Some updates and some anxiety

 I'm trying with some difficulty to remember when I posted last - it was June? What was going on in my life in June? It feels a little dim and far away.

Shortly after the first pour, our contractor came back to us demanding more money. The way it works in SF, if you piss off your contractor enough they walk, and then you can't get your job finished for any amount of money - so we're basically held hostage on that front. Our project that started out as a stretch, but doable, suddenly ballooned to, essentially, half a million dollars. We finally extracted a ceiling number from them, and figured out how we were going to pay that... somehow. (Spoilers, dipping into capital party of me.) It's taken me a decent amount of time to simply be grateful that I have some reserves I can liquidate still, instead of loathing and fearing that I'm going to have to sell the money I was to use to retire on.

And then things got... weird... at work. One of the engineers who has been a problem became increasingly more of a problem. I was fielding weird emotional requests, while also getting my roadmap towards the product continually filibustered and altered out of all recognition. Then there was a week of almost total silence, while half the company was out on vacation. I was counting down the days until it was my turn to go on vacation - out to Burning Man for the first time since 2019.

The day before my PTO started, they laid me off. 

Mostly I was angry and annoyed, I had so many hopes and plans and we were making progress towards having a functional product. I'm proud of myself for, in the moment, remembering to ask to keep my laptop, and for them to extend my last day to the first of the next month so I'd get another month of health insurance.

And I'm also proud of myself for just sucking it up and putting it out of mind for a bit and taking the damn vacation. I'd missed the desert and the freedom from worry that I get from Burning Man, and it was good to have that week out of time.

Of course reentry was rough. I caught covid in Reno on the way home and was sick for about a week. And then I had to hit the ground running on the job search - except that I realized that having been poached for the last job, my resume was in tatters. So first I started over on that with the help of some truly wonderful friends, then submitted a bunch of applications. And did screen after screen, interview after interview, writing test after writing test. The first one I bombed, mostly due to being unable to focus since I had another test stacked up right after it. I spent the next week regretting and assuming that literally every writing test had been a bomb. I had one job role abruptly close two hours before I was supposed to interview. I had another company ghost me for two weeks and then say that they'd found someone with more API experience. And another company that did some weird swaparoo with their job roles and now has two writer roles out there, staff and senior, and I'm honestly not sure which one they think I'm applying for. 

On Friday I got a call with a verbal offer. I was relieved, but something seemed... off during the conversation. I spent a weekend with a weird sense of relief but also dread, restraining myself from some celebratory, jubilant buying of wishlist stuff and I'm glad now that I did. The offer was supposed to come up "early in the week". Nothing Monday morning, nor by afternoon. By Monday evening I was starting to marinate in panic and self recrimination again. Still nothing Tuesday evening, when the sensation tipped into the adrenaline rush of a prolonged low-grade panic attack. 

This morning I had the hard offer in my email, but it's for literally $30k less than we discussed. 

I suddenly regretted telling anyone I had an offer, and felt like I was being punished for hubris. Immediate and total self-recrimination and a resurgence of the panic-simmer. I took a nap. It sort of helped.

It's October 5th and I'm now going on Martin's health insurance because it's less than COBRA ($980/mo) or Covered California ($590/mo), and I'm grateful that I have the option. But the house isn't getting any cheaper, and I'm starting to find myself slipping back into weird scarcity-mindset ways that are just... premature.

But I've also spent something like $14k in the last month on windows and doors, and I am just a bit freaked out about the stock market - because the stock I have to sell has to be at a price where I'll get enough to cover.

So I'm in final rounds with a place that seems super great, I finished my interviews on Tuesday and now with this panic-simmer of self recrimination, I'm thinking back to all the things I said that could've been awkward or misconstrued, where the interviewer interrupted to redirect, where I kicked myself. I know for a fact that they can meet my salary band and the benefits sound perfect. So of course I'm imagining every minute thing they could've taken as a dealbreaker. There's another promising place, but they seemed slightly lukewarm about hiring someone so senior, and while I really enjoyed talking with the lead, I've only got to the writing test and still don't know how I did on that.

I admit I am spiraling a bit. Writing it out makes me feel temporarily better; the first place's inability to value me correctly doesn't actually mean I'm worth less, just that they're unable to pay. But in this economy and with this level of debt stacking up behind me, my urge is to fawn like hell and just do whatever it takes to get a job. I have never played bluffing games because this is so hard for me. I'm just trying like hell to hold steady, and not let it shake my nerve.

