Mindless Ramblings

Tick, tick, tick…

The clock is mocking me while I sit in my living room, trying to write. My cat is lying in the hallway sleeping peacefully. She has not a single care in the world right now aside from if there is food to be eaten in her bowl or if I happen to make a weird nose that deviates from the hum of the air conditioner running, the tap of my fingers over the keyboard, or the constant ticking of the clock sitting across from me on my desk. Between the clock and the blank word-processing program in front of me, it’s almost like I am being mocked.

It is the first time in nearly a year that I have gotten to sit down and write, even though the past year has not had much going on outside of me sitting in survival mode since losing my job in June. The thing about survival mode is that while you can technically function there, you’re not thriving there. Too much of my time has been spent pouring over Monster, LinkedIn, or Indeed looking for tech jobs that claim to be entry-level while also asking for a minimum of 10 years of experience.

I’ve spent months looking for jobs and applying with no luck. My first time working in an office, doing what I spent four years in school studying. Hoping I can function on the canned beans and bags of rice I bought at costco before I lost my job. A job that was supposed to be a stepping stone to writing my own checks in infosec.

But you know what my mistake was there? Not keeping my head down, and not blending in enough. I was openly non-binary when I was hired, which looking back now I guess was strike one. I was misgendered on a daily basis for over a year, and then I was pushed out because I decided to speak up. I asked that I not be referred to in all of the documentation and in all the meetings as a girl, a woman, or a lady. I asked that they use they/them for me, and two of my three immediate coworkers were just fine about it. It was the 3rd one I had a hunch wouldn’t be as cool about it, but I didn’t think it would lead to being told I was making things difficult, or that I was the one creating a toxic work place.

Especially since I wasn’t leaving for 2 hour long lunches in the middle of the day, holding up evidence processing, and refusing to take any tickets. That was all her. She went to our boss and complained that I should be made to use she/her pronouns, and that I was going to make things too confusing. Our boss said no, but then things only got worse from there.

The shit all started rolling down hill when Russia had attacked Ukraine. I sat in my office in DC working on processing evidence that we had received that morning that no one else wanted to handle. I was working the late shift of Noon-9:30 while everyone else was getting in before me, one having been there since 7:30 that morning. Suddenly we all get an email in outlook saying to not sympathize with Russia or any Russians, that our own company has been attacked by them before. That seemed to be the point when everyone else decided to turn their backs on me.

It isn’t any secret that my family is Russian on my mom’s side, and Ukrainian on my dad’s. They’re the more overwhelming percentages that come up in tests from ancestry or 23 and me. But there’s also Hungarian, Austrian, German, Irish and and English there too! I am the 2nd generation of my family to have been born in the US, and I had laughed off too many of the stories about the way people had turned on anyone that looked too east european, or had too slavic of features during the cold war years.

Suddenly it was like I wasn’t even born here with how everyone decided to treat me. The only tie to the “old country” I had was my grandfather but he had passed away while I was in college fighting to graduate and get into the world of cyber security that clearly doesn’t seem to want me.

It was like the uphill battle to be taken serious as an AFAB person in tech just got even worse because of my last name. Two things I have no control over.

Then, it happened. One day I just got fed up with it enough that I decided I didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t stand being treated like I had been there leading the charge against Ukraine. A country that felt like home to me and welcomed me with open arms when I visited there on study abroad. I couldn’t stand having to wait hours for my coworkers to come back to their desks from lunch, which was going on at least an hour too long for the hour we were given. I couldn’t stand the guidelines and policies changing depending on who requested something, and my boss having too weak of a spine to stand up and say “this is how things are done.”

The first three months were fine. I had renewed my lease before I ended up being chewed up and spat out of the job I had worked for the past year, so I was guaranteed I at least had something there as a roof over my head. I wasn’t exactly happy about the apartment, but it also wasn’t the worst place I had lived either. With having reynaud’s syndrome it has been one of the less ideal places, but still livable. The apartment gets too warm very fast, and leads to my fingers hurting, swelling up, and changing into weird blotches of pure white and deep red from my lack of good circulation. It took forever for the air conditioning to be turned on, which lead to more of the patches showing up on my arms up to my elbows and up to my knees on my legs. Even with a portable AC unit my apartment (built in the 1970’s and still running a chiller system in 2023…) would get up to 89 degrees fahrenheit during the day and quickly become unbearable. It was only April 21st when they finally turned the AC on and the heater off in my building.

I want to look for different places to live, but I have absolutely no savings left in my account after having to scrimp things together and hope I could do enough deliveries with door dash to cover everything from my $2000/month (and some change) rent, my internet, insurance for my car and apartment, and trying to still make good on rationing the little bit of food I had.

I’m still looking for jobs at this point, and am completely torn on if I even want to try to renew my lease here for an extra $150/month on top of what I have already been paying, and now adding a community fee and other expenses on from the apartment onto it. At this point, I think I’ll take whatever job comes up and is willing to take me and hope that it is enough to give me some reasonable income that I don’t have to dash as much. But the $200 in my bank account and still needing to pay rent this for this month has me almost considering other options.

I’ve not been this depressed in a long time, not since I was living with my parents. That was an incredibly toxic environment that I have only been out of for two years now, and I really don’t want to go back to it.

To be fair, I’m not even sure why I am even writing all of this. Maybe it’s my way of hoping that the universe hears me and decides to stop being a bully, or maybe it’s my way of hoping that someone else hears me and can actually show me that everything will turn out just fine. I need help, but I don’t have anywhere to truly turn. My partner is already strapped for cash as is, and so are our friends. My family would end up becoming even more abusive if they knew the truth that I am not working anymore, especially if it meant them taking me back in.

I just want things to be okay again.