So tired

 I feel exhausted. My job is incredibly draining and I feel like I'm walking on eggshells trying to not fuck up anything else, yet I keep doing so. It's exhausting to deal with, feeling constantly like you're screwing something up or forgetting something because you don't have the tools to accurately track things. I don't like this position, it doesn't suit me, and rather than move me into something else, I think they're more likely to just terminate me all together. Which, is fine. I have savings and unemployement at this point which will help. But I don't really want to look for another job just yet. That whole process is hell, and almost as bad as this job in general. 

Its the not knowing, the anxiety and the feeling like a shoe is about to drop at any moment that is draining me. It doesn't help that my boss is terrible at her job, at least terrible in managing me, but that isn't unexpected, most managers get there via experience and failing up rather than expertise in how to manage people. 

I'm just so so tired of everything. Life is exhausting and I'd much rather just sleep for the remaining 30 years or so of my life. Just, let me sleep forever, I'm so tired of being forced to do this shit under the threat of starvation/homelessness.

So what's taking so long.

 In lieu of being able to come up with a clever title for a new blog, I'm back here for now.

My summer hasn't been good. I'm alive, but it feels like a struggle. I write now because it feels like something I should do stave off the worst of it. I feel trapped in this terrible job being forced to take on more and more work until it becomes untenable. I'm sure, normal people could do this, but it feels so overwhelming. 

They say to take time off, but I just, can't. There's so much up in the air, that I might need that later on if I end up moving. Moving that I have to do because of this job. They pay me just enough to force me to move but not enough to move comfortably, almost as if by design. 

Which, I knew going in. I just thought I'd have figured something out by now. I wanted to cry by 9am on Thursday, I did cry at 2pm today. I came close to quitting but a coworker suggested talking to my boss about changing roles. 

But, I don't see any other possibilities and I doubt they'll have other roles I can just move into. I've seen them burn through so many people, and seen so many people leave it just seems like something they do. I put in a few other applications since all the talk is about how good the job market is now, but job hunting for me has always been a nightmare, and this is, sadly, still the highest paying job I've ever had at the mid 50s. I'm 36, with a masters degree in a marketable field. Another woman on the team just turned 36 and is selling her house. '

She doesn't have my struggles, but the comparisons highlight the differences. 

I'm also very isolated, from friends, and moreso from community. I haven't been able to really go and mingle with old friends and acquaintances at all, and I feel really alone. That sense of shared bonding that other queer folk have, people who's faces I remember but don't have their phone number. 

The routine and grind is killing me. I am not able to do keep doing this five days a week over and over again. There's just, nothing in it. It's just, paying rent and treading water. Buying time waiting for my ship to come in, and it's starting to feel like it isn't going to come and I just give up and let the sea take me. 

I forgot my suicidal humor doesn't always go over the same in different circles, and I think, worried a few people. Maybe it was reaching out for help, I don't know. I didn't know how to accept their help so I brushed it off, as one does. 

Everything just feels so meaningless, my work is utterly without consequence. We spent 5 hours workshoping and email response to a client who was upset over  returning 15$ of expired product back to their warehouse. It's petty, stupid, irrelevant bullshit. It is meaningless, and I am utterly alienated from it. My boss thinks I'll enjoy it because I'll get thanks for handling emails from co-workers. I do not. I play chess at work, I browse reddit, I do anything I can to not do my job because it is tedious, unengaging and unchallenging. Many companies have automated tools already to do this task. I have a woman babysitting me, who refuses to answer simple questions because she either doesn't hear me, or is too stupid to understand the question. 

I wished her back 10x the frustration and irritation she has inflicted on me as I made dinner. I need a new job. I need to do something as I haven't been this claustrophobic in a while, and the walls feel like their closing in. I don't do well when I feel trapped, I panic and then I get angry and then sad. Until the sadness just becomes everything. Until the anger returns as desperation and the self harm starts again and yadda yadda yadda. 

So we're at the suicide memes stage, the r/2meirl4meirl stage, the joke about not having a reason to not kill yourself stage. I tend to forget that doesn't sit as well with everyone since I've been in it a while. Some friends understand it, and others grow concerned, or worse irritated at it. 

I think about the grotesqueness of it all. How long would I decay before they found me, would anyone notice? Sure they would, eventually. But how long? probably after I started to smell. Would I care? I could put trash bags down to make it easier to clean. Just an idea I guess. 

