Feeling a teensy bit better emotionally but I also tried taking a big dose of acetominophen. I read a while ago that it's supposed to help with emotional pain of certain kinds due to how it affects pain in the brain. I tried to take some before work this morning but either because I took it on an empty stomach or I was just full of bile from not eating much for days because I just puked them up along with the protein shake I had.
I am going to make a point to see a doctor soon. At this point I'm worried about my recent inability to eat. Due to my ongoing gut problems I'm predisposed to all sorts of friggin cancers and it's been forever since my last checkup.
I played a little Zelda after work and successfully distracted myself that way. Also found a new show to get lost in that's actually pretty interesting which always helps.
I'm going to try to hold onto the thought that Miss Kitty is the last creature in the universe that would want me to feel this deep a level of despair with no end in sight. Any and every time I was in distress she showed up and loved me back to health. Every fight. Every crying fit over boyfriends or having to leave our little apartment that I loved or stressed to my wit's end over work. She was my little guardian.
And I have to focus on all the ways she changed me for the better, because I wouldn't be who I am today without her specifically. I don't think I could have learned from any other cat but her because she was so goddamn special. I came from a fucked up family that neglected me and I didn't know how to take real care of myself or anyone else until I was responsible for her. And she inspired me to be better for both of us every single year I had her. Kinder, more patient, more responsible, cleaner, more organized, more grown up, more secure and stable. I wanted all of that more for her than I ever wanted it for myself, and learned to raise my standards for myself through her because she deserved only the best.
Well, regardless of how hard it was (and that I got to leave early! my guy was good enough to give me a tiny break by showing up ahead of schedule so managed to find a way to give him a work bonus of sorts so hopefully that made him happy) I did make it through my first day after one of the hardest things I've ever been through. I hope to GOD I can choke down some acetominophen before work.
Fuck I'm tired.
My boss... sucks. He barely covered and didn't do shit as far as managerial duties. It's clear that he's not really my backup, he just has his business set up with no support for his managers - either we show up and do it ourselves or it doesn't get done. I forgot to get one day covered and he just didn't bother to question it or ask, knowing the person scheduled quit with no notice. Didn't offer me shit in my time of crisis but let me handle covering my shifts myself.
I meant to text my guy closing and offer to let him come in early. I guess I technically still could. I just feel so... I don't know what.
There's just so much to remember and think about and mull over. Worried about the years where she was the most alone with the least freedom and stimulation and how hard it might have been on her, or whether I'm overthinking it since I still spent like 15 hours out of 24 with her and the hours I wasn't home she was likely sleeping. Looking at the big picture of her life and wondering if maybe she could have lived even longer had I optimized her health and diet at a younger age before I knew better - not that she had many years eating stuff like Meow Mix, she got fancy high end cat food most of her life and as soon as I could find/afford it. Hell, she probably ate better than I have across her life.
My brain and body are exhausted. Grief is so draining.
I tried playing Zelda a little but I can only enjoy it in these little spurts. Unlike before. I was pulling entire days off of work playing it and Breath of the Wild for like 11-12 hours at a time like I was a kid again. I had no reason not to - my job is fine (in fact I've got to be operating above-average, not that I'm given that info), relationship is good, cats were in good health and happy, and I was spending virtually all of my play time with either Miss Kitty or my big guy in my lap (or sometimes both!!! it was so amazing and wild, they wanted to snuggle so bad they were willing to put up a truce to flank me. Or Miss Kitty would wait until Austin got curled up in my lap underneath the blanket so she could sit on top of him while he was trapped.) A good, safe life, just enjoying a frivolous but wonderful piece of entertainment surrouned by the tiny creatures that loved me and who I loved with all my heart.
I'm so worried my big boy is going to be right behind her. I've read about so many geriatric cats that died close together despite sizeable age gaps and totally unrelated medical conditions. And he has so much wrong with him - heart murmur, prone to urinary crystals, hyperactive thyroid, arthritis, tooth reabsorption, and on top of it all he's highly food motivated BUT still a picky eater AND he pukes a lot because he eats too goddamn fast. We're going to try something new and try wetting some dry food for him since dry food is all he seems to want anymore but he can barely chew it. No matter what prescription wet food we get he turns his little nose up at it. And it's not appetite in general. On a whim I got him and Miss Kitty a couple of cans of junky brands they used to love like Fancy Feast and Sheba and he INHALED them and went absolutely wild. Our boy is just a junk addict and has no taste for the healthy stuff.
