Maggot Update

They're still in my apartment! I've thrown out trash and a couple plants and cleaned up some dishes, but they're still appearing at night on my ceiling. Where are they coming from?! It's so disgusting.

Stewing in My Own Mess

It's not uncommon for people with mental illness to have messy homes. Some of the symptoms of mental illness include going catatonic and not being able to do anything. This can happen in both depression and anxiety but for different reasons. During a depressive episode, someone may not clean because they don't have the energy or they don't feel like it's worth it. With anxiety, someone may avoid cleaning because they feel overwhelmed or feel they just can't do it properly right now at this moment. When you have both anxiety and depression, it's just a catastrophe.

I must now come clean and confess my mess. It's disgusting, and I'm pretty sure a health hazard. Some weeks, I manage to wash my dishes three times a week. Other weeks, I avoid them like the plague, and then avoid them for a few more days after they start to smell. I should get to that, I tell myself. Yes, but not now. I'm too tired. I feel too restless to stand at a sink and wash dishes. It takes too much effort. I have a lot of excuses.

The piles of nastiness pile up faster than my excuses. Sometimes I have three trash bags in the apartment. The one in the garbage can is full, so I start a new one. I put that new one somewhere on a shelf or box, out of reach of the dog. Oh, that one is full. Time to start a new one. No, I haven't managed to take out any of the bags yet. I will do that...eventually!

Sometimes I run out of clean underwear for two or three days before I actually do laundry. Like I said, it's a health hazard.

I've tried to take a page out of Dana White's playbook and just do a little at a time. This "little at a time" only lasts for one day or so.  I checked out Clean Mama's blog and followed her Instagram, but I scoff every time I see her post. Cleaning takes a lot more effort than she suggests. It's easy if you keep up with it! That's what they say. And maybe it is easier when you only have one bag of trash to take out instead of three, but even that one bag of trash requires a lot of effort when you have to walk out of your apartment, down the stairs, and 50 yards to the nearest dumpster.

I don't have any solutions to this health hazard problem yet. I have to constantly catch myself leaving trash or stuff all over and then have to force myself to put the item in its correct place. Doing this is exhausting. Maybe it becomes easier over time, but cleaning seems to require so much mindfulness and energy that I don't have right now. It's extremely disheartening, and I beat myself up constantly for not having a clean apartment and for not being able to do the basics, such as wash my dishes and put away laundry.

My therapist says that chores can always be done another day, but I'm not so sure that's the case when you have maggots in your house, and you're not sure where they're coming from. But at least getting maggots on my ceiling encouraged me to finally take out the trash.

Mental Health in the U.S. Workplace

By now, I think many people are well aware that there are limited protections for workers in the U.S., and when it comes to healthcare, employees are at the mercy of employers. Even though I was not a good fit for my last position, I was afraid to leave because I would lose my insurance if I did.

In order to keep up with the large workload that I had, I had to work overtime, which meant I worked 45-50 hours a week (for less than $40,000 per year). To be honest, even working an extra hour or two a day didn't help me keep up with the work. I felt constantly overwhelmed. I did eventually have a mental breakdown, and it took four weeks for me to recover and finally go back to work full time. During that time, I was able to use my vacation hours and sick time, and thankfully, my supervisors didn't give me too much flak.

I got the flak later. The last couple of months before I left my position, I decided to stop working overtime because I was incredibly stressed out and didn't feel like I could handle it without my health taking another dive. But the department head then gave me a huge spill about how salary workers are required to work overtime sometimes, and that I had to work overtime to finish projects before I left the company. It made my blood boil. I had worked overtime for a few years, and it was my last two months. It was pure bullpoop. I angrily responded I couldn't work overtime because I was in pain, and she required that I submit a doctor's note. So I did. I was so pissed off that I asked two different doctors for notes. If she wanted notes, she was gonna get them. I thought about perhaps contacting a lawyer and trying to figure out how to invoke ADA. Perhaps I should have gone to HR to ask for accommodations, but I didn't trust them. HR exists to protect the company from getting sued, not to protect the employees.

In the U.S., there is nothing to stop a boss from abusing salaried workers. And let's be honest. Requiring salaried workers to work overtime every single day in order to keep up with the workload is abuse. It's extremely unhealthy and causes harm to the workforce and productivity. Working long hours can lead to burnout and to the development of physical and mental health disorders, such as tension headaches, anxiety, and depression. (By "requiring" here I mean that there are many employers who will say to your face that you shouldn't have to work overtime or you should only work overtime occasionally, but then there is an implicit company culture that suggests you should be working overtime and checking email all the time.)

The U.S. does have the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires employers to provide accommodations to employees with disabilities. But I feel like the act doesn't do enough to protect those with disabilities. And is mental illness a disability in the first place? My mental illness did cause me to procrastinate, and I feel it took me longer to get started and to complete work than expected. However, I'm still not sure that my anxiety could have been considered a disability, even though my doctors had classified it as "severe."

In my supervisors' defense, I didn't tell them I had been diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses or that my anxiety disorder caused physical symptoms, such as stomachaches and headaches. I felt uncomfortable disclosing my conditions because I thought they would have treated me even more poorly than before due to the stigma of mental illness (and yet, here I am talking about it on the Internet, a more public forum than the workplace). I thought there might have been a possibility that I could have been fired since my mental illness slowed my work down and reduced my output.

Mental illness does negatively impact my work, and it cause delays in productivity. I feel like the stress of the workplace environment, working overtime, and just generally struggling to complete daily tasks makes mental health worse, and that supervisors who do not provide compassion or mercy for struggling employees only add to the employees' distress and pain. I wish there were more protections for disabilities and mental illness in the U.S. workplace.