I am really fucking excellent at what I do, and it's not lost on me that I still, even seven years later, still have to tell myself that.

Dark days

There was a moment, alone beside a canal in Oxford, in the summer of 2015, when the warm, humid breeze brought the scent of flowers and fruit and cut grass, along with birdsong and the murmur of the waters, and I thought to myself This is the Thing. 

I've spent years thinking about colonialism, how so many of the world's ills come from a structure of control meant to do... what exactly? To filter money to the top, so that elites could hold their slice of this feeling, of this calm and peace and abundance. 

I've lived in California most of my life, and never understood the desire for more land than you could enjoy, but then you could argue that California land will never have the same lushness of a place that gets, you know, regular water. To me, more of anything becomes more to be steward of. More fences to mend, more brush to clear, more life to tend and death to guide. I've always had a farmer's sensibilities for that. But I digress. 

Colonialism is at its core about greedily (insecurely?) taking more and more, at the expense of others, because you are afraid you won't get your share of the pleasure of life. Almost every other ill flows from this.

We're seeing the roots of a new system of slavery, aided and abetted by the online media, guided by cynical nihilist kleptocrats, and run by Christian Dominionists. They started by dismantling education and continued down a decades-long strategy from there. And yet, there are principles to this inhumane march that we are not quite acknowledging yet: That we no longer acknowledge anything like the sanctity of life; that anyone not white or Christian has no rights, and even among that privileged subset, only men should have the power to make decisions over the life and death of the people around them. All other people are to be food for the engines of commerce; while the tiny fraction of people in unjustly in control enjoy their lives, the rest of humanity exists to toil and breed and bleed to serve them. They want more people, but only more powerless people. The suffering of most for the pleasure of a few. It is the anti-Utilitarianism. 

They want us ignorant and fighting each other, distracted by struggles over who should be able to live their lives and to what extent, from the very real likelihood that this species will not survive the next century.

Because if we're all going to die, they who die with the most memories of pleasure "win".

We must not give up fighting, but we also must not stop taking pleasure in life, be it little or big.

The day after the Supreme Court shows its recent and extreme lack of legitimacy, we must understand - who cares how many people die from gun violence? Someone at the top is getting rich. Who cares how many women die? We will force them to make more.

I do not think the host - the United States of America - will survive this parasite.

The Kiss

 You're all going to laugh, but the thing I've been putting off writing about has been "Our Flag Means Death" which has been, as a queer jaded media consumer, an absolute revelation.

I put off watching it for a long time, despite friends tweets that went something like "Binged this show five days ago and am still crying about it". Or possibly because of those posts, because crying about a thing for that many days seems... uncomfortable? But then there's the implication that it's a good cry and NOW I'm intrigued and...

So we watched it. We spread it out over about two weeks (I think?) because it's really impossible for a person to consume and digest all the nuances of a story in one sitting. Giving yourself a day or so between episodes to think about the content and the trajectory really enhances your appreciation for the story.

But then we got to The Kiss.

...And now I have to backtrack.

There are a limited number of tropes in Hollywood and media in general, for portraying queer people. There's the classic one of the reviled effeminate queer, a la Peter Lorre (who lives on, immortal, as the shape of "wacky villain" in every kids cartoon from the 30s on apparently). There's the dangerous queer, the queer who inevitably dies, the comically harmless queer. More recently, we have the stoic queer, and the coming-of-age queer. 

It is so rare to see stories about us just living our lives, where the queerness isn't either the source of conflict, a dooming plot point, or played for a laugh.

So then there was The Kiss, and I literally held my breath waiting for the punch. Waiting for one of them to laugh uncomfortably, to deny the moment, to go "whoops, what was that" or react with violence or (comic and/or dangerous) unrequited lust. 

Instead it was sweet. No horror, no hurt, no awkwardness, no rejection. Just two men talking honestly, kindly, and explicitly about their feelings for each other.

It took weeks for the groundbreaking impact of that to really settle in, and now I understand "crying about it days later". I wasn't aware how much of a hole in the genre there'd been until I found the thing that patched it. That it didn't matter if they considered themselves gay or straight or what. They're pirates. They defy societal convention - why would they care about these labels?

It is no wonder that this show is inspiring such an incredibly talented and active fanbase. 

And now I sort of have a crush on Taika Waititi.

