the chemyst @hafnia@wandering.shop

I keep seeing a lot of apologies for not being interesting or funny or positive, and I just wanna say:

You are a person, not a brand. You do not need to be consistently anything but yourself. If you need to take a break, that's OK. We're all people, we'll understand.

Awkward is loving something, boosting it, commenting that you love it, and then not thinking before you link it at yr non-Masto friends who are going to creep yr profile and be weird, so hastily deleting yr reply and hoping that they didn't see it before they looked at yr link.

Kid, if you find me, DO NOT GO MORE THAN A FEW PAGES DEEP, THNX.

I've been meaning to update mine for a while anyway, so #introduction part 2!

She/her, queer, Chicana, partnered, feminist. PhD in materials chemistry, now working as a postdoc in materials science and trying to launch a startup.

Hobbies: #crochet #writing #IndieGames #PokemonGo

Loves: good urban fantasy, friendly people

Hates: racists, TERFs/SWERFs, alt-righters (see: first entry in list), people who insist on calling me by my full (HORRIBLE) name

Hi!

I'm never going to be smart enough or resilient enough or creative enough for the system as-designed, and *that's on purpose*.

Just keep reminding myself that not every place I work will be like this (the vast majority are too big for them to pull some of the shit that's been pulled without major lawsuits, and anyway I have friends who work for them and have been honest about what company culture is like, and it's not...this).

It's not me, it's the team. It's the setting. It's not that I suck, it's that the system is sick and it's designed so that I'm never good enough.

also I'm listed as having "five years of experience in the field of [x]".

A field I have been working in for ten+ years.

Ugh.

writing this Phase I DOE proposal, looks like I've been demoted yet again. Was originally "chief technical officer" at the startup; then I was "director of research", and now I'm "Senior Chemist".

I would laugh, but, like. Y'all.

So now I'm up, and I have a to-do list in front of me that feels eminently doable. If I finish early and go into the lab, great! If not, that's okay too.

Because I sat and asked myself: "Okay. If we're going to get out of bed today, and leave the safe cocoon of the blankets, and face the Big Scary Outside World, what do we need?"

And the answer was pretty basic -- self-care (get up, wash face, etc), comfortable clothes, and an acknowledgment that it's OK to work from home today; we don't have to face our abusive coworker right now.

Sometimes I feel like a colossal fool because I can't manage to do basic things like "get to work on time", and it feels like my brain is actively conspiring against me.

...and other times it's like, "you can think of this as being a separate part of yourself, but it's not, and you need to learn to work with it, not against it."

So I'm working from home today.

Wow, I, uh. I slept most of today.