We took him outside and it was nice to see him happy but I was, of course, instantly hit with guilt over how infrequently I'd taken him and Miss Kitty out over the past year. They got outside time aplenty but it was mostly on the porch. But I need to stop torturing myself and accept that there's always things to regret if you pick things apart hard enough.
My boyfriend and I also discussed how unfulfilled our lives have been feeling lately. It's funny because we've created our little bubble paradise but that's not all humans need to be happy (well, maybe some, but not everyone, and not us). We know we need community and a sense of higher purpose, and the loss of one of the members of our little family really put a spotlight on that. We have loved ones to support us and reach out to us but we don't have anything deep to keep us moving - just work and entertainment and each other (obviously we keep going for each other but we need more).
Guess that's all I have to say for now. It always takes me like half an hour to write these entries and then I have to adjust the timestamp because it's so different from when I start to when I finish.
I feel like I need to start just filling my time like normal again. I've written about her, I've talked about her, I've posted about her, I've gone through pictures, I've closed my eyes and gone into my memories of her snuggles and purrs, I've gone through journal entries. I found my drawing of her. I just need to figure out what I want to do for a funeral ceremony for her exactly as my final official farewell, as awful as it feels to write that out.
Part of me wants to just hold on and stay in mourning forever, keep holding her little collar and hugging her bed and remembering her scent and never let go. But that's not how life works. It was her time, she's gone, life will go on, and some day I'll follow her. I don't think I believe that our "spirits" will meet again like people say, but maybe I'm wrong and dumb and I do have that to look forward to. Maybe after death our consciousness leaves linear time and we experience our lives all at once and I'll get to relive my 18 years with the best cat the universe.
God I just hope she was happy.
I didn't really anticipate four straight days of randomly breaking down into tears while feeling like I can't handle anything but distraction, if that. And instead of the crying getting less intense and less frequent, the opposite is happening.
Granted, I've been pouring over every picture and memory of her I have. Went through this journal and ctrl+f'd every page for any mention of her (in addition to just reading the beginning and reflecting on my life in general and where I was vs where I am now). I mentioned drawing a portrait of her which I'd forgotten about entirely. I dug it out and despite my journal entry saying I was disappointed, it perfectly captures her. It's my girl, brought to life on paper by my hand. I captured a little part of her in it before I lost her.
There's been a weird part of me in the back of my head that's been questioning if I ever really loved or even cared about her. It started as soon as her seizures happened that night. I can only guess that it was some kind of fucked up, deep-seated defense mechanism from my youth trying to shut my feelings down by pretending they aren't there. But what little I've written about of my life in these entries makes it clear that of course I loved and cherished her. She was the little shining light I looked forward to coming home to every day no matter what happened and no matter how my other relationships failed me. Only a couple of months ago I was reflecting on how much love she wanted and how much I knew I would miss her when the time came. It came sooner than I thought.
I've barely eaten and I feel like shit for it. I keep seeing her cat condo in the corner of my eye and thinking she's up in her usual corner - the way our eyes tend to play tricks on us. It could be my imagination but I could swear my other cat keeps looking in the direction of it. She'd taken to hopping from the top of it to the kitchen cabinet next to it and roaming around up there. It was hilarious, adorable, and always made us happy to see she was still adventurous and just enjoying being alive.
I also have to keep reminding my brain that things aren't going to "go back to normal". It's just another new normal I have to adjust to like the many, many changes in my life over the years. I've had 13 homes and she was with me for 8 of them and she was always a good sport, always a trooper, always treated it like a new part of our shared little adventure together.
I keep thinking back to when she very first entered my life living in Surfside when she was just a little abandoned stray in a group of many neighborhood cats that would loiter around my building. I wanted to be her friend and slowly she warmed up to me after feeding her, let me pet her, and eventually got comfortable enough to come inside. I accidentally left her locked in once before she was really my cat and she freaked - tore a blind out of the window trying to get out, took a shit on my bed, and knocked stuff over. I never blamed her and felt like such an asshole for it. She'd hunt mice and bring them to me (but run away when I tried to take them from her, they were her mice after all). She'd socialize with the other cats outdoors and even had a big fat grey male she'd bring to my apartment she was friends with (who turned out to be owned by another family already and was just spending half the day freeloading at my place). She chose me. And I felt so special and loved her so much. I arranged every part of my life to accomodate her from then on, she was always central to my planning.
It hurts. It just fucking hurts. I want to scream. I want to change the world outside somehow so people are forced to be aware that she existed and how much I fucking loved her. I want to surround myself with memories and live inside so it doesn't have to feel like she's gone, like I've been trying so hard to do.
