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[recursivetrauma]

I'm job-hunting again.

Ten years ago I dropped out of school to be a homemaker. My dream was to be a game developer with my spouse. It was also to be happy with my partner and cats, and to let go of an abusive childhood.

While we were in school together I had a meltdown following domestic violence and my grades slipped, the semester after this slip I stopped showing up to our classes. I found that the anxiety from these events wasn't going to just go away. I couldn't do my work or even take an interest in it. Even reading code brought on emotional flashbacks.

I tried to keep programming off and on for years. It caused extreme frustration, feelings that couldn't be explained yet because I was mistaking serious mental illness brought on by trauma for regular depression and personal inferiority. I felt like I was struck stupid, and then that I had always been stupid, and then that there was no point in trying because I would never be good enough. At this low point I was coerced into accepting a very bad deal; to be an unmarried house husband with no social safeguards. My life was in someone else's hands.

Things got much worse in my relationship. I suffered serious injuries from further violence, I was cheated on and neglected until I grew distant, and then raped, the meltdown that caused my trauma was never ending. It reached a peak when I was hospitalized from stress. I hated myself and often wanted to die.

I've tried many times to return to computer science. I'm still trying, kind of, but mostly because I have to do something to survive that isn't labor.

I recently did well at a Data bootcamp, but I haven't gotten a job four months later. I've had only two responses.

When I had an interview with Meta it was like I suddenly had IBS. I did what everyone does: grind leetcode and study in preparation. I passed a test with a recruiter. Every day I was shitting myself and quaking so much my abs hurt. My stress was awful. Then someone else was interviewed before me and got the job, and my interview was cancelled. I did another interview for a Data Engineer position for city government where I just bombed.

I'm trapped in the same recruiting hell that everyone else is. But that's not all there is to it. I truly believe that I can never succeed in the long term even if I get a job. This is a stressful career and my worst symptoms come out with external stress. I have seen the pattern of my behavior and understood what it is since I was diagnosed with CPTSD in 2019. It is a serious disability.

Eventually, as I work, I will get sucked into emotional flashbacks that last weeks, I will be overcome with pain and it will affect my performance, the way I'm treated will shift with my behavior. The causality of trauma is that you keep finding it. In 2019, I was bullied at work for the first time in my life while working in grocery. I've dealt with bullies before the trauma, but that requires a strength I don't have anymore. I need jobs I can walk out of to be safe, and tech employers want jobs with steep requirements and multiple testing interviews to make sure no-one is safe but them.

Looking at the work culture of tech, I feel myself reverse-engineering the logic that abused me. Their lives revolve around being obsessively superior, the 'grindset' is driven by fear of being surpassed by others. Unless you're one of the privileged, you live by the logic of elitism.

When I told my partner I didn't want to have sex because of the cheating, to her that was someone with a lesser station in life making demands of their superior. The cheating itself carried the logic of "I need more to balance out our partnership because you're just a loser". Gender roles as sexual economics, they're cruel because economies always are to the most replaceable classes.

There is an absolute logic to economic abuse and social status that no-one can dispel. You don't just spend the bulk of your life being a 'hustle mindset' creep and turn it off in personal relationships. That's who you are everywhere. In my mind, Tech companies driving inequality isn't just a function of technology but the people who build it. You may know that 'harassment in tech' was a news item for years, yet there no mechanism in that industry or even in our society to help survivors deal with it. It's just your problem. If you get out of this hole you teach everyone the lesson that 'anyone can do it', and if you don't you're ignored forever. Even the way we view victims is steeped in elitism.

This idea works fairly well being plugged into various scenarios. After our relationship ended I was mocked on twitter as an inferior. Someone who should've known their place and been more thankful. No-one bothered to question the weird narrative shift from 'my sweet, supporting partner' to 'my evil, worthless ex who wouldn't respect my power'. There is no moral difference here, simply knowing that I was worth less is supposed to carry all the credibility of publicly abusive statements. I could write pages and pages on how viciously economic elitism, and the abuse that follows can shape two people and the social circles around them.

I'm still trying. I see some classmates getting jobs and others returning to amazon fulfillment. I read experiences on this process - It's shocking to realize that normal people are experiencing the same stresses I am, not because of an exceptional series of abusive acts but because of the pressure exerted by the regular economy on them. I'm tempted to say Capitalism is as bad as life-ruining abuse, but for some that's what it is in the first place.

I don't think it's an accident that I did so well in my class. It didn't revolve around the same culture as employment does. I felt confident, social, likeable even. If I had just somehow dropped directly into work from that position, maybe I would've been okay.

I really just want to be safe and I don't know how else to do that. If it weren't for one of my injuries degenerating into arthritis I would already be in a fulfillment center or working grocery.

It occurred to me this week that I wanted to make video games with someone I loved and that's how I got here. I despise that romanticism now, but I feel emptier living without it.