At some point, I should probably write a long screed about my last job, and why I ended up starting a new one today, but I don’t think I’ve finished organizing my mental bibliography enough to tackle that one just yet. Let’s focus on the present: I started a new job today.

Starting new jobs is always exhausting. It doesn’t matter if it’s your first job ever, your second, or your tenth, the process is a violent rewiring of the brain. And depending on your seniority or the complexity of your role, you can add degrees of difficulty to that based on if you have to learn new people leader responsibilities (not yet) or if you have been provided a list of like 137 execs you need to meet and greet in your first 30 days (fuck me running).

Setting all of that aside, after I barely survived Day One, I ended up on FaceTime with my parents — who are in Shanghai, sending me photographs of everything they’re eating because they’re bastards — and said to my mother with the consuming woe of a Victorian madwoman:

“I can’t do this anymore. No wonder I failed so many classes at school.”

Because it was day one of onboarding, I was blessed alongside 50 of my closest new corporate friends with about 4 hours of virtual classes. This included segments for cultural indoctrination, groupthink, slightly wonky guidance on how to navigate the intranet to learn about benefits, and much more. As someone who has started a lot of new jobs, I can say with genuine sincerity this was handled well, with earnest good effort, provided immediately useful resources and context for the organization, among many other things.

Unfortunately it was also delivered lecture style in a Zoom classroom.

I do not know how the Covid kids did it. I think I passed away six separate times during this class, and I was (a) being paid to attend (b) able to update my LinkedIn and also enroll for benefits and answer emails/Slacks while this was happening to me and (c) drinking Vietnamese salt coffee the entire time.

How did I once upon a time go to school for like 11 hours a day and learn things? And then come home and do more things? After onboarding I literally went to get Botox and dinner from the Whole Foods hot bar because the idea of coordinating any kind of sustenance otherwise felt insurmountable. I used to take five AP classes, volunteer at Ten Thousand Villages, and then go home and do fucking physics homework — badly!! I would genuinely rather go back to those first harrowing months after the world closed down, when I was on conference calls until 1 a.m. in the morning in a shared Microsoft document watching Nadine from Omaha type like a drunken sailor because we were all so fucking tired none of us could read.

As far as I can tell, Day One orientation was the only class with this format, and the remaining 6,000 hours of mandatory training I have left is more point and click adventure. And in case you are thinking, “that’s worse, that’s so much worse — they test you at the end!” my response is:

“Take screenshots so the whole thing is an open-book test you can take while listening to podcasts about ghosts.”

I feel like I’m the only person who suffers with this? My other friends who lift don’t suffer with pigu agony? I’m like gently lowering myself onto and off of soft surfaces like a fucking pass-around-party-bottom here what the fuck.

Saying, “I work with a personal trainer,” is one of those phrases that should give strangers license to punch you in the body part of their choice. It’s such a douchebag comment that it makes me want to write a letter to the fucking communists excoriating my own bourgeoisie excess. But the truth is that when I first started working with my trainer two, maybe three years back, it was because I was losing a fight with chronic pain and physical discomfort and I was finally desperate enough to work out about it.

The first few months were sincerely the worst. I have hazy memories of my ex-Olympian trainer — when I told him I needed to adjust my schedule earlier this year because I was going on a disassociation vacation in Japan alone, he said, “Oh, I’ve only been to Nagano,” what the fuck — explaining to me what a wall-sit was and me thinking, “This jock is trying to kill me,” White Lotus style. This time also introduced me to things like reverse lunges (go fuck yourself) and the assault bike (go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw) and that I was still capable of getting so overclocked exercising that I would need to go execute on a puke and rally. In the years since, Trainer Mike has commented fondly that the time I had to tap out so I could go hurl in his gym bathroom and then came back out and was like, “what are you talking about of course we’re finishing the workout,” was very telling about my personality. I believe that it is better for me not to be CC’d on whatever’s being communicated.

