Music Notes

Challenge Day Two

Tell us about an earthshaking Life-or-Death situation in your life. What happened, how did it change you, if at all?

My life has been pretty tame by most standards, actually. I've never been seriously ill or injured, I've never experienced real abuse or violence, and I've always had a loving mother who worked extremely hard to support me and keep me safe. Plus, I don't engage in risky behavior and generally live like a nerdy nun.

Despite all this, I'm not as nice of a person as you would expect, being honestly rather ornery and cynical, a bit of a lone wolf. I should remember to count my blessings and seek to cultivate a sense of gratitude for what I've been given so far.

Perhaps what threw me into the worst turmoil of my life, very nearly stealing away my sense of identity, was the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It was a complex combination of factors which came together to make a situation I had no control over. I'll try to break it down for you as well as I can.

In 2019 I had a job, my first one, at a charity work project, supposedly Christian. I was delighted with it and excelled in my duties. It all seemed to be working out well, and I had hopes of making a fairly decent amount of money and developing my skills to move on to something better.

Then the pandemic showed up, and everything went south from there. The project shut down for six weeks, and when it resumed, my position was tenuous. The boss was extremely stressful to deal with, and it was up to him to assign work days each week as he saw fit. The more I needed work, the less likely he gave me any.

The workplace trounced health regulations: masks were rarely or poorly worn, people didn't observe social distancing, and the new workroom was overcrowded, with little air conditioning or ventilation. But I stuck it out, not knowing what else to do.

I became more and more anxious and obsessed with my job over the course of 2020, spending hours calculating work days and figuring out ways to deal with the boss as he encouraged a culture which grew steadily more and more toxic.

I overworked myself in a high-risk environment. The pay was based on effort, and being a strongly competitive sort, I drove myself to outperform all others in an attempt to earn enough money to get somewhere. When I got home each day, I was too exhausted to do anything constructive with my free time. Many days I would hit the pillow immediately and black out for a couple hours.

The solitary, relaxing, interconnected hobbies I once pursued went down the drain: journaling, music, photography, digital art. All I had the energy to do was deaden my brain by scrolling endlessly through Twitter, hanging out with people I had nothing in common with.

The mindless, repetitive, strenuous quality of my job, combined with the stress of the pandemic and the irrational, overbearing attitude of my boss, brought me the closest I've ever been to a nervous breakdown. My creative power disappeared, and my mental abilities deteriorated until I quite literally couldn't put two sentences together coherently.

My records from those days document my mental decline; the failed attempts at communicating with old penpals, the photo gallery littered with dreary screenshots and disorganized work-related pictures, the hastily scribbled chains of random, undated notes that should have been journal entries and never were.

Finally, things reached a breaking point. I realized the harder I tried to work there, the less I was getting out of it. The situation was a trap, holding me back from what I wanted to do. I was turning into an empty-headed, stressed-out, restless idiot, manipulated by a boss who was anything but Christian, spending my days doing menial labor in an incredibly noisy environment drenched in distasteful music which drowned out any possibility of coherent thought.

What settled the matter is when the boss and his wife blatantly flouted national guidelines by hightailing it a thousand miles across the country to Ohio for Christmas and came back with Covid. They shut the place down again for several weeks, leaving me in a lurch. When one employee, a friend of mine, died of Covid, I knew I'd better quit before I lost myself in the sickness sweeping through. As it was, I'd already lost most of my identity.

By March of 2021, I was out of there. I spent the rest of the year putting my scattered brain back together, slowly reallocating my free time away from Twitter and other useless things. It helped that my two favorite artists, Imagine Dragons and OneRepublic, both made their post-Covid comeback that month, releasing singles which gave me something to get excited about. ID's Follow You and Cutthroat and 1R's Run sparked my weary imagination, inspiring me to write, observe, and create art.

By the time their respective albums Mercury Act 1 and Human dropped in early autumn, I was feeling more like myself again: artsy, thoughtful, journaling extensively about everything I could think of, dabbling in various forms of digital art, and perfecting my handwriting by transcribing poetry and song lyrics.

Thus closed the strangest chapter of my life so far: my pandemic experience. These days, my brain is more active than ever before, and I'm quite handy with my words as I craft stories, poetry and blog entries such as this one. I'm still looking for a job I can be passionate about that won't take over my brain, but at least I can think straight in the meantime. I'm grateful I didn't catch Covid during that trying time.

Word Count: 939.