I've spent so much of the day in silence. Had on tv for part of the day but barely paid attention. It's all so hollow. Every day is getting harder instead of easier. I was already bumming out about being lonely and not knowing how to fix it before and now I feel like it's just reached a new level of insanity. Not that I really am. My mom called and gave me condolences when I told her. My sister called when she found out. My only friend called me on the spot when I texted her the news. I'm loved, I just suck so bad at connecting with anyone but my boyfriend and I work pretty much alone day in and day out. I keep thinking a new job might help but it might be worse to once again be surrounded by people I also feel like I can't connect with (just like my last job towards the end, though it hadn't started out that way, just got worse over time as the faces changed, culture changed, and my position got higher).
I keep telling myself that Miss Kitty wouldn't want me to just keep suffering and starving over her. She loved me. Every time I EVER was sick physically or emotionally, she parked herself by my side or on my lap or even on my chest and didn't leave and purred me back to health. I had many people refer to her as a perfect little angel and she was very much that - sweet, gentle, loving, and genuinely one of the cutest cats I've ever seen.
I also can't help but feel like she really did know somehow that her time was coming to an end soon and that's why she was so aggressively coming in for love from me every day when I left for work. I'm so happy she did and I don't regret a single day where I was flying into work at the last minute, sometimes technically late because I wouldn't leave the couch with my cat. Nothing has ever been more worth it.
I have to distract myself. Now I'm just spiraling out in a horrible thought pattern of how she's just gone and that's it. And it's making me feel sick. I gotta keep telling myself she wouldn't want me to give into despair and her actions showed me that, in fact I spiraled out similarly to this many times with her, especially in the early years, and she was one of the biggest reasons I pulled out every time. Her and my boyfriend, who I saw myself refer to as everything from my ex to my roommate to my best friend in this journal over the years.
He's been present in her life since almost the beginning, the first picture I ever took of her was at our first apartment together. And he was always kind, always loved her, always helped me take care of her. She looked at him with so much love in her eyes and always enjoyed watching him in the kitchen from her tower. He's my soulmate just as much as she was (still is, even if she's gone. or is telling myself that making it harder to let go? will I ever really be able to let go?), and so is our big old kitty boy. I've got to be one of the luckiest people on the planet because I got to spend years with three soulmates who love me. We always call ourselves a family but we really are more than that. We each had trauma and found each other as young adults in a terrifying city that eats many people alive. And we made a life together, with its ups and downs we finally found what was truly a little piece of paradise. And we knew it. We talked about it every day - we're so grateful, we're so happy, we love each other, and we love our goddamn cats. Some people don't get that even for a day.
I have to stay grateful for the love I still have. I have to be grateful for the unprecedented amount of time and good health Miss Kitty enjoyed with me. I have to be grateful for my own health and good fortune but god I just want to keep screaming and crying and find some way to time travel or follow her into the afterlife (which I don't even believe in but it's still tempting to try).
I think I need to start looking for a new job. Whether I like it or not, this is a new chapter in my life. I'd already been trying really hard to fully pivot to Normal Responsible Adult Behavior instead of Dirtbag ExArt Student Young Adult behavior (if I still have bad habits like not staying on top of annual adult bullshit at 39 I'm worried I'm going to be locked into self sabotaging my life until I'm old when it will be infinitely harder to deal with). I was also planning on looking after the new year since I can finally cash in the single week of PTO I accrued at this job. Well, two days of it are gone now lol. And with the creature that essentially defined my entire adult life so far gone, the time for changes is obviously here.
Gonna try to distract myself some more. Hope I'm successful.
My boyfriend is with me right now, napping next to me on the couch before his shift. He only had Thursday and Friday with me to grieve before going back to work and he's in again tonight which breaks my heart for him. I wish he could be with me in our safe, quiet little bubble of shared pain. But life has to go on. I absolutely this time, though. I absolutely couldn't get through a shift like this.
I've been playing Zelda all morning but I'm taking a break to just write out these feelings.
As irrational as it is, there really is a part of me that doesn't want to go on living without her. I know I had more years than anyone can reasonably hope for after taking in an adult stray. I know I still have my boyfriend and our other cat. But she was just such a big part of my life and me that I can't help feeling like part of me died with her, even though I keep telling myself that a part of her will always live on in me - I think both things are simultaneously true and that's just the sad fact of life. Some day I'll be gone and in time forgotten, too, though that thought doesn't really bother me. It's living without her that just keeps feeling so wrong.
