Literary Pixie

By Sammy Ginsberg

I am so overwhelmed. I sit here and I feel so overwhelmed. I feel paralyzed by the overwhelm. I need to set some boundaries. I feel a lot of guilt and shame in saying no, in not having secure full-time employment, in not having a committed life partner yet, in how fucking expensive LA is, in how big the city is and how fucked up it is – with ICE Raids and homelessness and systemic racism and Palestine – and how far things are. Events I want to go to and support. Poetry event, and yet in a different city technically or a different neighborhood requiring a long drive. Or being asked for help but not being able to help, or to help makes me feel resentful, taken advantage of, guilty. Of people wanting to hang out but being too anxious to hang out, too overwhelmed, too tired. Feeling like we haven’t built that kind of trusting relationship, that healthy relationship yet, or more than that, that I know I don’t feel safe with them, that we are not compatible or aligned in this way, in the way that I need to be with someone but they are asking me to hang out.

When I saw that email and that they were planning to hire an ELA teacher ASAP, I was nearly ready to join up! To be a full-time high school ELA teacher again. Except I remembered that things are not better. I don’t have the curriculum made, I don’t have the health and relationships built to support me. I will burn out again. I will go into the dark hole of survival mode again, and I can’t go back there yet. Ever? I am finally feeling like myself again. Like the Sammy I loved living the UK. I finally feel like my whole self. Not compartmentalized. Not that being my true authentic self is dangerous. The feeling of being a cog in a machine that doesn’t care about you, just that the machine keeps running. Oh I don’t want to go back into the machine. I am scared to be a substitute teacher.

This is why I thought I would just start my own communications agency but I feel anxious of that too. Triggered going on social media seeing the way people post without any understanding of how it impacts others. Or being left out of posts – just no coordination. No communication. No norms – just each person doing what they want.

I fucking hate stories. I hate how they exclude me and overwhelm me. I hate how they don’t actually work for my time management system. I hate the immense responsibility I feel for people and orgs and events that are so far away, that I barely know, that I don’t know that well.

Easy to ask on social media, harder to call to ask for help. A direct message. I have my own philosophy on how to use social media in the 21st century, how to set healthy boundaries.

The last couple weeks, my boundaries have not been helpful. I hate how social media – the way we are publishing all the time, fragments of narratives of information that don’t fit in anywhere. Gosh all those coffees and the festival for next year – but I just feel overwhelmed. It honestly feels like a waste of time, that I will have to hustle and burn out and fight for money and resources for this festival but that it will never be able to take care of me, not a full-time income, only supplementary. And right now, I need a full-time income.

And now that I am too scared to go into teaching, I can’t have that. I could teach social media? Embedded in my health class. That’s what I feel like doing. That next year, I will teach health and ELA. An embedded curriculum. And I will return to full-time employment. And that this year is to create the curriculum, is to build the relationships and get trained.

I have savings to get me to the end of the year. What do I want to do by the end of the year? An investment in my future? I think in the next post I will share some of my brainstorms.