I want to say that in the years since, we’ve transitioned away from things that are terrible to things that are empowering and fun, but that’s not fully accurate. Only Been To Nagano Mike still makes me ride the assault bike for multiple calories like a monster, but he is also extremely down to clown when I say things like, “Do you think I could do a one-rep max of 200 lbs on the backsquat.” Today, I benched 125 lbs. Last week, I did 200 lbs on the trap bar, and with hallucinatory pride, I texted my mom that if she ever killed anybody not to worry because I could easily move the body now.

Lifting really heavy things is so fun. It’s so fun. I’m actively pissed nobody ever told me how fun it was when I was dragging my corpse to the gym only ever very occasionally to fight for my life on the elliptical or camel honk my way through a very bad jog on the treadmill. All those wasted years I could have been getting so strong I could donkey kick a man’s head off of his neck. I recently expressed this sentiment and then immediately asked Trainer Mike about MMA gyms; unlike other boring people in my life, he did not question my hunger for violence and instead suggested some dude he trains for fights.

“I just want to become like, really dangerous,” I told him.

“You’re already kind of scaring me,” he said.

Just you wait and see, buddy. On my way out of the gym today one of your other clients told me he teaches at a pole dancing gym.

I am never more dangerous to myself or my bank account then when I’m hit with a late night surge of energy to do anything other than whatever it is I am supposed to do. I have no idea if this is an trait attached to the carnival of other shenanigans that come with an ADHD dx, or the pistachio affogato I had with dessert tonight at Carbonara just activated me like the Manchurian Candidate.

(Sidebar: this affogato was the single most alcoholic thing I’ve consumed since I stopped doing racks of test tube shots in under-bridge clubs in the warehouse districts of Beijing, purchased for me by random wandering fleets of Chinese gays. When I first caught a whiff I genuinely whispered, “This smells like Everclear.” The server claimed it was pistachio liqueur, which feels like a lie, or that Carbonara makes its own pistachio liqueur using Everclear.)

(Sidebar to the sidebar: to be clear, none of this is a complaint.)

So far tonight, I have dropped $250 online shopping for random shit including but not limited to slutty shorts (shut up, everybody who knows me), giant t-shirts (to go with the slutty shorts), giant hoop earrings, and a mattress vacuum because my mom said something about how much skin dust she gets out of their mattress and now I’m convinced I’m sleeping in filth every night, which I’m guessing was was psy-op she was planning all along. This was after I decided to do laundry, vacuum my entire apartment, and rearrange all the furniture in my bedroom — which I didn’t get around to doing until half past midnight, and was the original triggering decision that kicked off this entire insanity spiral.

So now it is 1 a.m., I am exhausted and cannot go to bed until the laundry is done because my mom raised a lunatic not a quitter.

The last time I got a massage in 2023, I was fighting a daily losing battle with chronic neck and shoulder pain that sometimes progressed to the point where my elbow would lock up and I would have to call into work because I couldn’t get a shirt on or off. The massages were nice, but they weren’t fixing anything, and that’s the point where I decided that since being nice wasn’t working I was going to show my body who was boss by picking up strength training.

So now my chronic neck and shoulder pain is gone but everything else on my body hurts, and when I walked past the massage place two days ago, I thought, “fuck it, why not.”

Which is how I ended up face, a woman digging her elbow into my glutes, saying, “This is okay for today, but we’re really going to need to work on getting you more relaxed in the next few sessions.”

Here’s the thing: I have been gainfully unemployed the last month and a half. I have slept more in April and May than I have in years, both at night and in the form of a mythical thing called a nap. I have gone on little adventures by myself, read a bunch of books, binge watched some TV shows, built houses for my pocket monsters in Pokopia, and scammed my friends into a half dozen sidequests. I have watched three seasons of Alone, and even though nobody has been eaten by a bear (yet), I live in eternal hope. This is the most stress free I am ever going to be.

Lady, I did not have the heart to tell the massage therapist, this is the most relaxed I have been in the last four years. Things are not going to improve.