Last weekend I off handily said I felt like the side character in someone else's life. My life feels like a pointless exercise of futility. A warning sign of what they would show more privileged children happens to those who are cursed with being trans. How many years of our life we lose and waste to learning how to cope, to trying to deny, to trying to tolerate and understand why we feel the way we do. How much time and money we miss out on, how little you can amount to because your fundamental coping mechanisms will be broken and you tune out of your own life because it has convinced you that happiness and good things can't be trusted. That the most fundamental and core belief you have is that you can't trust anything because your own fucking body betrayed you and who you are. But who can you blame outside of yourself? Who can you point to and ask to apologize? So you take the lesson, and you make it the pillar to which you stand, that you can't trust anyone, you can't trust happiness because it's fleeting, and anything that does make you happy, must be fickle, else why would you be happy. Never get too attached to the idea of things turning out well, or risk disappointment, a sin only matched by its own naivete.

Get busy living, or get busy dying. I feel like I've been dying for 26 years.

If you hadn't noticed by now, I always write the title last.

Working for the weekend

 I don't want to write. It feels like a thankless chore right now. Writing asks the question of how I'm feeling, and I don't want to answer because I've essentially wasted an entire weekend that I was looking forward to. I feel like I just plug into video games and just stop existing to the larger outside world. To which, my therapist will inevitably counter-ask:

 "what would you rather be doing with your time". 

To which, anything. Anything that I felt was productive and moved my life closer to a place I'd like it to be. But it feels like those options are locked away from me due to my inability to access them. They're difficult, and so I don't do them, instead I waste away my life playing games I don't even like. So I ask friends, hey, do you have any interest in any game, anything that isn't my playing games by myself? And I get no answers. 

Which, is fine. There's always been an undercurrent of feeling like an outsider with my friend groups, be it now or in elementary school. There was the core group, and then me as like, a side piece who would occasionally get invited, but more often than not I had to instigate it, I had to be the one to ask if I could join. Maybe they could tell early on that I wasn't one of them, or was, different, but they never said anything, they just, never bothered. 

There's a temptation to cringe at those middle school notes asking them to come over that weekend, only for them not to call, or message, maybe they'd go do a thing but I'd never know until the following week when I heard about it at school. Meanwhile I'd just, stay up in my room, playing the same games, being bored, and alone, every weekend. Grinding through the next week waiting for maybe the next weekend when they might be interested in doing something. I don't know if that ever changed, it feels like it did at some point, college maybe. When schedules were more flexible, social groups were wider, people were less busy. Now though, it feels more similar to those playground days. Alone, bored, restless, depressed, and feeling like there's no point to anything. I guess another metaphor is that of the dog excited for the owners to get home and play, only for them to leave again as soon as they got home. Well, I guess that's it, so, back to waiting. 

"Well what would you want to do"

Anything, it doesn't matter, something to make the week feel like time has passed with something to show for it. Something to ease the feeling of just wasting away for nothing. That I'm not spending countless hours of what should be comfortable adulthood doing all the things that adults should be able to enjoy, rather than wasting it doing a dead end job for 40 hours a week until I day with some worthless number in a bank account to show for it. Something that matters. And for so so much of my life I've done nothing that matters. I was always waiting for the next thing, the next phase. And now there isn't one, so it's just waiting for the next weekend. 

Side note, I'm uncomfortable with who might have access to this, so I'm likely going to move the whole blog to a new name/host. So, if this is the last your hear from me, Thanks, it's been real.

13 years and a day

 I've had this blog since 2008. 13 years almost. I've neglected it in the last few though as it became easier to escape and avoid the things that were getting to me. Easier to not deal with the negativity and the creeping dread. The pandemic, the politics, the relationships, the lack of any real sort of fulfillment, the impending sense of foreboding, and the complete sense of helplessness. Why would you want to look into that. Why tap into your own unending fountain of suffering. 

Honestly, I was content to not write anymore. Only on the suggestion of my therapist am I here again. Masks off I guess. 

So where do we begin? I'm trying to ignore the voices, the whispers that ask if anyone cares, if anyone will notice or bother. Because whether anyone does or not isn't the point. The point is not the response, the point is the asking of the question. 

