*taps mic* Is this thing on?

[obstinatecondolement]

So! I have been incommunicado on here for Some Time now, but I thought I'd swing by and write a quick update.

RL stuff involving workplace bullying and mental illness

I've been having kind of A Time of it with my mental health and various RL things—I was bullied very badly at work by a supervisor and eventually let go at the end of the probationary period^*, which has been a blow. I will be starting a 1–2 year accountancy technician course soon though, so onwards and upwards.

In more fandom-y news however, I participated in pod_together for the second year, and had a great time. I was in two teams: one as a writer and one as a podficcer. I also contributed some line readings to the team I wrote for, because it was a Discworld fic and I thought that having a second reader for the footnotes would help mitigate potential confusion.

I wrote Radio Killed the Semaphore Star which semperfiona adapted to audio in the podfic version of the story. It's a post-canon imagining of the invention of radio on Discworld (full credit for this premise to semperfiona! I thought it was such a great idea for this event) in the form of various connected vignettes featuring different sets of characters interacting with and reacting to the new medium. The podfic is very creative and semperfiona did a great job with it.

The podfic I made for the event was [Podfic] Death with Dignity, based on a fic by Thebiwife's fic Death with Dignity. The story is s an examination of the social model of disability through the lens of Deanna Troi's backstory and the extent to which she experiences extra sensory abilities having been aritrarily pathologised both on Betazed and Earth depending on what's considered the "default" where she happens to be at the time. In the final part of the fic, she interacts with everyone's favourite ex-Maquis Betazoid murderer, Lon Suder from Star Trek: Voyager, whose lack of empathic abilities have also been pathologised and problematised throughout his life. The fic is very poignant and I think it hit it out of the park.

There is a fully soundscaped version of the audio version I made featuring some intro and outro music, in addition to many bells and whistles as I could jam in artfully integrate from a combination of sound effects available on TrekCore and Free Sound. This was my first time experimenting with audio effects beyond just trying to get the raw audio of my own recording cleaner with noise reduction and the Audacity de-esser plugin etc., and I had a lot of fun with it.

For people who prefer less busy audio in their podfics, there is also an effects light version that is mostly vanilla audio with the exception of a little echo and reverb added to telepathic lines of dialogue—there are time stamps for the above lines in the work itself as well as information and time stamps for specific sound effects I thought could trigger misophonia in the soundscaped version. I will try and add a completely vanilla version in the near future!

^*Possibly these are somewhat related, but it was also just... a mess there for various reasons that I don't think were my fault and I frankly think that it was a terrible management decision to let me go and they didn't know what a good thing they had with me, but you'll have to take my word for it. I also got fired almost immediately after disclosing my disability, so. Lol. [click to return]

Comments

[flamingsword]

You may not be able to tell government authorities about this because of the anti-labor way such rules are written (which is such 💩), but maybe you could request an exit interview with HR? Or email HR directly, whichever suits your temperament. If you go over what this persona non grata said to you, how it was abusive, and how it was ableist, then HR will know that her crappy personality is leaving them open to future legal culpability, and maybe someone will hold her to account. It may also serve to reinforce in your head that you did not deserve that, and that such bad behavior deserves to be pushed back on. It’s one thing to tell ourselves that we deserved better, and another to act on that impulse to defend ourselves and others.

I may be speaking to my own traumas here, but I let people push me around in school and in relationships like that, and eventually I had to stop letting people do whatever 💩 thing they liked with no pushback, because it was bad for my mental health to not at least say something. But I am one of those Fueled By The Fires Of JUSTICE™️ type of autistics, which not everyone is.

[obstinatecondolement]

To be perfectly honest, I do not have the emotional energy or resilience to do this and I don't want to burn bridges with the manager of that place in case I need a reference. The bully is going to retire in two years and while I hope that she doesn't treat anyone else the way she treated me, she has managed to beat me down enough that there's not anything I have the energy to do about it. I still have not been able to get in touch with social welfare to tell them to re-means test my disability payment because I'm unemployed again, which involves sending a single email, and I am averaging about one shower a week and am almost always day for night, so I just... can't right now.

*offers hugs*

[flamingsword]

That is so crappy, and you deserve better. I’m sorry that your brain is doing a depression / executive dysfunction to you, and hope that that calms down soon.

I wish we could return that stuff to sender, like “here, Bully, have some executive dysfunction!” Sadly, the world doesn’t work that way. But it should. * glares at your former coworker* 😒