Work makes me panic; It’s the whole mechanism; this new class of relationships and priorities, it sets me on a paranoid edge. I stand at the sink shifting through the stacks of dirty dishes, sorting and characterisng them into groups based on a dozen factors, loading them onto racks and shoving them into the gaping, crooked mouth of the ancient dishwasher whilst my mind spins onwards, detached. Physical reality wraps its tendrils around my brainstem. Thoughts flicker and loop. Will I be fired? Does everybody hate me? Am i too slow? Is my boss, the one with the fruit machine problem, secretly out to destroy me? Am i secreting the right false sense of servitude and dedication?
For weeks my sensorium has been so completely filled with working that independant thought has been impossible. Except when I’m on breaks, lurking around the smoking area eavesdropping on conversation fragments and drinking in the sea and sky with starving eyes. Recently though there have been moments. Murmuring glints of cognation that make me think i could possibly function on some level other than that of unrelenting repetition of actions. Just the other day, whilst brushing and mopping down the back corridor, shortly after 6am, I had an idea for a dissertation, an idea so good i wished I could go back in time and rewrite my own. The idea was to explore the moralistic undertones of traditional narrative structures and how these undertones sought to influence the social and psychological. This topic is of such a wide berth that it ties into at least a dozen fields; Linguistics, Memetics and Anthropology to name but a few. It’s these moments that almost give me hope that I can exist within the work structure without losing an important part of myself.