Where do we begin? How do I feel? I feel numb. I have suicidal thoughts, and I fantasize about shooting myself. I have no plans to do such, but the desire is there. I find myself watching anime and feeling like I'm wasting my life. I talk to my therapist and we rehash the same conversations and nothing ever changes. I wake up, I go to work, I go to bed. We repeat. One day I'll die and my last words will probably be "fucking finally". 

I think about what all of this is for, what I'm supposed to be doing, what I want to do, and it's just empty. My brother has things he's passionate about, his music, his kids (I assume), and I look around and there's just..circuses and distractions. Things to occupy my mind so that it doesn't think about what's going on, or how I feel, or how empty everything is, just, waiting to consume the next thing. 

I'm on the wrong side of 30. And, reading back to 2014, I can say that my anger at being trans has diminished a lot. It's not something that I actively grieve as much. I've largely made peace with it I think. The surgery helped a lot in that regard. I don't feel attractive, and I don't think I'll ever be so. But, I've accepted that. It makes dating hard, but as we've seen, I'm used to being alone. It isn't desirable, but it is at least routine.

I feel suicidal because my life is needless suffering. It's needless because my life has no purpose. I've tried to ascribe some point to it, to try and create something, to try and say something, to scream into the void of anyone who would listen, but I can't form sentences. I get so paralyzed at the idea that someone might be listening that I freeze and go non-verbal anytime I'm emotional. So raw and sensitive am I to the idea that I might actually be seen that I shut down out of fear that I might reveal something. A lifetime of hiding will do that. Hiding who was I was, what I wanted, how I felt. Hiding everything under the guise of performative masculinity and fear. Convincing myself that I would never be perfect and so there was no point in trying. Since there was no point in trying, the only other option was suicide. Thinking, back in 2008. Holding that razer to my wrist, have the last 13 years been worth it, or do I regret not killing myself then. Or hell, back in 2000. If you asked me, given the chance, if I had the option to go back and make those attempts successful, would I? Probably. 

It isn't that things haven't gotten better since then. They have, objectively, I'm in a better place all around than I was then. Its more that, it still all feels so meaningless, and I still don't place much value on my life. I don't hope for better things, because better things don't happen. Will I have good days, sure, I'm sure I'll a few really good days before the end of my life, but I know by far those will be outnumbered by awful days. And dwarfed by the sheer endless numbers of pointless, meaningless, meandering nothing days. Pointless weeks on end of doing pointless capitalist busy work peaking from weekend to weekend in the hopes that one of three people in my life might be free to do something interesting. 

I feel like I've become a non-player Character in my own life. A passenger without agency to say where and how it goes. And even when someone does ask me what I would do with my own story, I have no answers. The things I would do, are closed off from me, by me. 

I say I want a voice, I want to say things, to express things, and every time I try I find my nothing comes. I try to create a song but I can't hear it. I try to create a world but I can't see it. I'd long ago given up any attempts at finding success with a voice, the goal was simply to speak for the first time. But I can't even do that. 

Maybe that's the true irony of being cursed. I can transition to be a woman, but I'll still never be able to create anything in exchange. Be it life or art. But I can suffer for it all the same. Someone remind why I don't kill myself again.

Beach House

It's hard to describe the emotions that come into this. I feel forced, and yet writing is seemingly the only way I can process things. I've been extremely low and suicidal lately. Mostly due to the ongoing feelings of being trapped and hopeless. The cyclical nature of my life becoming more evident, and feeling like nothing ever changes. Since I've moved here, I've bounced around jobs but never really landed a "career" or anything resembling job security. I've pushed my wage up, but the most I've ever made is still well below the area's median average. While it's a small point of pride that I can live on 17/hr, it's not comfortable living. It's certainly betraying what my skills and qualifications should be garnering. Of course, people who are hiring folks with my skills, don't want to hire people who look like me. They want cis folk, they want people who will fall in line and do all that 110% company life bullshit. That isn't me, but then I'm not asking for 100K a year.

The most depressing part is watching people in my same position, who are less qualified, get better opportunities because they "interview well" despite admitting to me lieing in their interviews, and other bullshit and questionable behavior that would get someone like me even more disqualified.

Being trans inherently means I have to work four times as hard as anyone else to get the same thing, and I just don't have the energy or mental capacity to do that. So I bounce around from temp job to temp job, struggling to get by, and watch as the money I've saved gets eroded away by months of unemployment.

