stay warm

It’s not much, but god, it’s a start.

It took hitting emotional rock bottom from missing that wedding for me to acknowledge that something has to give.  The more I chew on it, the more I just feel like with where I’m at, it was in everyone’s best interests that I didn’t attend – to put it bluntly, I’ve become a miserable fuck who gets stressed and scared and lashes out when I have to Do things.  My “everything’s fine and we’re having fun” veneer is a lot more fragile than it used to be.  The last thing I would have wanted is to be a downer there or have people have to bend over backwards to accommodate me.  I think I also would have felt weird and self-conscious about my hermit gremlin physical appearance being out in person with everyone (my friends are all adorable), but that’s a whole other rabbit hole.

Socially, my path forward for wellness is like…I really do have a solid foundation of a group of friends who care about me.  I want to thoroughly understand what I can do in order to do right by them, both as a collective that I shepherd and also as individual people.  It can be hard for me to focus on doing right by –myself- first and foremost…I’m not in a place where I feel like I have that drive.  But doing things for their sake seems like an OK direction to start in.  I have my own shit to work through, and I don’t want that to negatively impact them, but I have to respect my own feelings and struggles too…it’s going to ultimately be about finding a happy and healthy balance.  I’m at a point where my gut instinct is to go curl in a ball and isolate and be angry and get frustrated and think everyone is better off without me, and I have to unpack that bit by bit.

And to the handful of you who reached out to me about what I posted, holy moly. Thank you.  It makes a difference to know I’m not alone in my struggles.

I am 32 years old, and I am capable of so little.

I still can’t drive, and I resent that I live in a world where it’s so required, and it feels like something that I’m a million zillion miles from being able to do both mentally and coordination-wise, if ever at all.  And my mom just dunks on me to anyone that will listen because she thinks it’s funny whenever I do try, which definitely does not make me interested in trying more.  It’s led to a life where I feel trapped in a birdcage.

Speaking of that birdcage, I still live with my parents.  I’ve spent so much of my adult life without a “real job” that I haven’t been financially independent enough to get the hell out of here, though I’m finally making some progress towards it now.   On some level, the thought of moving out is terrible because I’m in such rough mental shape that I don’t feel independent enough to be able to take care of myself. As it is, I’m barely even forcing myself to keep up with basic hygiene….and it’s so hard to force myself to even brush my teeth…I have no motivations.  I can’t cook to save my life, though some of that comes from being ridiculed by my parents for lousy attempts and not liking the feeling of using their messy and dirty kitchen.   My parents don’t really respect me.  My dad drinks too much and is disruptive, and disgusting.  My mom enables it.  My mom is a soft hoarder who doesn’t want to let me clean up or get rid of things, and it effects my day-to-day mental state.  I know there’s more I could do (like chores, keeping my own spaces more tidy, etc) to make it a more bearable situation, but I can never, never find the gumption. I can’t tell where the laziness ends and the mental illness begins with me…but I know there’s something wrong with me.  I also feel a little stuck because I’m so anxious that I would feel terrible if I lived alone, but I’m so people-averse that I would probably feel terrible with roommates too.  On some level I feel guilty for feeling crap about it all because I know I’m fortunate to have a relatively safe and comfortable place to live despite all the major issues, especially since my mom is so willing to pick up the slack in areas where I falter (making sure I eat, making sure I sleep, etc).

My health is in a ??? state.  I haven’t gotten a regular doctor checkup since before the pandemic.  I haven’t gone to the eye doctor (I wear glasses) in even longer.  I have weight problems, hormone problems, skin problems, ear problems….and I’ve just been living with these things and procrastinating.  The Weight Thing is kind of it’s own can of worms because my diet is bad and my exercise is even worse than that from a variety of factors, not the least of which is my overall mood.  For a good while I was using the excuse that I had crap-ass insurance to not work on this stuff, but now that I have great insurance, I know the true reason is I’m just terrified of going.  I don’t really know how to unpack or explain that.  The good news is I’m keeping up with vaccinations, and I’ve still been going to the dentist.  At least there’s that.

My day-to-day and the way I relate to others has been completely decimated by the pandemic.  I’ve spent the past three years just…stressed.  Before I got a job last fall, I was going months and months at a time without leaving the house.  Even now, I haven’t had to go into the office in like ~2 months and that was the last time I stepped foot outside.  I’ve basically just been trying to not want or need anything extraneous, and if I really need something, I either rope my mom into dealing with it because she has to be out in The World all the time for her work or I just grit my teeth and deal with it.  To put it bluntly and half-jokingly, I don’t want anything to do with the unwashed masses breathing on me.  I have asthma.  I don’t want to get covid.  The long-term side effects are not well understood yet, and they are scary.  I work for a fucking hospital that takes covid patients and even they’re starting to get rid of masks now at the same time they’re sending warnings the hospital is at capacity.  I’m tired.  I’m so tired.  And I’ve lost so many people in the past 3 years that should have been entirely preventable.  I know things are better than they were, but I just…I don’t know.  I’ve come to hate strangers, and crowds.  I already hated airports and flying, but now I can’t even imagine going through it ever again.  The subway is also nigh unbearable between it falling into such bad disrepair in the pandemic and the unmasked crowds…any day that I have to use it to work onsite is a nightmare.  In my fear, I feel a million miles away from whatever page most of my friends/family/loved ones are on.  On top of all this is a heaping scoop of good ol’ American crime/violence/gun fear.  To make a long and spooky story short, in the mid 2010’s I narrowly avoided being in a mass shooting situation by dumb luck chance, and I’ve been so skittish ever since…and I think people’s desperate behaviors in our Current World only have been allowing that fear to feed.

