Where did the time go????

This past December was probably the roughest December I have ever had the displeasure of going through. It started with one of the people I cared so much for and trusted enormously passing away incredibly suddenly. Then, three more friends were lost to COVID, one more lost to suicide, and ended with another final friendship that got critically damaged, very potentially to a point where it might not recover. It’ll definitely never be what it used to be.

There was a lot more that happened. I spent six weeks watching my friends’ pets, diligently driving all over Los Angeles County to make sure that eight cats and two dogs were fed, cleaned up after, played with, and cared for at various points throughout November and December. I had a very awkwardly failed attempt at a relationship. Which. I had never been so sure of anything than I was this guy. And it just… fizzled but lingered and hurt because it was so clear he didn’t want me. I don’t think he wants to be alone though, which is why traces of what could have been lingered for so long. I stayed at a friend’s place, which was closer to the office I work at. I had my first actual review at work, which went significantly better than I expected to and I also got scolded because I expected to not get a good review.

I am, it seems, very obviously too hard on myself.

The days seem to be slipping by way faster than they had been now that I am home again. It feels like yesterday I was at the New Year’s Eve party watching Encanto with friends. Now it is beyond halfway through the month. I am constantly scrambling to get things done because I feel so far behind already.

I start my final stretch of education next week. This should be my absolute last year of official educational courses lasting more than a weekend where there is the end goal of a degree or certificate. I still need to sign up and take the course to become a notary. But I worked hard to get into the program I am in now. And I am going to get all of these things done.

I don’t have really specific goals outside of becoming a certified notary and a certified paralegal this year. I am not looking to move out any time soon anymore, especially since it looks like in a year’s time, I’ll be able to go back to work remotely full time. I have a really good deal where I am at right now. I want to get healthier but that goal is not limited to this year.

I don’t know. This sure feels like a year.

Let’s see how it unfolds.

Some Sort of Accomplishment

On October 11th I attended, as far as a digital ceremony where all they kept was my name in a list of thousands of others, my college graduation. After half a decade of false starts and struggling with just existing with my brain chemicals and general health. I did it. I have all of my associate’s degrees and a bachelor’s degree.

I don’t know if I will ever actually use my degree in any real way. This is a very expensive piece of paper I’ve earned, that I may never use.

This should feel like something. It doesn’t. But it should probably feel like something.

Contemplation

I’ve been thinking about this article a lot, since I read it a couple of weeks ago.

Letting people know that I am bipolar is terrifying, every single time I must do it. It doesn’t matter the context of the relationship – romantic, sexual, completely platonic… sometimes even just work. And it’s not something I feel I can really keep from people – sometimes it’s not easy for me to hide the fact that my brain just functions differently. But I am scared that it’s a deal breaker. That the person I’ve met and I’m excited by the prospect of getting to know will decide that the idea is too much. Or just how they view me or interact with me will change. It’s not even like I can blame them. That, with the generally hyper-active anxiety, OCD and PTSD. I know I can be a lot to deal with. But feeling that change in interaction is always sucky.

I’m lucky, in that I have one of the most solid supportive group of people behind me who can usually tell when “bad brain” is the predominant brain working. I’m lucky in a lot of ways. And doing a bunch of reflection and figuring out why things in the past didn’t work, and how to get to the places I want to be in life. Maybe that’s why this article has made me quite as contemplative as it has.

https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2021-09-25/la-affairs-im-bipolar-was-it-a-deal-breaker?

Going for a real theme there with those titles apparently. Ah well.

Different

This past weekend was one of the busiest weekends I’ve had in a very long time.

Last Friday night I went to Universal Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights. It was a lot different than the previous years – which makes sense. It would have had to have been different. The crowd didn’t have much restrictions outside of masks needed to be worn unless you were actively drinking or eating. But all the mazes and scare zones kind of suffered from the fact that there couldn’t be as many scare actors. Where one room would have had three or four people, there was only one.

The event was still fun. It was different. But it was fun.

Saturday night my friends threw me an early graduation party. There was also dungeon and dragons. I got to see a couple of people I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. And I actually did things I usually avoid. I stayed inside the whole time. I played Jack Box with people. I stayed behind and watched a movie with everyone.

Everything was different.

I’ve been kind of wibbly wobbly lately. My graduation is literally days away. But I feel so insecure about everything and I really don’t know or understand why. Well. I know some of why. Which doesn’t help anything because I don’t know how to go about doing anything for it.

I don’t know. Guess I just have to wait and see what happens in the next few days.