Over a year

So much has piled up in the last year that it started to weigh heavy on my blogger's conscience, which as we all know ::cough:: just makes it harder to get over that hump and sit down to write. But at some point the missing post starts to hold other things you want to say hostage, and so away you start.

Right around my last post, someone I cared about dumped me for a third time, and I sort of got... too busy. We'd hired that lead writer at work, and some things he passed on to me from the higher ups made it absolutely clear that my work was not valued. That, combined with the chaos of my company being bought by a larger one, and the utter clusterfuck that turned out to be, with turnover and broken promises and the painful process of shoehorning a small startup's tempting benefits into the reduced generosity of a larger company - it made it clear it was time to leave. 

However, in the midst of *this* our long-running search for a home finally bore fruit, sort of. The house took the maximum of our available funds, and took an eyewatering sum to be made ready to live in. We spent May not-really-believing we were in escrow, and June frantically working on the house: new roof, new flooring, new plumbing so we could have a dishwasher, all new appliances (well technically, since the water heater horked at died two weeks in), a lot of new electrical runs so we could safely work from home, and an all new kitchen. That was on top of the usual things like rugs and curtains and figuring out where to put things. I spent a month working from a jobsite, air traffic controlling simultaneous contractors, from a plastic card table in an empty kitchen. 

My delicate neck and shoulders did not care for this bullshit one bit and I started having severe arm and shoulder pain that woke me up and kept me up at night. By the time we moved in at the end of June, I was so sleep deprived and lost that the pain relief of a hot shower in the new place made me *actually cry*. It's been a long walk back from that and I'm still not 100% - but at least we're pretty sure this is muscles and not bone this time.

So, during this time, I gave my notice at the old job. My new lead had taken the day off so I had to give my notice to his boss, who I liked immensely and who'd gotten a raw deal joining a company that'd just been acquired. I was so shot I burst into tears and blabbed my heart about being undervalued and patronized, and she was shocked but saw the truth of that and just asked me not to repeat this to the new hires just coming onboard. 

The moves were absolutely traumatic. The company had refused to come and give an estimate, so we each got one day. We each should have had two; one for packing and one for delivery. M spent my move day at the house overseeing the kitchen installers, who were done, cleaned up and gone, several hours before the moving van even left my old apartment. Unloading at least went reasonably fast. The second day I stayed at the house, making room for M's incoming things - and I thought I did really well! But oh boy. That was awful. The movers "timed out" in the end, and had to dump everything into the house's garage. We spent the next four months deduplicating our things and making run after run to Goodwill to deposit duplicates.

And I started a new job. The first day of the new job started late, because just as I was signing in (temporarily from my own laptop) I started hearing water running in the wall behind my desk - right below where the toilet was. It turned out to be a bent antique lead toilet gasket, but it set me back a bit. Aside from that bumpy start however, things have been going well, and I've enjoyed getting to do all the same things at a 600x the speed of the last place, with people who take my word that these things are needed.

The months sort of flew by, to be honest. We spent a good several months interviewing contractors and trying to relax, getting turned down by the contractor we'd most liked, and having to start over. In the end we signed a contract for a whole new foundation and a bunch of excavation... and then had to sit and wait until people were available. We did things like go camping, and tried to get back to normal as vaccination rates went up, and cases went down. And then there was Delta and everything went back to the way it was before. We attended a lovely (pre-tested) party in Truckee that had some weird relationship dynamics in retrospect, but that was otherwise absolutely wonderful. Odd Salon had its first back-to-in-person Salon and it was amazing and terrifying to be around so many people so close together.

The new roof held up during the bomb cyclone that hit San Francisco in October, and in November our new stove was finally delivered, just in time for us to celebrate Thanksgiving, still in pandemic distance. We had a lovely, quiet Christmas season with lots of baking and cooking and eating. We explored the neighborhood, and joined a gym, and went wine tasting. We attended and spoke at the second in-person pandemic Odd Salon. All this while waiting for work to start on our house.

The original start date had been "in Q1 of 2022" and when I started emailing in early March they didn't have a timeline. Our architect only finally got to drawing up plans in April, and was gone all of May, doing revisions by email late at night Pacific time, from his family's place in Turkey. 