Which, wouldn't be so bad if I felt like I was making some sort of progress towards anything. My relationship also has parallels of running the same course as my last one. The same anxiety/depression pairing where I get pushed into a nurture role that I'm not enjoying, but get stuck being in because, as with jobs, being trans means it's 2x as long to find an interested romantic partner.

Suffice to summarize, everything is incredible difficult, and I see no way to change any of that, or create or produce anything of meaning. So I wake up and I sit on the couch and I just ...waste. Time, money, energy, it all just gets wasted as I sit in this room, and just exist waiting for something dire to happen.

my heart aches for some sort of raison d'être, and everything feels pointless until I find it. I thought it was writing, I thought it was music, but so far the only thing I excel at is self delusion, suicidal tendencies, escapism and compartmentalization of my emotions. 

Everything in my experience of this world is so atrociously mediocre or short that I can't wait to pass onto some new existence. 

I often dream up a character who routinely kills themselves only to end up trapped in the same room over and over again in a sort of purgatory hellscape. It isn't intentionally auto-biographical, but that feels very humbly stupid and imperceptive of me. If I knew I would end up right back here, why would I even bother killing myself. The whole point is to get out of this bullshit.

I've no hope or options, but to just numb the pain away and continue on until I hopefully get hit by a truck. 

Criminal Negligence

I wrote twice in all of 2019.

It isn't due to lack of trauma, it's a sheer matter of negligence and aversion. I don't have to deal with my bullshit if I don't acknowledge it. As long as I stick my head in the sand my complete failure at my own imposed goals will go unnoticed and I can continue on this path of make believe.

Plainly, I've failed at everything I've set out to do in the last two years or so. I called myself a writer, yet I didn't write anything. I didn't draft, and I didn't even brain storm. I spent half a day on it, and then installed a writing program that I then spent more time configuring than actually using. I can't even get myself to write here, where there is literally no audience and no performance to create. How can I call myself a writer when I don't even do the basic things a writer does? What, oh, because three years ago I wrote a bullshit narrative based off actual events that happened to me that some friends liked?

I feel creatively bankrupt. Like I've spent so long escaping into other worlds that I can't exist in this one, let alone create new ones to exist in. Like I've warped my brain into a consume only mode that does nothing else but shut itself off while doing something else, anything else, rather than be left alone with my own thoughts.

I sit here, wallowing in my depression, as it drains my mood into ever deeper pits, lamenting my own failures because i don't have the discipline, or willpower, or strength or whatever have you to commit to the work needed to actually get the results I want. Be it any sort of creative outlet, or my body, or diet. And then I beat myself up for not having said results that I could have had by now if I only had the virtues to do so. I've been practicing yoga off and on for the better part of four years, and yet because I don't have the virtue to continue it regularly, I make no real progress. I could be in much better shape if I bothered to continue working out regularly, but because I don't see results in my hyper short attention span, I get discouraged, and then stop doing it, and then don't get results, and the whole cycle repeats. Look at creativity, had I consistently practiced guitar I likely could have done something with it, yet because I can't play the songs I want to play, I can't ever get the results I want, and since the results I want I can't get, I get demotivated and stop practicing.

There's no sense of just doing it for the fun of it.

And then back to writing, which all along I said the whole fucking point was not even to get results, but just to fucking finish the thing. I invested time and money, I took a class, and yet I can't get more than three chapters in before getting lost in bullshit. Feeling like I don't know where to go or what to write, or what the characters would say or do. I have a half an idea of some cool world building and then I can't get anything else. How could I ever finish a completed story when I don't practice writing stories?

So practice writing you say? Yes great idea, BUT I CAN'T GET MYSELF TO DO SO. Maybe because if I actually allowed myself to practice I'd have to put in the effort, and then, like I do with everything else, I'd realize I'm a failure at that too. After pretending to think this was what I wanted to do, not writing, feelings like I'm back to square one, and at my age I'm not sure I know what to do with the idea of being back to floating in the cosmic void.

Like all the rest of my emotional baggage, it's easier to put it in a closet and pretend than it is to take it out and unpack.