I miss her. She's the first thing I think about every morning and she always has been - between waking me up by pulling my hair in years past and her recent habit of early morning screams, she made sure I did. Not that she needed to. I even dreamed about my cat prominently for years, stuff like being in a crisis and struggling to protect/secure her. Luckily in every real life emergency I was able to give her the best possible care, safety, and comfort. Multiple hurricanes, poverty, several moves (including one across the state with a 6 hour drive).
I keep going through my memories and happy times with her. When she was still newly my cat, having chosen me out of many people trying to lure her in as a stray, she occassionally followed me the 2-3 blocks to my bus stop and sit on the other side of the fence meowing at me from the bushes behind the bench. I had to move and leave her behind temporarily for about a month, but I arranged for someone to feed/water her in my absence and found her waiting outside my old apartment when I was finally able to get her to my new place - she was NOT happy on that bus ride in that cat carrier. At my next apartment, she'd HOWL to go out and come back in, chase lizards in the hallway (I got her a bell collar to make her hunts less successful and it made her furious), and many times was waiting for me outside our building when I got home and would accompany me inside at the end of my day. I had to stop letting her outside with my next move as the area was nothing but pavement and traffic, and I know those years were a little harder - she was withdrawn and spent most of her time in the window, but it was also the first time she sat in my lap, and she adjusted after a while. I rarely went out but I invited people over so she had extra company, even had a couple of cats temporarily stay with me who she hated and loved respectively. We moved again and started investing in real furniture and one of the first things I got was a real cat condo for her - she loved it. She always loved her little beds and items purchased specifically for her, she always seemed to know.
I want to keep writing more but it hurts too much now. I hope she had a happy life - she certainly seemed happy for much of it. She was my little feline soulmate, my familiar, my family, my sister from another species, my roommate, my nurse, my therapist, my audience for my silliness.
God I am hurting so bad.
In a lot of ways what happened was a best case scenario. I was up a little late and everything had been completely fine - we'd given her ear drops for an ear infection just a couple hours prior and had to wait ages for her to leave her dinner plate because she was licking up every last bit, and she seemed normal and in good spirits. Then just before we went to bed she had a massive seizure. We rushed her to the emergency vet and managed to get her there and in their care in less than 20 minutes.
I was hoping for the best but I knew what they were likely to tell us and we didn't wait long in the waiting room to be called in and told this seemed to be an end-of-life event. The likeliest cause was a brain tumor or degenerative brain disease and she was too old and already too frail from the seizure to survive an MRI, let alone other treatments like surgery. They recommended taking advantage of the opportunity to give her a (relatively) painless death with us there to comfort her.
I've lurked on senior cat communities online for years. I've read tons of stories and recommendations from vet associations regarding geriatric animals, what end of life looks like for them, and how to weigh the pros and cons and consider their quality of life. There were people who were afraid they let go too soon but also people that were full of regret for possibly trying too hard to save their pet and dragging them through a heartbreakingly painful experience.
It seemed to be obvious it was time to say goodbye. Even if we wanted a second opinion, the sheer amount of stuff it would take to keep her stable just through the holiday and maybe to a vet the day after (IF we could find an appointment) would be a nightmare for her and there wasn't a guarantee she would even make it through the night.
We held her and pet her. Gave her cheek scratches and spine scratches like she likes. Told her over and over how much we love her and kissed her forehead about a million times. I made sure to get in her eye-line and slow blink to her as many times as I could. And the nice vet gave her the syringes and she was gone.
Everyone at the vet was very nice, though we were unlucky and it was an incredibly busy night. A room full of strangers saw me hold my cat as she convulsed and they took her away. We had to get ubers each way, which was a pain in the middle of the night, luckily the first one didn't give us a hard time about bringing a sick cat in his car and wished us well. We brought her home in her little cardboard coffin, showed her to Austin so he would hopefully understand she's gone (and not look for her for the rest of his life and wonder why she never came home), and took her straight back to the vet to hand her off to be cremated. I wore her little collar as a bracelet for the rest of the night. It's in my crafting organizer pouch on the side of the couch where I'm sitting.