In April my work planned its first traveling offsite to San Diego, and it was absolutely exhausting and unrelentingly work work work, with only dinnertime being the "fun" part. With the international fly-ins, this was just... not great. By Wednesday I was so sleep deprived that we checked into our new, us-paid hotel and I couldn't even explain what food I needed. We had a great pizza and then I went back and slept for a few hours. We spent the next few days enjoying San Diego, though I started to have more and more sinus congestion and a sore throat - I figured one of my typical sinus infections - a few days in. We didn't let it slow us down too much. On the day we returned home, we got an email from our contractor saying they were ready to start in a few weeks and how was our move-out going? I was not in a state to really respond...

It was covid. The next ten days were a haze of exhaustion and sweaty nights and taking sudafed on a timer so I could keep breathing. On the third day I called my doctor to try to get an appointment because my throat was waking me up at night from the pain, and I was coughing up blood and green goo in the mornings. My doctor's office couldn't see me until the next week, and my actual doctor had no openings until eight weeks later. I gave up and joined One Medical, got a telehealth appointment the next day, and a prescription for the anti-viral paxlovid the day after. The next five days tasted like metal, and because of the potential for liver damage, held me off from taking the antibiotics I knew I needed to kick the sinus infection. By the end of the paxlovid and the amox-clavin I felt mostly better, though I still cough and I feel short of breath sometimes. 

During this whole ordeal we were scheduling the piano movers, movers to pack our breakables, movers to empty the garage, the asbestos company to take away the ductwork, and the heater guys to take away the antique gravity heater for a future project. Odd Salon ended, somewhat abruptly, due to health issues among the organizers, right after I started testing negative. We also found and compared a couple of short-term rentals (which I will add is HARD when you have a cat in SF in tourist/intern season) and secured and moved into an eye-wateringly expensive one that gives us a lovely view, and puts us close enough to be able to walk back to the house if we're needed. 

On the last day of May (Ramadan?) our architect returned to SF and finally took our permits to DBI - where they were approved over the counter. A HUGE sigh of relief. We'd reduced the scope to the point where all the things we were adding - drainage, sewerage, a new bathroom, etc, were just "foundation replacement and seismic upgrades". 

So that brings us more or less to today. We're in the beautiful but expensive rental, with the Pride flag out one window and the Pink triangle lit up on the hill out the other side, with Luna contentedly on her chair.

And now I can write about the rest.

A running thread

 I started this post to talk about grooming and didn't even get there.

Because when I found out that my friend had died, it came up in conversation about it with another person that someone I had cut out of my life rather earlier had also passed away (of skin cancer of all things). I realized I'd cut out a large part of my formative social scene because of the hurt (and let's face it, harm) they'd done me over the years. I said something to the effect of "Lot of people who won't hear 'no' in that group". And it hit me; this is where it started. 

I loved the place I went on Tuesday nights to dance to a local band and talk about nerdy things. I felt seen for who I was, I felt supported, I felt attractive, I felt safe; all things that I did not feel at home nor at school. I finally found a place I could take some more tentative steps towards my own erotic fulfilment, and it was mostly with people my own age. But I also endured the advances of some much older men who I did not find attractive, while considering the advances of some men who I did.

We were all subject in myriad ways to the Five Geek Social Fallacies, spread over a community of a hundred or more people. These dynamics are toxic and harmful enough in small groups, but at that size the problem is exponentially worse.

There goes my brain, trying really hard not to think about this again. 

It starts simply enough with affectionate words from a man of the group. These are missing at home and so welcomed, and so is the chaste affectionate touch that follows. With some of them, it becomes less-chaste, but never outside the bounds of some group-understood propriety. You are underage, and you are safe. And because you're safe, you let them do things that maybe you wouldn't let other people do if you didn't know they were safe. A touch that lingers. Some inappropriate comment. You don't notice it slowly ramping up. You are exploring with other young people your age, and you interleave the humiliating and awkward things you do with people your age with the interactions with the older crowd. You're praised for being so "mature" and so in control of yourself. If you stand up for yourself, this approval is rescinded.

I gave up seeking my mom's approval in 2016. It is only now, some five years later, that I realize that the gap where I was trying so hard and not getting it, was a time that left me vulnerable.

I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager. But the simmering anxiety that was bent to someone's (or someones') selfish purpose led to the inability to say no that marked so much of the last twenty years of my life. I said yes to a lot of the things I wanted, and I said yes to things I didn't want, over and over and over again, because I thought it would make me a good person. That gap in the armor made me hyperaware and a people pleaser, which left me open to emotional abuse. I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager, but I was sexually assaulted, regularly, by an intimate partner for several years as a grown-ass adult. It's taken me so long to admit that that's what happened that it's a whole new form of embarrassment to have it out there in the open.