And then I came home and made Emily come over and install a bidet, an activity that contorted our bodies in such a way that any progress that was achieved in the massage has been immediately obviated. Fair to say that when I suck it up and visit again, I am going to be getting another bad grade in massage.

I caught sight of the book I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki when I was whoring around the Barnes & Noble, but courageously resisted buying it in favor of checking it out from the library. This was a mistake, as on page 20 the book references “the hedgehog’s dilemma” and I immediately whispered “Shinji, get in the robot,” and wanted to shove myself in a locker filled with sweaty GAINAX figurines.

I got to start off my morning by hopping on a long-overdue call with my friend Jaq, who said one million extremely charming and wise things and made me miss her and Walthamstow with a depth and desperation unbefitting of an E8 postcode*. In the midst of this wide ranging discussion covering everything from damning commentary on my most recent former manager (stay fucking cursed, D 🖤) to how literally everyone I know is astonished I haven’t reacted to being jobless by running away to the Arctic or something, we talked about yoga.

Jaq, rightfully, does not like yoga. The vibes are rancid, for her.

“Me too,” I said. “I hate yoga, too.” And then, almost immediately, I said, “Also I have to head out for yoga in like 15 minutes.”

Hilariously this came up a few weeks ago when I got a last minute but very welcome overnight visit from College Roommate Julia, who marveled that I was going to yoga at least 2x a week because, quote:

“I took you to a yoga class in college and you said you wouldn’t be caught dead in another one for the rest of your life.”

College Roomate Julia is also right, and when I said it then I meant it as much as I mean it now: I still hate yoga — I hate sitting still and being quiet and being invited to engage with my breathing. I hate that last Friday I got my period during a restore yoga class and that I discovered this when I was getting into child’s pose and saw a blood smear on my mat and had to hiss “what the fuck” into overpriced lululemon foam. (Stay tuned to find out if the tips and tricks provided by the /r/cleaning community on Reddit will actually help me get the blood out of said lululemon mat; all tools and supplies have been acquired and also immediately forgotten in the backseat of my car for going on three days now.) I hate the existential tension of feeling every muscle in your body fight for control as you maintain a position that feels godless and insane, such as revolved pyramid. I hate when the teacher says, “for your second bridge pose, you can rise into wheel if it is in your practice.” Hemal, it will never be in my practice to bust out a move from The Exorcism of Emily Rose in a cute matched set. Do you not see me actively bleeding here? Your faith in me is as extremely sweet as it is achingly misplaced.

And all of that said, I’ve stuck at it. In fact, I got a sticker today from my yoga studio because I’ve racked up more than 60 classes. I fled like a coward when they tried to get me to take a photo for social media.

For a long time, I bought the toxic positivity about exercise, and how once you hit some unknowable benchmark you’d receive some dose of endorphins that would send you into bliss. That I hated exercise and just felt shit every time I did it was a failure on my part: either I wasn’t working hard enough or I was doing it wrong. It took a very long time for me to realize that for me, exercise was not fun, it would not feel good, it would not get easier, and I would not get some virtuous dose of good brain chemicals for suffering through it.

Every yoga class I go to (more than 60 now! sixty!!), I feel like I spend an hour fighting for my life, and that the only nice thing that happens to the entire time is when you lie there at the end in shavasana wishing you were an actual corpse, and the yoga teacher walks around and waves an aromatherapy towel over your face. I don’t feel calm or at peace or one with the universe; I feel sweaty and like I got my ass kicked by a space heater, and that the guy who bogarts the back row spot closest to the wall needs to learn how to breathe quieter or see an ENT. Every time the nice woman or man working the check in counter at my studio asks me, “How was class?” with a beautiful smile on their face when I stagger out like a rotting, wet bog zombie, I say, “A near-death experience, like always.”

