It's All About Me. No Really. It Is.

So I've belatedly discovered that the bushist fascists with their dreadful profit-driven health-insurance-healthcare-denial-serf/slavery system have contaminated my mind, and left me vicariously traumatized. Which had been too traumatized to notice until the day before yesterday. No, really.

Here were (are?) my symptoms: irritability, anxiety, panic, angry outbursts (NOT a usual behavior for me), insomnia, hypervigilance. Occasional upsurges of wanting to kick something sentient (REALLY not a usual discursive thought-stream for me.)

So, in the tiny sliver of co-consciousness that miraculously accompanied these behaviors/subjective experiences, I'm like, where is this all coming from?

Which it took me a while to figure out.

It is not my anxiety. (Although I have every possible reason to worry about what I worry about). It isn't mine -- it's theirs. The people I work with at work. I am bringing my work home. And I have been sharing worry about suicidal clients whose insurance providers, in order to save pennies on meds, are dumping people off the latest anti-psychotic drugs and replacing them with cheaper generics or with really old drugs left over from the 1950's. Thus de-stabilizing the previously stable.

I mean, how stupid is that?

And I can't do anything about it. There is no way for me to intervene in this system. I can watch them go from ok on an outpatient basis, to needing to be inpatient, but inpatient is too expensive, so they re-do their meds and spit them out on the streets again, still unstable.

And what is my part in this? Like watching a plane headed into a tall building.

"Oh. Look."

That plane -- is going to -- hit -- that building."

Boom!


Hmm.

So what am I, what are we, supposed to do?