Paranoia...
Recently, two coworkers called in consecutively, one on one day and one the next.
I know one of them has been unhappy here (he just put in his two weeks), and everyone was stretched thin because of one our full-timers was on vacation.
Both days it was just me and my boss dealing with everything--the first day she was forced to exceed twelve hours, working from 630 am to 800 pm (close), to give an example. Then she had to be back at 6 am the next day.
I wonāt get into what I was working per day because itās unimpressive for a healthy person, but physically devastating for me. I will say I ended up working 33 hours in five days, with none of those days off.... bear in mind my upper limit for working and not debilitating myself is 20 hours in seven days, with three of those days off.
But the point is, it was difficult for me not to believe that this was deliberate, that because the coworkers had closed/midclosed together the night before, they had done this on purpose, toĀ āget backā at her (with me as collateral) because they were angry about their hours, or both of us (because I was complicit in allowing her to overwork... me and others?.) It made such sense, that they were doing this to teach us a lesson or out of conscious spite.
There were a few mitigating factors (the sloppy close the night before from someone who has never had a sloppy close in her life, the consistent unreliability of the other employee) that I could sort of point to as proof against it. Which did help.
Still, it persisted until I worked with the woman a couple days ago... and surprise, she was actually sick. Amazing.
(I donāt really care what the other guy was doing. Heās constantly late or calling in so his excuse is irrelevant.)
But it wasnāt until recently that I began to identify my concoction of these āminor conspiraciesā as paranoia and... not.... well, Iām not sure what I thought it was. It wasnāt anxiety, haha.
I was, for a long time, under the impression paranoia meant you had to believe inanimate objects were watching you. It didnāt occur to me that this could be paranoia too. That people were conspiring against me in secret all the time in petty ways that still matter.
Of course, it also didnāt occur to me that my beliefs about climate change and the government and society werenāt paranoid, let alone delusional.
So I guess Iām not very good at this, ha.
Or maybe I should look at it this way: Iām getting better at it. Haha.












