You're probably almost off work for Christmas so this is a bit late, but I'll throw my thoughts in any way.
Chordal Wrote:It's been so long since I've been in a spiritually and emotionally dark place that I'm not entirely certain how to deal with it. I don't feel "normal" at times like this (though I'm not very certain how often I actually pass for "normal"), and I don't know how other people deal when they experience this (as I'd think they must, at times).
At the risk of provoking a tl;dr, it's a little hard to know how to respond to you being in a "dark place" and having "a strong amount of darkness" in you, without knowing what you mean. Do you mean it in the sense of depression and other generally unpleasant feelings, or in the sense of having a side to you that while perfect for "you" meshes very poorly with the world you have to live in? Or something else?
Quote:This is compounded by not being able to speak about this angle of things with the people closest to me.
May I ask why you can't speak with them?
Quote:And I've never had to deal with this so long as I've been employed.
-=snip=-
Thing is when I go to work and I am basically reeking of this...feeling like I must be radiating, "I'm on edge. I don't want to be here right now. Don't engage me," the only things I can think of to do are: 1) be wholly with it and honest in the moment, meaning I may scare some people, and that I set myself up for unnecessary emotional suffering; 2) attempt to deny it and play like everything's good, which is not honest, and may scare people *more* when a flash of how I'm actually feeling escapes; or 3) attempt to boot whoever's fronting and only allow them out when things aren't depending on my being not-angry and not-frustrated and not-cold, etc.
If you can fairly easily switch between whoever's fronting, that might be a good strategy . . . though not so good if it means certain people in your system stop trying to handle some situations (and later get forced into them). But as a purely practical step, is there anything stopping you saying to co-workers "I'm not feeling on great form today, so I'm not likely to be too chatty"? They don't need to know why; if they press you can claim a migraine or that you have a virus coming on or anything like that. Certainly trying to be 100% chipper when you're around people is going to be trying on
anyone, let alone someone with health issues and the inherent difficulties of sharing headspace.
Quote:How do you deal with this, IRL?
Depending on the location, I drink a Red Bull or a daiquiri, heh. Chemicals are perhaps not the best method, though <!-- s;-) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";-)" title="Wink" /><!-- s;-) -->
On days when I simply don't want to bother with being friendly, an all-purpose claim of tiredness or similar is useful (often true in my case, as health issues can themselves lead to a lot of unwillingness-to-interact). If it's a bit more fundamental than that, and not just with "darkness" but also with one of me very much wanting to front and do some thinking when the rest of me has to do something (eg work), I can use a kind of forced dissociation. Essentially, "Say" (that's the host) runs background processes, like work tasks, using a computer, or talking to people - while "Tal" (that's the shadow hosted here) gets the majority of processing power to think about what he wants to think about. Co-consciousness, at least to a certain degree, is probably fundamental to this - and I don't know how much co-consciousness you have. But think of it as the times when you walk or drive home, and have been daydreaming, and don't remember how you completed the journey. Your conscious mind was thinking about something, while your unconscious was able to perform complicated tasks to a high degree of specification.
It might be possible to do the same with work - farm out the co-workers and customers and interaction to a calmer, less intrusive part of yourself, while the darkness gets loose in your headspace and thinks/does whatever it has to.