So I recently moved to a different team after seven years of doing a job I only did because it was A Job In the Games Industry (communications) and now I do a job I'm actually suited for (editor in the narrative department) and I'm in the middle of the weirdest identity Moment. I have never had a job I'm good at before. I mean, I was not bad at comms but I had to basically fake being a different person to be good at it, y'know?
And my brain has just grabbed a parachute, flipped off whatever I was doing previously, and jumped. All my capacity for speaking to groups of people or keeping up with work events outside of my job or caring about anything I'm not personally invested in has just fled. I used to hate taking time off because 70% of my job was getting pinged every few minutes as a source of institutional knowledge and at the same time I was constantly behind on my own shit; I would be freaking out the entire time I was away from work, expecting to log back in and find out I'd forgotten something or been needed for something. So I thought it'd take me months to wind down, and instead it's like a rubber band snapped. The rubber band was being stretched into "pretend to be a human being" and has bounced under the couch of "fuck that, I'm out."
I don't think I believed in Job I'm Good At. Like it sounds fake, even now. You mean I just get up, go to the computer, log in on the dev tool thing, and check on words? I can just put some music on and people send me text to edit, and I do that and then I feel accomplished about it? I don't go to bed every night stressing about not having gotten enough done? I don't feel like I'm faking it? I work on a three-person team and both of the other editors are also neuroatypical and chronically ill and do not give a single fuck about office politics? Where am I. Who am I. Am I dead.