I’m struggling these days. It reminds me of the winter 2023, when I was getting ready to leave my apartment in Culver City. I was worried sick that I would be evicted from my apartment because of the mold in my bathroom that I never reported. So I would start future-tripping over the worst-case scenarios: I was going to be evicted, and the owner of the building would take me to court, and I would end up on the street, homeless, starve to death and die. These movies really play in my head. I’m not making this up. I told the manager about the mold, and he made me take pictures, and he said the maintenance man would come and take care of the problem. But he never did. It made me wonder. This was around the time when I hired Orkin to exterminate the bed bugs in my apartment.

It was a rough winter, and when the new year came along I carried the same anxiety as I do at the start of every year. What two disasters will strike? There are at least two, and they happen whenever before a dormancy period where I’m like a deer in the forest that hears a sound and gets alarmed even when there isn’t any danger. I’m hypervigilant, waiting for the next calamity because I go through them most weeks, like I can’t sit still and relax. I have to be on the lookout for any starving bears.

Well, I moved out of that Culver City apartment and never got evicted. The owner never took me to court either. I’d lived there for over three years and never got in trouble for anything.

Now life is better in Palm Springs, but my job has put me in severe anxiety. They keep inundating me with work and more work until I’m drowning and can’t breathe. They expect me to meet a quota which is too demanding and impossible to catch. I’m already way behind. I have to work cases and finish them within ninety-six hours, and I already have had cases open for over a week that I either can’t get to or can’t close because my clients keep having issues to solve, and so the cases remain open. That’s just one aspect of the job. Other duties include working from two spreadsheets with long lists of assignments that I can barely get to because I spend so many hours on the cases. And that doesn’t even count the emails I have to answer. These owners send them every day, and the emails keep growing and growing. It’s driving me insane. I need an assistant.

I went through full-blown panic on Tuseday because I believed I was dealing with a fraudster who’d stolen someone’s EIN for their business and changed the address. The person had fooled me into changing the corporate entity address that wasn’t on their SS4. I hated myself. I thought how stupid of me as I was taking a walk. I thought for sure I would get fired and get in legal trouble for being such a dumbass. I called the owner’s phone number on Wednesday, and it was the same shady person, although he didn’t sound as shady. But I still wonder if he’s a fraudster because he hasn’t signed the contract. The week only got more complicated from there.

Now I rest on Saturday, knowing what kind of maelstrom I’m gonna face on Monday: a long list of emails and cases I still haven’t solved, not to mention the spreadsheets. It’s all insanity, but I guess that’s what makes it a real job. It’s shitty, but I don’t know how shitty it can get. What if the next job is even worse than this? What if I actually have it good, but I can’t withstand the pressure as it is? I like my schedule and the company benefits. But at what price? How good are the perks when the job itself is making me want to quit? I go through bouts of a “fuck it, fire me” approach. That’s when I get fed up when I have to tackle five things at once without any skill in time management.

I watch videos where the guru says that multitasking is really bad. Tell that to the higher-ups who keep inundating me with work after work. For chrissakes, hire more people. I heard from a neighbor that that’s what companies are doing. They’re just overloading the employees they have with more work. I know I’m not alone, but I don’t want it period. I think about quitting and just roaming like a nomad living off the land, not having to work for anyone. But again, that’s me future-tripping. I know that’s not going to happen to me yet.