My career trajectory is…I don’t even know any more man.  I went to school for art, which is something that really decimated my self-confidence and my love of making art, but I finished my degree out of spite. I tried to make it work for a while.  The timing of my art education was pretty shit, because it was an oldschool program dumping me into a wild west of social media and internet hustle content creator culture that I wanted nothing to do with.  Freelance was never an option that was going to work out for me in the long term, between being woefully unprepared for a 21st century art world, just being a terrible self-manager, and having a yucky time with the weird lack of split between work and hobby and self-worth.  I worked salary for a while doing scientific illustration…I didn’t have enough hours or health insurance for it to be sustainable. I worked for a walking HR violation of a boss who wasn’t just unpleasant, but abusive. I don’t even want to get into that, or this will be twice as long, but to give a little taste of how it went – I was yelled, at sworn at, had things thrown at me, had my personal business picked at, criticized and scrutinized (like eating habits, relationship status, my values, my sexuality, how I got along with my parents etc), and worked long days with no breaks to the point where I would be chewed up and spit out if I was gone to the bathroom for more than 2 minutes.  HR wouldn’t do shit because that manager had seniority and connections.  Between the mental state that job left me in and the pandemic, I basically sat in a state of brokenness for three years until I got a little IT email job.  They lowballed my pay pretty badly because of my career trajectory change/lack of experience, but I took it anyway because the benefits are good.  I liked it a lot there at first, but we’ve been subjected to a lot of rEsTruCtuRiNg which has been stressful and a lot of unknowns.  It sounds like my position isn’t really going to exist anymore after summer next year.  I really have no idea what I want to do in the future. I preform well at my job and the managers like me, but I think a lot of it just stems from me not liking getting in trouble or letting people down.  I’m scared of finding new work in the future, either at this place or somewhere else, because there’s so much general pushback against work from home, and it’s all I can think I can handle.  Job-hunting and job-changing is also so much effort that I can’t muster the energy for.  This has also been my first regular-ass full time 9 to 5, 40 hours a week job, and after 6 months of it…I’m already feeling pretty burnt out.  But it’s definitely not the worst, and I try to approach it with a good attitude, even though masquerading as a well adjusted adult is pretty exhausting.  I’ve just been keepin’ on and trying to save money….but I don’t know what I’m going to do.

And then there’s the state of my social life…hoo boy. As you can imagine, your social life takes a hit when you’re this much of a hermit. Over the years, I’ve distanced myself from some lousy friends. I’ve also distanced myself from some friends that really weren’t that lousy, usually because the regular upkeep on a friendship can really drain my battery.  Sometimes it’s been because I’m a judgy person. From my mid-20’s until now, I’ve slowly built up a friend group of wonderful and good people.  They’re scattered across the country, and I don’t get to see them all that often.  That hurts in its own way. I was seeing someone in this friend group on and off for 5 years.  We hard-stop broke it off almost 3 years ago.  We’re still close friends.  I’m not proud, but I still have a hard time with it.  He has a thing with someone else in this friend group now.  I care about and respect these people, and I want them to be happy, and the last thing I want is to cause any kind of fuss for them or the wider group.  I am having a hard time with it.  I keep waiting for it to not sting, and even now it doesn’t happen.  This is something that’s also just kind of made it hard to move forward with my life in general, because there’s a part of me that still can’t accept I have to pick a direction for myself that doesn’t involve being with that person. I feel very, very guilty for that.   I do a lot of organizing, planning, peer mediating etc. in this friend group.  I’m also the connection point through which a lot of these people know each other, so I think a lot of them see me as a leader, or even THE leader.  But I feel pretty emotionally disconnected and distant and lost, because of every factor I’ve written about in this post so far weighing on me.  There was also a Friend Group Schism a few years back (and honestly, it needed to happen for everybody’s sake), but I really harbor a lot of guilt over it because the bottom line is I helped facilitate that split, and people got hurt. I’ve been feeling such A Way from everything though that I’m starting to wonder if like…my friends would even really like me if they really, really knew me. I generally try to do right by others, but I’m such a jealous and judgmental person.  I’m very bitter.  I can be loud, I can be annoying, and I get frustrated easily.  All I do in the immediate is make sure the dark cloud hovering over me doesn’t disturb others.

Fast forward to this weekend: two of my good friends in my friend group got married. I was invited and didn’t go. I was stressed about work.  Traveling across the country seemed unfathomable.  The thought of being at this wedding and not being able to dance with the person I shouldn’t even miss anymore was too much for me.  I feel BAD.  I think I am not a very good friend.

So, what now?  I don’t know. I think one of the most harmful things I do to myself is I put on a really good face.  Pretending I’m fine is second nature.  I know how to be disarmingly sweet and soft and silly and even a little bit charming.  I know how to trivialize my hurt so people won’t worry or pry.  But I’m in such a worse state than I know how to communicate to people…it’s hard to ask for help, because there’s a lot of shame in letting anyone know that this is how I’m living.  So I grit my teeth, and I grit my teeth, and I grit my teeth…and it wears on me.  I’m worn down to nothing.

I wrote this whole Thing to help me clarify my tornado of thoughts, and if you read it all, thank you, and I’m sorry.  My hope is that having all these problem areas laid out in front of me will help me target them more effectively and make progress where I can.  The silver lining is I am a lot kinder to myself than I used to be, and a lot more in tune with what I’m feeling and why than I used to be.  I hope that one day I can come back here and write something with unbridled joy.  I want to strive for happiness that isn’t fragile, or fleeting.  I want to get better.