained and tired of everything. I am tired of the bureaucracy and redundancy present in corporate. Feels like I am decaying and immediately becoming irrelevant.

I used to be good, now I am just barely hanging on.

Unable to process feedback correctly

Lights out Alice!

The saying, " Being in a relationship will force you to introspect and ask the hard questions on your quirks and ill-behaviour patterns", is pretty apt. As a person who regularly isolates and does not engage with people, it is only expected that after a while my ability to spot the error in my ways reduces. It is as simple as becoming accustomed to one's behaviour and a testament to a human's ability to adapt, although in this case it has a detrimental effect.

Therefore, regardless of how much I loathe being in constant communication with people who are not super duper insanely close with me, it does help in making me understand where I am wrong.

Newsflash, I suck in a lot of places. The biggest one that was brought up today was how there is a differential standard that I draw up when it comes to making jokes. When I make a joke using somebody's past data that they shared with me, that is fine by me and I expect them to be understanding about it and take it in their stride, but when they do the same, I get immediately "pissed off" about it and demand that they stop it immediately and refrain from using the same in the future.

That's pretty messed up.

What is it about travelling?

Lights out Alice!

Context for the post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhPsL43-j90

 - Overland travel documentary through Patagonia

What is it with people and the need for an escape?

What is it about nature and mountains that immediately humbles my brain and calms me down. Is it the humongous size of it? Is it the fact that nothing we do can even come close and nature can wipe us all down in a second? We run around in our world thinking what we do is important. So much of our lives are formed by the stories we tell ourselves in our head as to how and why we need to be whatever we are and what we need to pursue/achieve in life. These are all constructions of our head. Nature is a reminder that in the end we are as memorable as fallen leaves. Nobody cares and nothing really matters.

I am a shitter

Lights out Alice!

A mark of a true shitter, which in this case is me, is the inability to take feedback or accept mistakes. The instant reaction of recoiling or shutting off as soon as someone says anything less than ideal about you.

I am ashamed of reacting in a similar way. I used to mask that under the statement, "Did I come to you asking for your opinion, or did you come to me?..." But that's shitty because I generally push people away anyways and not having an interaction on my own accord leads to the false belief that I have worked on my issues enough to iron them out. NO you dumb piece of shit, you just buried it deep enough and never stirred it.

• Immediate disgust when someone says anything negative about me
• Inability to actually listen to people when they give feedback and immediately trying to find loops in their argument and find ways to prove how I am right
• Not really listening to them and discounting their opinion because they came to me and not vice versa. On the other hand, I would put a different set of argument for people I would approach because there I would try to sell the story to myself that they are just piling on because I came to them for help and I am allowed to disagree with their opinion
• Remembering back to the UKD incident last week when everyone was gathered here in Sweena, I tried to pile on my way of understanding onto UKD, dismissing his fears and beliefs as trivial. That was shitty of me. Additionally, I had no right to tell him what his beliefs should be.

One big pattern that is emerging in all of this is the fact that I tend to give unsolicited opinions on a situation and then assert that my understanding of the situation, through my pattern analysis, regardless of how biased it might be, replete with incomplete and incorrect data, is the right interpretation of a situation.

Time and again, I push people away. The proof of my shallowness is in the fact that I am greatly offended if people know any detail of my life or talk about me. "Who gave them a right to talk about me?.." is my usual justification in my head whereas on the flip side I turn and bring obscure details people's personal life in a discussion to justify how their pattern of behaviour is incorrect.

Truth to be told, I also have a case to make about the fact that I do not go and ask for people to tell me details. Frankly, I would like to believe that I want to stay away from people. But that would be incorrect. I like my personal space and time, but I have been conditioned among people for far too long to go beyond a few days without any human interaction. Who knows, the first few weeks might be difficult, but hopefully I can adapt to that.

More than anything, all of this is ensuring that I have taken my eyes off the ball. I have slipped and am barely hanging on to my dear routine, let alone getting shit done. It doesn't take a lot for me to fall apart at the seams, it seems.

I truly suck Alice!

Back in that space again...

Lights out Alice!

A lot of people interaction has been draining me these days. Given that it is hard for me to set boundaries given that I am a people pleaser by default and my availability is a given, it can and has gotten a bit straining these days. 

Instead of showing irritability, which has been a natural response for me in these situations previously, I decided to cut off and take a break. The shit part is that my brain keeps going back and forth in an anxious loop telling that I am letting others down and that if I do not reply instantly to their messages or their requests to rant, I will be a bad person.

To add to these, slow days cause the most amount of stress to me. They make me feel like I am wasting my time, which I do, but it just keeps on piling up in my head. I work only when there are deadlines and working on things and basics with no clear outcome is something that my brain straight up rejects. My ADHD peaks at this moment leading to unparalleled levels of procrastination while being acutely aware of every passing second, all the while doing nothing about it. I do not know how to convey it in a manner that actually gets the severity of the situation across, but it is the most mentally taxing of days. When I have tons of work or lot of calculation or even a tight deadline, that's when I am at a normal state of mind.

Yes, I have read enough self-help books to know that having homeostasis on a mentally heightened state is not a good thing to have. I am trying to work on it. I am trying to talk to myself to remind myself that in the end it is all futile. Our prof in the Marketing department at MDI recently passed away. He must have been good. He must have been super enthused about his work. At some point in time he must have been good at research and academically acing everything. But just like everything else, that time passed as well. 

I keep thinking that I have been a disappointment. I need to do this or achieve that or get to a particular intelligence level or execute an idea successfully to prove my mettle. But the brass tack is that I am nothing more than another average human who has nothing of significance to contribute to this planet and all the stories of greatness and achievement that I keep concocting are just that. STORIES. LIES told to my self to tell myself that I am not useless. 

But I know, I am, Alice!

Repeating patterns

 Lights out Alice!

This is mostly a rant. I read a few days back that we generally reinforce our behaviour and bad traits through repetition. We claim we do not have the capability to change since every time we sub-consciously work towards ensuring that we fail in a similar manner thereby reinforcing what we want to believe. I do not know if it comes across as remotely believable but on most days it is a fight against my own brain, trying to calm it down enough to get working on something while not bored enough to doze off from whatever was supposed to be done. It is not unlike trying to get a mischievous five year old kid to do their homework, just that in this case, the kid is your brain and the person trying to control it is also you. The game is rigged and on most days you lose. 

Any small ripples of change in the daily work creates large ripples and upheaval in the routine and productivity flow that takes ages to restore. It is very hard to get consistency, even harder to stick to any sort of plan/target/goal, especially when one is not under any duress.

This sucks. I know on some days I am happy with the ability to create mental models, but this repeated inability to achieve daily targets, some of which I have been trying to meet for over a decade is pretty frustrating.

I am a failure Alice!