I’m literally considering finishing the last 4 hours of my econ degree so that I can get a job negotiating contracts for the federal government. My business would be fine with my wife handling the day to day and we would have good benefits for the first time in our lives.
Could you be more specific with pubic sector? Any type of government job?
I think you need to make sure you’re being hired as an employee and a contractor.
I work for city government, wife works for federal government. I’m happy to answer any more specific questions by PM.
Yes. City, county, state, federal. And public education. I’m sure I’m missing something.
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Yea, I work with a lot of government clients and have occasionally considered making the jump (despite it being a large pay cut). It isn’t always a cake walk but there’s often a much more relaxed and flexible attitude. Plus, assuming you’re working for an agency with a worthy agenda, you can feel like you’re making a difference in a way that doesn’t always exist in the private sector.
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So I’ve been lucky. My wife applied everything she knew about the early stages of ptsd to keep me sane, but this hit home:
I only think about the bad nights every so often now, and the dreams have stopped.
On a personal note, this person helped me craft my first CV. I used it to get my job.
I looked up to her. She was a role model. She barely knew me and took an hour to get my cv just right.
I suppose this may be too niche, but I’ve been thinking about this article and her all day… and wondering where I’d be if not for my support system.
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never too niche, thanks for sharing and I’m sorry for your loss
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Thanks.
I find myself fine 95% of the time these days, but the other 5% is some weird alternation between guilt from feeling fine and reliving some mistakes I made in that time.
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One of the biggest reasons I’m skeptical that the destigmatize mental illness campaign will work is that we basically max stigmatize physicians. That is some major mixed messaging. What happens if you are misdiagnosed and treated for, say, severe treatment-resistant psychiatric illness that turns out to have an underlying cause like Hashimoto’s, and is quickly rectified by treating the latter? Seems like it would be easy to amass a seemingly nonsensical list of overlapping differential diagnoses on the path to the correct diagnosis. Does anyone take that into consideration? Maybe I’m blinded by eternal pessimism but I’d bet dark that they basically don’t.
Well if it makes you feel better that’s literally my job for anyone with severe psych issues in the ER.
We miss stuff sure but most of the time it’s just primary psych stuff. That other stuff that you mention is quite rare too.
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Yeah I feel ya. And I wouldn’t expect anyone to be nailing the rare or atypical presentations at a high clip in an ER setting. Stanford’s consultative medicine guy says they only get answers for about 20% of the cases they take and that’s with throwing a ton of time and resources at it.
The school is continuing to extend me on a yearly basis. Teachers who work here normally get one or two yearly contracts before getting signed permanently. Yet, I’m getting a third extension for just a year.
It’s extremely difficult to settle anywhere without any job stability. It causes a lot of stress and anxiety to have to effectively have my job hanging by thread. Being treated like a temporary employee is not the way I deserve to be treated. I feel that I deserve more than this and I’m not getting it. It’s fucking with my head. I didn’t mind this in my 20s because it was my 20s and I wasn’t looking for stability. My trips there were always going to end. But here, I’d rather it not end.
The job I have is quite rare for a person in my position. I haven’t had much time to network with covid cutting down most socialization opportunities.
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I always assumed that you bounced around because you just wanted the experience of living in various places. Do you actually want to settle down in the Czech Republic? Is there somewhere else where you wanted to live long term but couldn’t because the job didn’t pan out.
Was a bit rough to find the type of job I wanted in the UK after I got my degree.
But permanence for once in my life would be pretty cool. Too old for moving around now.
Hey all.
Ive been having a lot of trouble lately (and also my entire life) with being defensive. My main issue seems to always stem from the desire to explain my actions as though the explanation might enlighten the person im talking to into seeing why the thing we are discussing might be good actually, or why my fuck ups might be understandable.
This is understandably causing problems in things like relationships and jobs (I tend to do this more with females, and I have always had major problems with female bosses not liking me, which I think stems a lot from this. Im sure it has something to do with my mother but im not entirely sure what.)
Does anybody have any resources they have found helpful in this realm specifically? I want to do better and that means improving myself and being lesd defensive, but I need help on how to best get there.
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I try to imagine the man that would make my Dad or gregogoat proud (someone who demonstrates tact in difficult situations, and negotiates a satisfactory outcome for all parties). When your mood hints at stress, see if you can recognize the feeling/ emotion and take steps to cope.
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If you want a few books about childhood/traumas and the influence events can have, then a few books are:
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller | Goodreads
The Body Keeps the Score
For me, these books helped me understand that my current state of being is a lot more influenced by things that happened decades ago than what I had realized. But, the reality is if you want to better unpack your story, your triggers, your needs…well, I think if you are in a position to afford it then finding a good therapist is going to be the most helpful.
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Just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, even so the wise are not affected by praise or blame.
– Buddha
As it says in The Way of the Bodhisattva , praise and a good reputation do nothing to increase our longevity or good health. Maybe if lots of people praised us we might get a bit richer! But apart from that, praise does not make us live longer or in better health or help us in any other way. If people criticize us, it does not make us sick or unhealthy and nor does it shorten our lives. It does not affect us in any substantial way at all.
If we really stop to think about praise and criticism, we will see they do not have the least importance. Whether we receive praise or criticism is of no account. The only important thing is that we have a pure motivation, and let the law of cause and effect be our witness.
– The Dalai Lama
Defensiveness results from too much concern with what other people think of what we say or do. If you’re not confident in what you’re doing, that’s a genuine problem that needs to be addressed, but trying to talk other people into agreeing with what you do is bad. You can see this at work in politics. Even people who have different political opinions to Bernie Sanders frequently like him, because they can see he acts with integrity. Other people try constantly to ingratiate themselves with voters but it doesn’t work.
As for how you can stop doing this, practice meditation and other ways to redirect your mind to more useful pursuits. Like if someone was obsessed with getting likes on Facebook, I assume your advice would be “avoid Facebook and try to focus your mind on sources of meaning that don’t involve getting likes”. My advice is the same, just with “the approval of others” subbed in for Facebook likes. It’s not easy, but there it is.
Those of you who experience anxiety/panic attacks - can you feel them coming ahead of time? I’ve had a few over the past couple of weeks, and probably a dozen over the past year or two, and for most of them I could identify hours/days beforehand that one was coming.
Not like a steady buildup or anything either. Last week I was feeling very anxious one morning and told my wife I was going to have a panic attack that day, felt largely pretty normal the whole afternoon and evening, and around 10 PM I was reading unstuck and just got smacked with one out of the blue.
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