16 december 2023
I've always felt like problems in my life are something I should secretly deal with. I know that's not a healthy position to have, but from childhood onward I had to be valuable for what I can do without any weakness or I was discarded and abandoned.
I feel like my pain a contagion that is my job to protect others from. If it isn't life threatening than I should quietly suffer and not bring people down with. I guess this sick self-image happens when the oldest memories I have are of getting in trouble for allowing myself to be hurt by others. Always getting in trouble having needs. Help always came with the price of resentment. My goal for so long was to simply not be a burden on anyone - to not be resented - but that has become harder as my chronic illness has intensified.
In the spirit of not being an annoyance or a burden toward people I hardly even know, please stop reading my entries from now until January. The situation I am in will require a miracle to escape from and the last I want to do is harm the mental health of strangers during a time of year when I feel I have no right to ruin anyone's fleeting joy. If by chance I survive this and I still somehow have internet access in February then I promise I will have happier posts. Maybe I'll finish my book(s) or one of the dozens of programming projects I've started. Maybe I'll be working on one of the many ecology projects that I desperately wish I had the means and health to work on. Maybe there are brighter days ahead of me and maybe I will live to see my 40th birthday. Small hope keeps me from doing the unthinkable. But as the middle of January draws near, I fear that hope will be extinguished like every other bit of small hope I've clung to through these hellish years.
Countdown.
In mid-January my world is set to end. That's when the place I'll be living isn't here and there is no "there" for me to go. I've been homeless briefly but that was when I was in my 20s, my body wasn't falling apart, and it wasn't the middle of winter. So this time it looks like the real deal. I always had this possibility hanging over my head. Ever since I got sick, dropped out of engineering school, spent a year applying to programming jobs, all the while getting sicker and sicker my life has just been an exercise in barely holding on. But anyway, I want to don't revisit the past too much right now. There be the dragons of anger at myself for not working harder to secure my place in in the world.
So I contacted some of the easy to reach people first. No luck so far. One person even replied back saying they're sick too hope I get well. I don't think they really read my email..,
Most others have not responded. I expect to be ghosted by most people I know again, just like in the 2010s the last time I was faced with losing everything. I get so much anxiety doing this because I know asking someone to house me for even a brief time is a huge ask. I hate that so many people are going to say no that even the small chance someone won't say no is barely enough to get through the humiliating process of begging for my life. I fear that I was never anyone's friend irl, they just tolerated me.