Hi all! I just did kind of a silly thing and thought it was worth sharing.
I work at a hotel just down the street from where I live. It's a very prominent building that I see very clearly from my apartment windows- bedroom, living room, you name it. While I enjoy the job to a degree, it's very, very high stress, and I struggle with what I can only describe as a rotating carnival of mental illnesses that only make that worse. I'm sure everyone's familiar with the idea of “your day being ruined because you have to go to work at night”, and that's been triple exacerbated lately by me doing rotating night audit shifts with one (sometimes two) of my other coworkers.
It's gotten so bad that I basically spend my entire weekend in a perpetual anxiety attack thinking about having to go to work for ten hours, and since I can see my job so clearly from my window, it has made it so much worse. Even when I draw my terrible apartment shades, just the light leaking in is enough to make me feel stressed out. Like I'm being perpetually “watched” by my job, an endless and omnipresent reminder of what I am chained to. It's so bad, I'll do everything in my power to avoid looking out the window or even being in the living room where we have a huge bay window, as if I'm being laughed at by God for my hubris of wanting to sit on my couch when I have work in *checks watch* six hours.
So I finally caved to the mental demons, grabbed a blanket and some command hooks, and hung a blanket over part of the window in my bedroom. My only coping method was that if I was under a blanket/in complete darkness, it felt less like work was bearing down on me, so this was kind of a shot in the dark. But I'm very embarrassed to say that it worked wonders and I now feel so much better sitting at my desk. The tension in my shoulders eased and I finally feel like I'm able to enjoy my day now.
Isn't that sad? lol