I went to bed for the first time without yelling "Goodnight Miss Kitty, I love you!" to her in her little 'bedroom' under my bed where she liked to sleep every night. I didn't wake up to usual her raspy banshee-screams or feel her jumping onto the bed to headbutt me awake. There's only one cat to feed this morning, though it's almost an hour past breakfast time and he hasn't asked for food yet. Does he understand? Is he mourning her, too? It seems insane to me that a housecat wouldn't understand death - the vet stressed that there's no literature to support the practice, but she shared my belief that it was a good idea to let him see Miss Kitty's body. They'd been together for... I don't even know how many years now. Seven? Ten? They weren't an inseparable bonded pair or anything, they had a lazy Odd Couple esque rivalry, but they didn't hate each other. They shared they porch, lined up side by side for food at each meal, did silly things like run to each other's plate to 'steal' the other one's food.
I feel so fucking weird. I was obviously in shock last night, I cried a little here and there but the full extent hasn't come close to hitting me. And I feel bad about not feeling bad enough, like it makes me a bad cat owner that I'm able to write this out and just sit here like eveything is normal. Normally she'd be headbutting the cushions on the couch next to me, per her usual morning routine, and croakily meowing at me. The end of the couch has a massive dent on the top of the pillow where she would always curl up and nap away the day after breakfast.
I spent a solid hour after I woke up looking at every picture of her. I told myself I was just going to distract myself with tv and video games but instead I've spent my entire morning so far reading about grand mal seizures in cats, random recent posts on reddit from other people who have recently lost their senior cats, and looking at every video and picture I ever took of my little lady.
Life has to go on but I don't want to do anything anymore.
Polishing up a new version of this little site. I want to get back into it. Too much time passes too quickly when I don't journal and reflect and the older I get, the faster this effect speeds things up. And I am definitely getting older.
Had a nice day out yesterday. Saw the new Naked Gun film early (funny coincidence, the audience was mostly old women) and it was a lot of laughs though I made a bad decision getting a bubblegum flavored slushie. The theater around here is really enjoyable. It looks like it's abandoned from the outside and on the inside it looks like it hasn't been updated since the 2000s but has been very nicely maintained. It has those recliner seats and they work great and are always clean.
Later on we visited a curious looking place I'd seen riding past a few times, a little independently owned "museum" that was just some old guy's personal collection of historical items, fossils, and other oddities. It was pretty impressive, he had certified fragments of what was supposed to be pieces of Mercury and the moon that had made it to earth. Also a supposedly authentic cuneiform tablet (what I wouldn't give to have my own).
We finished off the day by popping into a couple of the overlooks in Payne's Prairie. Didn't see anything from the boardwalk (pretty much never do) but there were some horses near the visitor's center including some babies.
I hard into a new video game for the first time in ages - Breath of the Wild. I blasted through it on regular mode so quick, including all the side content, for the first time I'm trying a Master Mode on a Zelda game. Right now I'm struggling with the combat trials and they are frustrating me so badly it actually gave me the motivation to finish working on this site.
I guess it's finally time for a journal update, even though I'm at work and on the clock.
It's been a while.
I've been at my new management position for a little while, 9 months now. It's been ok, definitely the least stressful job I've had as an adult. There's a LOT of downtime and that's nice but it is ultimately a dead-end job. No opportunity for growth and no real benefits. Pay is ok but I'm not saving nearly as much as I like.
I'm still feeling kind of lost in life. Maybe lost isn't the right word. It feels like I'm trapped in some weird invisible bubble. Like the online algorithms have me trapped. Pretty much all the same complaints I've had for the past few years and I just don't know how to find my way out of this fog.
I'm still hopelessly addicted to scrolling social media so that's obviously making things harder. I cannot stay away from the dumpster fire that is reddit no matter how hard I try. I've tried looking for alternatives but nothing else scratches the itch.
I can break myself away to do things like play video games (I'm almost done with Breath of the Wild, and as always with video games I'm several years late to the party) or watch TV while I crochet. But as far as making good creative use of my free time I am just... not doing it. I started fiddling with a new layout of this site and an overhaul of my feminism website. I'm not proud to admit I used AI for the latter because digging up the statistics/info I want feels impossible with the current state of search engines. I'm suspicious Google and others have allowed the utility of search engines diminish in order to push AI as a universal tool.
What's funny about my creative slump is that I have so many raw ideas and rough drafts I don't NEED to come up with anything new. But I still can't get over my mental block of cringing over my own writing. It's so strange because I have no problem rereading my journal entries. But my fiction and nonfiction? I can't get the "who do you think you are? You're not a writer, you're a nobody" voice in my head to shut up, even when I remind myself that anyone can be a writer and it's like the one art form where there's almost no floor on how bad something can be and still becomes popular.
I also still get compliments on my voice from random strangers and told I should do something with it. Seems easy but the one time I tried reading a book aloud and recording it for practice, just the act of doing that make me feel almost crippled from embarrassment and self consciousness (and why??? I was alone an had no intention of uploading it anywhere).