But in addition to giving me another venue to work on bits for my tight five, regretfully yoga is among many exercise-adjacent activities that have helped resolve my chronic pain. They have become as essential as my SSRI in managing my anxiety and ADHD. They give me undeserved confidence that I could kick a man to death.

So I continue to hate exercise and feel like shit every time I do it. I have accepted that is as unchanging as the promise of public humiliation as an adult woman living in society. But weirdly, it’s also made me exercise a whole lot more, compared to in the past when I didn’t get my promised endorphins and said, “fuck it we ball” and lived the Hangover meme until I had to drag myself to work again. Knowing that it’s bad, that feeling bad is not only okay but the correct state and nature of the experience, has unlocked some deep well of contrarian masochism in me.

I will keep going to the stupid yoga class. I will keep showing up for pilates. I will add another plate to the bar. People will tell me they’re so impressed by how I’m really showing up for myself and I will tell them, with abject and complete sincerity, “Thanks, I hate this.”

*The first text message I got this morning was from Jaq saying “OMG Linda! It’s E17 not E8!”

For reasons too stupid and depressing to explore at this juncture, I’m starting and ending my days the last three weeks and counting with a semi-literal fistful of pills.

My historically bad and until most recently well-managed allergies got some kind of Manchurian Candidate activation from either the cheap detergent I bought (I would deserve this) or because they got an Instagram post about perimenopause (no one deserves this) and decided to unionize every mast cell in my body to coordinate my death. My passive suicidal ideation has always been more of a “drift away beautifully, without any pain or suffering” approach however so I said, “absolutely fuck that” after only four weeks of using my agency and free will hoping it would go away. When that somehow didn’t work, I sucked it up and finally went to my allergist, a man who I — sincerely, lovingly — describe as the type of old timey doctor that tells me I have ghosts in my blood and that I should do some cocaine about it.

(I am not kidding at all: this man is 300 years old and my favorite medical professional. I was worried for about a year he would retire because he sold his practice, but he still sees patients and recently he started rocking an unbelievably terrible Just For Men dye job and I’m revivified in my belief he will be buried under the floorboards of his office and that I will benefit from his benevolent form of insane guidance for the rest of time, either from this worldly or via a spiritual plane. That this man’s office once sent me into anaphylaxis while the Supreme Court was actively striking down Roe v. Wade is just a shared adventure that brought us closer together, emotionally.)

Dr. Blood Ghost, who always looks like he is either on the tail end of or about to have a heart attack, listened to my ring cycle of woe, and then suggested I take 100 pills about it. When that didn’t work after a week, he nodded kindly and revised that estimate from 100 pills to 130 pills. This is only a moderate hyperbole, because every morning I’m popping two OTC 24-hour allergy pills, two OTC antacids (that are actually antihistamines?), a new prescription pill — that’s apparently $4.5K a month if I rawdogged that out of pocket, but that Dr. Ghost Blood handed to me from a mystery closet in his practice; again, love this man — and then whatever other pills I’m supposed to be taking to ensure I don’t die of anything else before my autoimmune system gets me. Dr. Blood Ghost also assured me if I was struggling to sleep I could take some Benedryl before bed.

Oh, okay, because what my liver and barely sustained hold on lived reality needs now in this tsunami of medication is yet more opportunity to invite the fucking Hat Man into my life. The first two or three weeks I was on this cocktail I made other people drive me to the grocery store because I wasn’t confident I could tell left from right or that I wasn’t tasting purple. I defy anybody in the greater DMV area to produce a more encouraging and gregarious plug than Dr. Blood Ghost, my best friend and Hat Man facilitator.

Anyway my latest set of “medical guidance” is to keep taking my fistful of pills 2x a day, and to check back in four weeks from now. I assume this is because if I am still actively in flare by then Dr. Blood Ghost will do the kindest thing and take me out back in an alleyway near Foggy Bottom and put me out of my misery. He has characterized this as “consider adding a new rx shot into your monthly regimen,” but I am confident that is just allergist for “make it quick so you won’t suffer.”

It has to be.