Looking Back on 2021

So New Year's is right around the corner. Somehow. 2021 is already over, even though I'm sure we're all still trying to process 2020, let alone 2021. My hopes and goals and dreams for the New Year are very much up in the air right now. I'll probably do another post later about that. In this post, I just wanted to look back on what this year was like for me, because it's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, as it has no doubt been for everyone.

Substitute Teaching, & Starting to Write

I started out this year as a burnt out Substitute Teacher. In late 2020 I was pressured by my mom, who taught at an elementary school, to apply. It paid decently well, and they were really desperate for substitutes, so it was easy to get in.

And I didn’t always hate it. When I filled in for the art teacher, I had a lot of fun working with the 4th and 5th graders on ambitious projects for things like Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day. I worked hard to build an environment of “we're gonna just try to make this cool thing, and it's gonna be really hard, and we might not be able to do it, but that's okay" and it was a beautifully fun, exciting swarm of chaos.

Unfortunately, I ran out of energy to run those kinds of hectic activities pretty quickly, and I was only able to keep it up for a single class period roughly every other day. Worse, I didn’t get much control when covering other subjects (for good reason). Working with Kindergarteners and 1st graders on basic mathematical concepts is really hard, and though I think I did better than most people without a formal teaching education would, the stress was still beginning to negatively impact my mental state.

During downtime at my substitute job, however, I started writing COMari and Watson's Shark Diaries. I had long stretches of time where it was just me, a pen, and a notebook, and it was at those times that I felt the most alive. If it hadn’t been for substitute teaching, I don’t know how or when I would've started writing again.

Eventually, I believe sometime in April, substitute teaching had become too much for me. I had a very stressful experience one day, where I bounced between several kindergarten classes, and it kept getting out of control. There was another day when I was asked by a student if I had two brothers (I only have one brother; the other “brother” was a picture of me pre-transition that my mom had had on her desk a year ago, and this student remembered it and asked me about it).

The kids were sweet, the other teachers were really nice, and there are definitely aspects of that job that I miss. But I'd never go back. Not in a million years.

I was unemployed for some time, and I spent that time writing and daydreaming about creative endeavors. It was a relaxed period of my life, but I had a fair deal of pressure weighing down on me to start proving my worth. I wanted to prove my creative work could get me somewhere.

Kohl's

Eventually, however, I would get a new job, this time as an associate at Kohl's. And working retail was one of the worst experiences in my entire life.

I didn’t even necessarily hate the tasks that job entailed. Stocking shelves, folding clothes, helping customers find things… those were generally enjoyable to do. But the hierarchical business structure felt so suffocating, and I felt my humanity being torn away from me with every passing day. This is what terrifies me about all modern work - it's all been fitted into an hourly, strictly scheduled framework, with high expectations, low reward, no leniency and no lasting respect for employees.

If I could've temporarily turned my brain off, lost consciousness, and carried out all of my tasks as an autonomous robot, I would've. But my feeble human brain just could not put up with being treated as a tool, as some kind of object that just carried out its programmed functions.

There were a lot of great people. Even some of the managers. I had a great conversation with the second strictest manager about my mental health struggles and needing to reduce my hours, and our conversation reached a point where it felt like we were talking on even ground. Managers of single stores in franchise chains really only get so much power, after all. They're being incentivized by the next level higher up to underpay employees, squeeze the maximum amount of work out of them, and push for quotas. Often, they're only cracking down on employees in order to avoid getting punished themselves. It's a busted system all the way up to the top. It's definitely possible, given a franchise manager with enough empathy, to speak to them as an equal, even if it can only do you so much good.

I seem to have lasted longer than many employees did at that revolving door of a workplace. I started some time in late August, I think, and a week before Black Friday I put in my two weeks notice. The event that triggered my breaking point was when I left halfway through a shift that Friday, because I'd spontaneously begun sobbing and couldn't stop. I was having dissociative episodes again. It was a bad scene. After just the first couple weeks at Kohl's, I was spending all of my off days laying in bed. I would just sleep the rest of my life away. And that didn’t start getting better until I knew for sure that my last shift at that place was coming up.

December

And so here we are. This past month has felt almost like a third of my year. Over just the past few weeks, I've been more motivated than I can remember myself ever being. I've been writing, doing graphic design, recording and planning projects. I've even been programming video game projects in the background.

I don’t know what awaits me in the future. Starting in January I'm once again feeling pressured to look for another job, and I'm afraid of the possibility that my life will fall into another purgatory like it did at Kohl's. But I can't guarantee that any of this online work will amount to anything more than a hobby in the end, so perhaps it's for the best.

I'll try to keep doing what I love most. Being a creative disaster on the internet is what makes me smile, and everything that has and will make up my online presence feels like who I truly am. I really believe this is where all my passion and energy should be, so no matter how many times I fall down, I'll keep getting back up.

See you all in 2022. <3

~ Princess Aquos