You can call me Houdini.

I pulled my famous disappearing act again!

Let me back up and explain.
I have intense anxiety and panic disorder (which anyone who’s read any of my entries would already know) and it affects my everyday living exponentially. Every time I get a new job (or start anything new for that matter), there’s about an 80% chance that I will bail out of it due to an anxiety attack or just extremely uncomfortable feelings. Usually I’ll start the new job, get through the whole first day, then commence my freak-out once I get home and never go back (this has happened with four different jobs in the past). I also have a habit of just not showing up to my first day due to the same reason. Such a situation happened today.

I got a job at Walmart a couple days ago as an "overnight stocker" and my orientation was today at 8:00AM. I don’t have a car/license (another lovely side effect of my anxiety), so my mom had to bring me an hour and fifteen minutes early (that is when she had to be at work). In hindsight, this was a mistake that could have been prevented. I should not have down time to think about stuff before I am to start something new. I just go over and over things in my head, coming up with all kinds of different things that could go wrong. I was walking around Walmart, looking at stuff (they have a lot of awesome DVDs in the $5 bin; I was surprised), and coming up with all these hypothetical situations:

What if I don’t know where something goes? I’ll be too nervous to ask someone!
What if I price something wrong and everyone complains and I’ll get in trouble?
What if I have to talk to coworkers on that little walkie-talkie thing that everyone who works at Walmart carries?
What if I get lost in the labyrinthine back storage area and can’t find my way out to the main floor and become late and get in trouble?
What if I just don’t know anything and everyone will be like, "Wow, this is Walmart, if you can’t figure this job out, good luck with your life…"

And so on and so forth. So, of course, at this point, I started getting really nervous and sweaty and I kind of started to hyperventilate (the beginning signals of an anxiety attack). I told myself I was just going to go outside and get some fresh air. Mistake #2. If I ever put distance between myself and what I’m supposed to do, that’s the end of it. I’ll feel an intense sense of relief because I have extricated myself from the thing that had caused me so much discomfort and the only logical thing is to keep putting more distance between myself and said thing. So, I just started walking. 

I walked to my boyfriend’s house which is somewhat close to Walmart, muttering "FUCK, FUCK, FUCK. SHIT, SHIT, SHIT." every two minutes or so. I woke him up and started pacing around his room, grabbing at my hair and clothes, exclaiming "What am I gonna do!?" about three hundred times. He, being extremely tired and annoyed that I woke him up to run around his room being noisy, wasn’t very sympathetic. He told me it’s my fault and that he wasn’t surprised that I bailed again. After not getting any sympathy (wasn’t really expecting any), I just decided to walk home. 

I still live with my family (mom and brother). My brother was supposed to pick me up from Walmart today at 4PM (when my shift/orientation is over) and my mom gets home from work at around 7:30PM. Both of them will be extremely disappointed in me and I’ll have to explain that I bitched out on yet ANOTHER job opportunity and I’m back to square one. I honestly have no idea what to do anymore. No medication is working, we don’t really have 500 dollars a week to throw around for therapy and just "pushing" myself to do something has never ever been successful in the past. I’m sure the good people of Walmart have no idea where I am considering I just didn’t show up and I’m too embarrassed/anxious to call them and tell them that I have a brain issue that prevents me from continuing my "job" with them. Why do I suck so hard?

I got hit by a van when I was 12 or something and it resulted in a head injury. My old psychologist wanted to have my brain tested because he thought there might be a correlation between my head injury and my seemingly complete lack of normal reactions to stress and anxiety. Of course, we ran out of money before I could get the test done. Yet another reason why it would be pertinent for me to get (and keep) a job. FUCK!!!