So now I sit here, once again unemployed, with endless time on my hands to do anything, the perfect time in my life to practice writing, and I sit here, depressed, crying on the couch, watching YouTube and playing crappy old video games lamenting why my life feels so empty and directionless, and why I'm so unhappy. While I at least have the awareness to realize my own bullshit, I don't have the capacity to change any of it apparently.

I wish I could just start this life over. Just hit the ol reset switch and call this go a mulligan. I've clearly fucked myself up to the point of being unsalvagable and it would be far easier just to start fresh without all the fucked up processes I've instilled in myself.

A question was posed on reddit earlier, something along the lines of: 13 year old you is teleported to the current time for 24 hours, what do you show them. And the thing that came to my mind was that 13 year old me would be so sad and depressed that after all this time, and everything that I've done, that I'm still a depressed little nothing, who doesn't even have the strength to do the things she wants to do, to get better at what she wants get better at, for the sole purpose of having fun and to do something she set out to do.

Like, those are small fucking goals, and I can't even do that shit right, and if 13 year old me, saw how fucking pathetic I still am, I think she would have put a lot more effort into those suicide attempts.

Insurance

I've recently been trying to figure out how to unlock my emotions. I don't know if it's just normal depression that has muted my feelings, or if it's a subconscious choice to dive into escapism or aversion. Either way the end result has me tuning out of most emotions because I find them overwhelming. I've been using the metaphor of a slipgate, and while I can try to turn the flow on or off, it comes as one large surge.

Which would be fine, if I could tolerate the water, but seeing as how almost everything I feel is related to how awful literally everything is in the world right now, it feels very difficult to try and stomach that taste. Maybe if I could isolate myself away from all the awful shit going politically, environmentally, socially, economically, literally almost anything about my outside world and focus on just the fine minutia of my daily life I might be able to tolerate my emotions. But as is, it's a few strands of happiness amidst an entire ocean's worth of negativity, anxiety, hopelessness, anger..seething apoplectic anger, sadness, and just more hopelessness. There's just soooo much of that awful brew that it outweighs any positive emotions I may be feeling at the same time.

Now I will add some caveats. I'm not married to the idea that it's all or nothing, or that its a binary of on or off emotions. I'm also not super set on being turned off to everything, because It has also locked up a lot of my desires to be intimate or sexual with anyone as well. Although, that may be an aversion to something else.

But the main gripe, is that to avoid all those awful emotions, I've locked away most everything that I feel. Most of my daily life I feel sorta empty. A numb contemptuous passive witness to my life. My instinctive Id-like mind doing all of the work, while any higher level emotions are just ..gone. The emotions are still there, but it's just the name tags. All of the substance and mass of them are locked away.

I don't want to risk dealing with those emotions, they are incredibly intense, and overwhelming, and avoiding them is easier and allows me to function on a realistic level. In that same vein, I need to come to grips with some very heavy sexual emotions that I've also been avoiding. One being the potential ongoing truama that is my sex life, that is coming to terms with what sex is now, and accepting it for where it is, and how it isn't what I thought it would as a little girl. All my life I've wanted to have sex as a woman, and while I now have as close an approximation as I can get, it isn't what I dreamed it would be. How could it have been? Nothing in the world would have lived up to those expectations. Still the disappointment in that is very, very real and very painful to experience. That isn't to say it can't or won't be enjoyable, or that I've even begun to learn how to have sex as a woman, or what the best and most enjoyable sex is for me. But the aversion comes from now wanting to risk that disappointment again.

After all, I can't be disappointed in the sex if I don't have the sex to begin with. That's the kind of sick, high brown mental gymnastics I've twisted myself into to avoid that emotional pain. In order to avoid that risk, I've locked away my sexuality as well, much to the detriment of my relationship, and any other potential relationship. Oh but we can go deeper. Buried in that fear of disappointment is also the fear that as I have more sex, that it will never be fulfilling or engaging or enjoyable, and that I'll come to regret my surgery, because you know, I don't have enough fucking weight put on my ability to enjoy sex from myself, I need to add the weight of becoming one of those people that neo-nazi's use to argue against my own fucking rights.

So, you can see how it just becomes so much easier to let all that shit go and just be asexual. Just don't think about anything, just leave all my cares and emotions behind to where nothing matters and I can just exist on some functional level. Everything else is just too much to risk.

Anyway, happy fucking birthday to me, guess I need to visit a claims adjuster.