Today is Monday, November 14th. I’m sitting in the MLK Library, like I try to do every few days out of the week, to hammer out an insightful blog post or article and apply for a few jobs.
I haven’t been able to do either the past few days, mainly because of the overwhelming feeling of doom at having a hateful white supremacist/child rapist/evil demagogue/cheeto Voldemort soon become the leader of the country. I’m not here to talk about that, though. At least not really.
A lot of stuff has been weighing on my mind lately, the slow destruction of America notwithstanding. I’m in a weird transitional phase in my life and I’m not handling it well at all. I feel helpless and hopeless and powerless most days and when I’m not feeling like that, I have a crushing feeling of apathy sitting on my chest; why am I here if nothing I do matters? What’s the point?
Besides abstract feelings and sitting in my thoughts, there’s a ton of other tangible problems that have been screwing everything up as well. I just started taking two anti-depressants and they’re making me both extremely tired and nauseous, and while I can deal with the drowsiness, nausea is the worst feeling in the world. As I mentioned in the first sentence, I’m at the library right now and I’ll be damned if I vomit in public as I can’t think of anything more embarrassing.
As of the new iOS update, autocorrect is completely useless and the mistakes it makes and doesn’t correct me from making is driving me crazy. I tend to use all caps when I’m joking or something, and after doing so once, it tries to automatically capitalize that word every time I use it thereafter. I don’t know how algorithms for autocorrect work, but these new ones are way more broken than they ever were and it’s pissing me off.
The loneliness and frustration of this weird place in my life is the most viable of my problems, I think. I’m living in a place I don’t like. I still don’t know very many people that I can hang out with in person. I don’t have a job and I’m running out of money. It’s scary and lonely and tough, and it’s making me wish I never moved out here in the first place. If I were still in Texas, I wouldn’t be as happy as I could be, but I also would be around people that I know and wouldn’t have to be so stressed out about money.
Transitions are hard, yeah, I know. Being an adult is hard too; I’ve heard the stories. People try to give me advice on how to be successful and I know it’s well meaning, but it feels a bit condescending as if they think I haven’t already tried everything in the book. I realize people aren’t actively working against me or trying to steer me in the wrong direction, but it doesn’t always feel like that and it’s hard to acknowledge their true intentions.
Focusing on anything nowadays seems nearly impossible. I’m already in a constant state of stress from the election, but add major depression and brain-altering meds that are supposed to fix it and I’m just not where I used to be right now.
I think it’s healthy to have conversations about mental health and ~feelings~ and all that good stuff, but I feel like that’s been occupying so much space in my head lately. I want to get back to a place where I can critically analyze text and television and movies and games. I want to write funny articles about entertainment media or dedicate thousands of words to my favorite cartoon.
I can’t do it anymore, at least right now. I just can’t focus.