A friend asked me earlier tonight if I had "processed" some stuff that happened to me a while back, and I jokingly told her "My philosophy on emotional processing is: I ain't got time to bleed."
Several hours later, which is just now, I thought about it again and I realized that was way too accurate. Mentally and emotionally, I'm living my entire life as if I was being stalked by the Predator.
I went through so much shit for fifteen straight years, where I was always running or hiding or fighting or outwitting dangerous people (my ex), financial disasters, and housing catastrophes, with a horde of other issues of varying sizes flowing in to fill up all the gaps. I've been out of that life for almost five years now, and the serious crises have slowed down to what I suppose is a more normal pace of about one or two a year (instead of before, when I was squaring my shoulders and taking a deep breath every time I walked in my front door, preparing to find out what emergency was waiting for me).
Even though I'm not constantly running or hiding from a Predator now, I'm still... there. I'm still in that jungle. It's not that he's gone, it's that I don't know where he is or how much time I have before he finds me. I'm spending all my emotional energy on carving wooden stakes and digging tiger pits and preparing for the fight that, in my heart of hearts, I know is coming.
Of course, life is life, and sometimes shit just hits the fan, and I'm always glad for my tiger pits when it does, so my brain doesn't really see this as a problem. "Yeah, it's exhausting, but aren't you glad you had the deep-deep-super-emergency savings account when X happened? Aren't you glad knew and had practiced three alternative routes to get to that client's office when the highway flooded? Aren't you glad you left for that meeting an hour and a half early? Aren't you glad.... aren't you glad... aren't you glad?"
And yeah, I kind of am. I'm generally in an ok position for the one-in-a-hundred or one-in-a-thousand bad random event to happen. So what if I'm spending an equal amount of money and time and worry on the other 999 things that don't happen? Even though I'm kind of disturbed by this realization right now, I'm still having a hard time convincing myself that this is a problem. It's not normal, obviously, but is it really so bad? Especially since sometimes my friends get into some shit and I can say "Hey, here's five bundles of field-made leg-spike-traps to help you out with that Predator that's on your ass. Don't worry, I have ten more in my hidden stash, and thirty more in my extra-hidden stash, I'll be fine."
So no, I ain't got time to bleed. I have to rig up these snare traps and swinging-log-traps for a monster I've seen neither hide nor hair of in five years. If I stop to think about what I've been through, much less take the time to cry about it, it might catch me unawares. I'm still not prepared enough.
But when I ask my brain, "When will I be prepared enough?", my brain replies: "Shut up, it'll hear you. Whittle another spear."
I was a Teamster when I worked for Sygma, and out of all the unions I've been a member of (four, now), the Teamsters were the motherfucking worst. If they were actively trying to take a revolving door of 18- and 19-year-olds just getting their first big-boy jobs and turn them into all into die-hard anti-union voters for life, they couldn't do a better job than they're doing right now, and I told my steward that before I quit.
They designed the whole contract specifically to offload all the real work onto the new guys, protect the older guys when they decided to throw hands on the loading dock, and give as much overtime as possible to the ancient, divorced boomers with no family to go home to, that they could spend pretending to sweep the floors while the trainees finished the actual loading. Guys would bid order picking, then use seniority to bump bid loads/receivers off their jobs and wouldn't pick a single case for the whole contract, while getting paid picker bonuses and shift differentials.
And just to rub salt into the wound, those perks (bumping lower guys off their bid jobs and "sweeping the floor" during overtime) were specifically written out of the latest contract, so only the guys hired under the previous contract would ever get to do them. They straight robbed those kids of even anything to look forward to if they toughed out the low-seniority years. They also negotiated a different pay scale for under 5 years, 5-10 years, and 10 years in, and you can guess which end of that they weighted the raises toward. It was a complete shitshow, and when kids would quit, the Teamsters would keep their initiation fee (taken out of the first three paychecks). You could call to try to get it back, but the best they'd do would be to put it towards your initiation fee for your next Teamster job, as if any of those kids would ever willingly subject themselves to that shit ever again.
AND THERE'S MORE. I just don't feel like typing up a fucking novel on it. Don't even get me started on the shady shit they did during the contract negotiations I was actually present for. It was worse than maddening; it felt like it was specifically crafted by the senior guys to make sure that ladder was pulled up as high as they could behind them, while not actually making any waves for the company. And the safety issues they ignored and covered up, and the fancy fucking "union meetings" they never told anyone about so that they were only attended by the office reps, because they were being held at the most expensive restaurants in the city, on the union's dime, and the number of stewards who were literally fucking floor supervisors, and on, and on, and on....
UIW was kind of spineless and milquetoast, but they took care of us. The Teamsters are fucking old-school mob racket motherfuckers who are single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of workers who think all unions are a scam.