In which I tell embarrassing stories about myself

While talking to some of my girl friends, one of them was lamenting a way in which they embarrassed themselves by in general being just real goofy. So now my brain is ruminating over some of the ways I’ve wanted to curl up inside myself and never be seen again due to embarrassment. And I can’t think of a better way to get this out of my head and be able to focus on literally anything else than announcing ways I’ve embarrassed myself on the internet.

So let’s get to it.

  • Yesterday I was texting the guy I am currently all butterfly-y about and joking about how I trip a lot. As he joked about how dangerous the phrase “don’t trip” is for me, I very literally slipped and landed on my ass. In front of our normal fish tank cleaner man, who I have 0 way of avoiding in the future.
  • I have forgotten I was naked and answered the front door more times than I care to count. It’s a wonder my roommate has not accidentally seen me naked yet.
  • One time it was my brother. That did not go over well.
  • At one of my regular papsmear appointments, the doctor walked in and I exclaimed “Oh no you’re hot.” He was my gynecologist for the next four years.
  • That time I told my neighbor that my vagina was great, thanks for asking.
  • There are a lot of vagina related ones, come to think of it.
  • So. My vagina.
  • The panic response I give anytime someone speaks to me in Spanish when I’m not expecting it. I usually tell people “me gato is muy burracho,” which translates to “my cat is very drunk.” I had a woman chase me down half a block once because I am clearly an animal abuser. I’m not, I just don’t know how to speak Spanish and that sentence is the only thing I remember from Spanish class.

This has been a fun exercise at laughing at myself. Which is great.

Disco Ball

This holiday weekend has one of my busiest weekends of the year. Probably the past two years – though in hindsight basically nothing from 2020 should count.

On Friday night, I saw Hamilton at the Pantages Theater with my family. And while the show was not the mind blowing experience was the first time I saw it, it was still really good. It just had a lot of technical bugs. And most of the cast seemed to take most of the first act to find their energy. However, they got the singularly most important part of the show right. King George was just a damn delight.

I woke up early Saturday to frantically pack to go out to Vegas with one of my closest friends. We hadn’t spent a lot of time together in the past few years and definitely have not had any real time together on a one-on-one sense. I was going out because I was seizing the chance to see my favorite comedian, John Mulaney, perform. I have wanted to see him live for years, and at the time, Vegas was the closest he was going to get to me for the foreseeable future. We managed to get lost on the way. For some reason, rather than taking the most direct route to Vegas, we were navigated to the Mojave and circled the entirety of Edwards Air Force base.

There was one panic attack during this trip, brought on by a failure on Ticketmaster’s fault. They did not send me my ticket. They did not send hundreds of people their ticket. So I missed about 45 minutes of the show (basically the entire opening comedian, who was very funny for the 5 minutes I saw him) until the venue realized this was an issue and went through the Will Call line writing out paper tickets for everyone who should have already received their dang tickets. But. It was a great show. It was very different from his other shows and sketches but still so funny.

I got to meet a new/old friend too. Who was just about the closest I will likely ever get to meeting real-life human cinnamon roll. They were just a delight to be around. We realized during our lunch that there are so many different facets to who I am, how I express myself, so on and so forth. And given where we were, I realized that I am a disco ball.

It was a good trip. It left my brain riddled with future planning.

It was good. It was all good.

That big emotional info dump

I keep saying I am going to sit down and write. And I say it and say it and say it and say it. And clearly, I don’t do it nearly as many times I say I am going to. I can’t even really say I’ve been actually writing in a notebook.

My life has become very different from what it was at the start of the year. I’m fully single, for example, for the first time in 3 or 4 years. I have been in such a large and heavy pit of depression that nothing in my home looks the way it should. It’s messy and unkempt and I feel messy and unkempt and I look messy and unkempt. And I’m just angry all the time now.

I’m not used to be angry so often.

My forced re-introduction to singlehood was not easy for me. It was not by my choice. At the very least, I’ve definitely taken steps towards moving past that. I’ve been going to therapy, and talking things out. There has been a lot of reflection and admissions of the less positive aspects of that relationship. And admitting to myself that there is no circumstance in which I would date that person again because of those aspects. I kind of lost myself with wanting to make this person happy and twisted myself to a level I don’t fully recognize. I spent a lot of time in the past year and a half loving someone who didn’t really love me to the same degree, couldn’t love me the same way, and I knew it, and I felt just incredibly lonely as a result.

I’m finding me again. Little by little. And I feel enough like me again to try to open up to someone new.

Work has been less than great. I can’t go into a lot of details here. But it’s become a place I dread having to go to and have since started looking for other positions.