It made me popular (for a time) in a way that I'd never been popular among my peers in school. But more and more as I look back, that time was extremely bounded: between 18 and 23. The five years in which I could still be mistaken for underage; the years in which modeling requests came with a frequency that was annoying, but also rather flattering. The years when I was frequently asked to dance, winked at, pushed, prodded, hugged, fondled and groped.

I am thinking about this because I was thinking about the person I'd cut out of my life who'd died of skin cancer, and how in our shared high school theater classes (he was an upperclassman), he insisted on hugging me. Insisted. To the point that even when I didn't want to hug (when he started getting handsy and I started saying no), he made a joke of it with another guy in the department, and they made me their "hugging post". They hugged me while I stood defiantly stiff and glaring. They hugged me when I said no, laughing and high fiving each other. And then that guy who died of skin cancer wondered why I never wanted to speak to him, once it was made abundantly clear (a few years later when I was of age) what he wanted from me. 

Older men, this behavior is on you. It's not enough to say "sorry, you're jailbait". It is not enough to say "let's not date until you turn 18".  It is not okay to cultivate friendships with underage women on the chance that they might fuck you once they're legal. It's not okay to only withdraw, or threaten to withdraw, emotional support and friendship when they don't want to fuck you. This needs to be taught, along with the curriculum in consent that's now coming to the fore, to every man on reaching the age of 18.

I am now, twenty years later, still crippled with fear in the face of making new connections, because am afraid that I am valued only for sex, and I cannot believe that my desires would be accommodated. Let me say this again. I am nearly 40 and I am afraid to date because I am afraid that the people I form intimate connections with only care about fucking me and will not stop when I say no.

I am unpicking this thread from the weaving, bit by bit.

Incivility in unrest

Last week, someone I was once close with died of cancer. 

I say "once close" instead of "a friend" because we'd drifted apart over years - they were part of a group that was formative to my youth and to my young adulthood, but which turned quite toxic and eventually I quietly left. (At least I thought it was quietly.) The last thing she asked me was advice for making skirts out of the elastic-smocked-top crushed velvet yardage from Joann's, and that was more than a decade ago. She was medically obese, and was working hard to be seen as a woman. The skirts were an easy way to get an infusion of femme without trying to also tackle the toxic women's diet industry at the same time. I can only vaguely recall her deadname at this point, because her nickname was what we all called her. I hadn't really spoken to her since before her transition. I had cut off that entire part of my life like one cuts off a decaying branch.

I realized that I stopped doing Faire in 2006 (or 2009), and Dickens in 2013; it's been fifteen (or twelve) and eight years I've been outside those groups, respectively. While I miss the camaraderie and I miss the absolute joy of the places and experiences we created, I do not miss the toxicity of the people involved.

Dickens Fair is having its #metoo moment, simultaneously as it's facing criticism for it's casting policies, business practices around the volunteer staff, and acknowledging the hurt and harm that cast members receive at the hands of both patrons and other members of the cast and crew. There needs to be a change, that much has been acknowledged - even by the people who run the event. They've promised many things before and been caught short, so the performers are right to hold their feet to the fire. However, I do not think that the timeline set out in the demands are reasonable, and I believe one of the demands in particular is unreasonable. Others agree, but several of the leaders of this movement cannot abide others who don't agree wholeheartedly and are actively sealioning and dogpiling other folks who raise the slightest objection. I'm seeing signs of a cortisol/dopamine cycle addiction that I find really troubling. To quote something extremely relevant:

Self harm that is rewarded by society looks like: 

5. Social media ‘outrage’: social media outrage occurs when we (without breaks) consume content that puts us on a cycle of emotional addiction. These platforms are designed to use our dopamine + cortisol hits to keep us using the product. They can lead us to feeling helpless + have a narrative of the world that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.

I've been trying to write this for an hour and I keep looking away. 