Maybe I'd benefit from those super cheesy self kindness practices like complimenting myself in the mirror. I feel like I've got a positive view of myself and I like myself ok, but when I look at what I just wrote in those previous paragraphs I can't deny that I obviously still have issues.
I tried making a new friend recently and that didn't work out. It was definitely a big chance - it was a woman my age who had come into my job and we found we had a little bit of common interest so we exchanged numbers and discussed going on a walk. She had kind of a weird vibe and apparently got so overwhelmed over exchanging numbers that she teared up a bit an apologized a bunch. Being a socially anxious weirdo myself I didn't want to be judgey. We met at a park and hung out for a couple hours just walking and talking and I found I had the same issue I've always run into making friends - she dominated like 90+% of the conversation. She even winded herself by talking so much a couple of times. I tried making space for myself in the conversation and she did ask me a couple questions about myself but then immediately steered to conversation back to herself. And most of it was trauma dumping and pushing me to come to a silent disco with her when I very politely made it clear that isn't my scene. I could have been down with the trauma dumping but she seemed weirded out or offended if I tried to relate or delve into the feelings aspect. It was just a straight hour of being bombarded with Bummer Facts. She offered me a ride home and I took her up on it. I feel bad about it but I ghosted her texts after that, I just didn't know how to tell her that spending time with her was draining and not fun and I never want to do it again (then again, her texts were mostly about herself and things I didn't even know how to respond to since I barely know her).
I want friends, specifically female friends, but I can't deal with the all-take-no-give types. That's the exact relationship I have with my mom and sister and I can only handle them in very small doses a couple times a year or less.
For a while I thought I had a personality that was attracting these types but nowadays I think it's just the direction humanity is taking in general. My boyfriend apparently has lost touch with people over the same issue.
And I guess that's my big life issue right now. I was spoiled for so long with human communication - I had interesting people to talk to at work every day and I had all these places online I could go for high quality discussions about everything imaginable. Now I'm alone for 90% of my work day and every social media platform I use is full of toxic stupidity and I cannot resist rage-gaging with it, even knowing I'm probably talking to a bot.
So. Here I am. 3 hours and 20 minutes from the end of my shift, just waiting for the day to be over. At first I was making really good use of my downtime - reading and watching documentaries while I crochet. I even had fantasies of making jewelry while I'm here to sell on the side or some other kind of "side hustle". But now? I just scroll.
Things are pretty good otherwise. Both my cats are in pretty good health for their age and they both seem so happy all the time. It is so hard to leave in the morning because Miss Kitty always wants to get in as many pets as she can before I go. I don't know what I'm good do when she's finally gone, it's gonna leave such a massive hole in my life and heart. But I'm just lucky I've gotten to have this much time with her and I gotta make the best of it.
I've had ideas for trying to pry my brain out of lethargy, I just have to do it. I have so many strong, angry opinions about media I've thought about writing reviews for all of them just for my own record/enjoyment. It's probably a good idea.
Getting out for more exercise would probably also help but I've been dropping weight and now I'm back to being really skinny again. Of course this means I have less energy and feel dumber. It's also hot as the devil's dick outside and twice as humid so going outdoors is super gross. I walk a mile to and from work every day so that's as much as I can bare right now. On a neat note, I did calculate that I've walked at least 10,000 miles just traveling to and from work over my lifetime.
I've also seriously been considering attempting the Florida Trail but I have to keep my weight up consistently and go see a doctor, and I have accomplished neither. My heart has also been beating too fast lately at weird times so that's probably not good (almost certainly due to caffeine and marijuana consumption but I have no desire to quit either).
Drying out would probably do me a lot of good, both substance-wise and digitally. A few months back I did an Abstinence Day - no screens, no drugs, no junk food, just bland healthy foods and tea and irl physical hobbies. I was successful and it made me feel so good I promised myself I'd do it once a week. Naturally that means I never did it again.
It's funny. I have all this free time to just think about what I want and now I feel like I'm waiting something but I don't know what, whereas before it felt like I had this unstoppable force driving me but not enough time to dedicate to my goals. Whatever spiritual funk I'm in has got to be connected to my inability to get hyperfocused on anything like I used to (though I came close with botw). Well, here's to hoping that getting back into journaling will help.
Oh yeah and I miss microblogging. Debating on whether I'm gonna add one to here or just join bluesky. I miss old Twitter and LiveJournal :(