In other news, while I had been more actively involved with my doctors and hospital in the longest time I can remember. In fact, the last time I remember seeing this many doctors was when I had just been given the blood clot diagnosis, and told that I needed a wheelchair to get around and would for the remainder of my life. That bit wasn’t true. Mostly because I’m stubborn. But I can walk. I do it every day. We never did figure out what was wrong with me though. We never worked out why exactly I can’t walk without being in moderate to severe pain.

We actually got answers this time. There’s an actual treatment plan in place that so far I hate but I know it’ll get me better. It’ll get me back to where I was at the start of 2020, where I was at the most poised to get to the general body goals I want to. And there is people keeping me super accountable for not falling into eating disorder habits, which has been flirting pretty heavily with me lately.

This really is just one pile of emotional ranty info dump. I started writing this back in July. And just, kept resent staring at it and trying to get the website up and running again on my own and not knowing anything of what I was doing or where to turn to for help. But… it’s up. On a platform I understand just a little bit better than the old one.

And things are getting better.

And they’ll continue to get better a little bit, day by day.

The Umpteenth Inappropriate Conversation I’ve had this week

Some people I hold near and dear to my heart have recently had their baby. This child’s mother is in one of the group chats I am apart of and will occasionally bless us with photo’s of her spawn. Who is as great and pretty as a spawn can be and I am absolutely low-key jealous of this child’s hair color.

Any way.

She attempted to share a picture last night. And was unable to. Because the service we use has decided that the picture of an sleeping infant burrito was explicit content. I have seen this picture. It is literally a infant burrito of adorableness.

Now, I am apart of a few servers. A couple of which are extremely explicit in what is posted. And there has never, ever, EVER been an issue of this is explicit content how dare. Which has lead me to be upset. Because baby is not explicit. Baby is especially not explicit when compared to someone’s vagina. Baby has not had enough opportunities to be explicit.

Which I may have half yelled this morning when my neighbor could hear. Which lead to another I may have traumatized someone with a vagina but at least it was not my own this time.

So yeah. That’s how my day started. I feel like this over moderations fault.

Getting Back At It – Sort of.

There’s a lot I could write about today. I have the Inaguration on, which has given me so many feelings. I also discovered that Luna, the little pug who is a spaz, does not like when I get upset and will try to attack the things she thinks is upsetting me. Which is how I spent 5 minutes calming her down.

I don’t know the prevailing feeling I have from watching this. It is both positive and negative, and there is a lot I am holding out for to see which way everything goes. 

I spent this past weekend in a cabin up at Big Bear. It was my first time up there. I didn’t do much, thanks to COVID having the majority of things shut down. But it was still beautiful. It was refreshing being surrounded by trees and some snow and just very, very chilled air. I realize that I adore cold weather. It’s not something I get to experience all that often, given I live in Los Angeles, where it’s unusual for the weather to fall before 70 in the dead of winter. 

Some may have noticed on my discord and Facebook that I’ve added a streaming schedule. I want to be able to give Twitch more attention than I did last year. I really enjoy streaming, I adore how it’s making me go out of my way to learn something new every day. It has easily become something I look forward to doing. It’s something I am extremely excited about.

Reflections

I did not do a lot of what I had wanted to. I didn’t go to Japan. I didn’t go to Disneyland once a month, or do the stair walks regularly. I did pay off a good chunk of the ever so oppressive debt I was in…. only to need to then put myself in so much more debt due to school and needing to buy a new car. I vaguely remember the things I learned about taking care of my face – but a lot of the time I hit a point of so much exhaustion that it’s all I can do to make it into my bed. 

The Coronavirus altered and changed so many of my plans and ideas for this year. But I did do things. I started school again. By the end of next year, I’ll have my bachelor’s degree. I got a new job that I absolutely adore, and that values me in a way I have never been valued for at work before. I have a new car that I love, that I picked, and that is entirely in my name.

And I did do one of the trips I had planned. At the start of the week, I stared out over a ledge into the Grand Canyon. I felt small and insignificant but centered and whole all at the same time. It was one of the trips I had planned to do this year, and honestly. I had intended for it to happen in May or June. Because of the pandemic, and the general massive amount of depression I fell into this year. I didn’t take it. But I realized that I cannot keep putting things off. So I looked at what steps I had to do in order to be safe, and I went.

I am so glad that I did.

This year has been challenging. It seems like every year gets harder and harder. But we get through them. It’s what we do.

I’m not making a list of goals for next year. I know the things I want to do. I know the big things that I am incredibly focused on making happen.

Next year I am going to graduate with my bachelor’s degree. I am getting surgery to help improve the quality of my life. I’m going to keep streaming and keep pushing myself to learn new things. I am going to start my classes to become a paralegal. But most importantly, I am going to focus on myself, make myself a priority, and do what I can to ensure that I am living my best life. 

Happy new year, everyone.