My brain does not want to talk about how traumatized I have been by people who I thought were my friends, who enjoy beating others down on the internet, and who have done it to me with a shockingly casual and final cruelty. Before it was Facebook, it was LiveJournal and Tribe, before that it was forums, and before that usenet groups and mailing lists. I have had these righteous types who I thought were my friends do real and lasting harm to my self-esteem and mental health, to say nothing of my social life and emotional connections. These are people who see themselves as good people, and who are blind to the harms they do, be it in the name of The Cause or on a personal whim. I will not abide this treatment, and I leave. For better or worse, when I disappear from their sphere of influence it doesn't even register.

I have been fortunate enough to not need Fair or Faire in the economic sense, and so cutting them out has impacted my social life but not prevented me from thriving. We talk about "drama is as drama does", but the reality seems to be that people who cannot control their external lives spend much of their time enforcing their views on the internet instead. I am all for moving the Overton Window in the direction of Social Justice, but I am not for magical thinking when it comes to social organizing. I get that people have been pushing these objectives for months and years, but it has been (slowly) getting better. I get that the time for BLM organizing is now, but I also think that timelines for demands should take into account that we're only just now starting to emerge from a global pandemic in which the things which shut down first, and most-thoroughly, were special events. 

There seems to be a thread of "we can rebuild this on our own if the Powers That Be deny our demands" and to that I just have to purse my lips grimly. If your main method of building consensus is to shout down people who hold other opinions, you are only going to have people join who already agree with you lock, stock, and barrel. And I doubt that will be as many people as you think. Facebook is the wrong place to organize, because it enables and normalizes building and maintaining the type of filter bubbles that enable other magical thinking movements, like Q-Anon. 

I want change for the better. But I also want to stop people from spending their entire days writing thousand-word rebuttals to people who say they disagree with any part of a plan. It turns out, arguing these things at this length, in person or especially on the internet, does not have the persuasive effect you intend. But keep chasing that dopamine.

I want change, but I also want people to stop being assholes.

I guess they're people, so maybe that's not entirely possible.

Just desserts

 Day 7 of Wellbuterin, and I wish I'd done this sooner.

I have avoided "drugs" all my life, because of the bogeyman they represented; my mother's fears about loss of self made manifest in her children. I remember my first time "driving" for a significant other on MDMA, and when he told me he loved me, I asked the next day if that was him talking, or the drugs? Who am I without tinkering with myself? Am I still me? It's an Odysseus' Ship problem, except on a more abstract scale: you could argue that the animating intelligence is what makes a person, no matter if their appearance, limbs, even organs, change. It's much less clear when you're tinkering with that intelligence, when what you're changing could materially affect how one thinks and perceives the world. If you are behind the wheel, but the drugs are driving, are you really behind the wheel?

So as I sat listening to music on the beach and Incubus came on, song that I rolled my eyes at in high school because it was "too popular", the line "let the fear take the wheel and steer" hit me like a poleaxe. I have been so afraid of letting the drugs steer, that now I find that, somewhere between 12 and 20 years later, that it hasn't been me per se driving, but my fear and anxiety.

It has been like realizing that you've been putting up with intense, grinding tinnitus for years and years without realizing it. It's like finding that you'd been carrying around a leaden weight for all these years, and like in a dream-state, been unable to look at it, put it down, or speak of it to other people. Suddenly, thinking about my relationship doesn't fill me with dread and terror. 

TikTok in loco parentis, TikTok in lieu of therapy; there are so many genres of self-help on the app that it's always amazing to me when I find something that makes me sob. And so I've been thinking about what happened to me around 2008, and I've been thinking about worthiness. I sobbed over a DnD NPC video where the barkeeper hands me the key to the tower room because I look like the kind of person who's not very good at letting themselves rest and I scribbled onto a post it note:

Why do I feel like I don't deserve:

• rest
• care
• to say no
• to ask for more
• to feel better

Sometimes catching the fleeting thought is an important part of acknowledging what hurts. I was in the middle of unloading groceries, thinking about the last time I felt like I could be sexually free, when it struck me: The last time I felt free was followed by horrible horrible times, and I felt I was being punished for something. An unjust breakup, a divorce, a housing situation falling apart, a job loss. Over the next year I rebuilt my life entirely, and closed myself off to many things. And while some of those things crept back into my world, I never fully uncircled the wagons, so to speak.

It's pretty shit, you know, when you're raised with these ideals of Karma, and how they're supposed to release you from a Judeo-Christian god-guilt. And yet, and yet, I felt like I had taken too much, and much must be taken from me in order to balance the scales. What rubbish. And yet here I am unable to truly fathom that things might go well for me without them also having to go poorly.