#if i ever put off a deadline ive set for myself it's usually because of this and not writer's block

[dreamsicle262]

alright time to work on another chapter of my fanfic that even i, as the author, am emotionally invested in (i say as i continue to do other things instead of writing)

[futchmccree-archive]

i’m so fucking anxious:

basically work is putting me under more stress than usual because they are training me in the back, in the kitchen and i’m under a lot of pressure to preform well by both my managers and my coworkers, and i’m so are out of my comfort zone at work because i’m used to being up front and dealing with people, and having set hours and getting the same shifts that now that my shifts are changing its making me super anxious.

I've also been in the process of applying to this college in Malta that my brother in law works for. there doing a really good scholarship program where if i get in i can basically get a masters in Video Game design for basically free. but trying to apply is literally just hurdle after hurdle. i was and still am a piece of shit and never took my SAT or ACT and have no A-levels or GCSE’s because i’m from the United States. i also never took any AP courses in high school, so they're willing to compromise if i give them both my high school and college transcripts since i have already taken 37 credit hours at my current institution. but i don’t entirely know how to get my official college transcripts and i have to get all the way across town (i live in a major city) by 4 pm when i work until 4 pm 5 days a week, and my days off for this week are already over. i don’t own a car so getting anywhere by the public transport system can take hours, especially since i live so far out of the way from literally everything. i also need a letter of recommendation from a teacher, which i do not have. ive emailed all my professors from last semester, and some old HS teachers, none of which have replied to me, which is understandable because i literally found out about this scholarship opportunity in the middle of July and the final deadline is August 20th. 

i’m so fucking stressed and i know i’m only making this harder for myself, and i need to do this, i want to leave my house, i want to get on my feet, i want to not be the family disappointment but i honestly just feel so bad for myself that i don’t think i ever can and it’s really bugging me and stressing me out. both of my brothers are so much better off than me, even though they might be 6 and 11 years older than me, at my age they weren’t still living with their dad only working 5 hour shifts at a minimum wage job, they both knew what they wanted to do and i honestly have no where to go and i don’t know what i wanted to do. 

i literally kinda just want to die, tbh and this is a really long post and nobody cares but i need to talk about it somewhere so, i thought here would be the best place i guess. 

[cosmosogler]

i got four bottle caps today. two from fishing, one from collecting shards in the “fun adventure island”, and one when i won the lottery. i should probably go back to trying for gold bottle caps now that i’ve got a good fishing system in place for the silver ones.

that’s not really what i’m gonna talk about too much though.

i woke up before my alarm again, but still put my alarm on snooze when it did finally go off. i did not want to get out of bed at all.

this morning i kinda goofed off and grabbed some of the leftover rice for a quick lunch before i left for therapy. i could only eat like two-thirds of it though, it made me really sick. the only difference between this rice and the rice i had a few days ago was the enchilada sauce. but the bean burrito adventure with enchilada sauce didn’t make me sick before the first leftover meal.

i mostly spent my 45 minutes with the therapist complaining about my parents and worrying about my grad school applications. i gotta email florida back about the enrollment deadline... i’ll do that right after i call uic in the morning. they were 10 minutes closed when i went to call them. just missed.

oh yeah, and she can’t see me next week. so it’ll be two weeks before i see her again. for 45 minutes.

i dunno, that extra 15 minutes i usually get with other therapists makes a big difference... i feel like i don’t have much time to settle in and figure out what’s on my mind. i mean, i have the topics i want to bring up going in, but it takes a bit of meandering for me to really find something i can actually work on that week.

i picked up my meds on the way home and then spent the afternoon hanging out with eve, fishing for bottle caps, watching some tv show reviews and adding them to my watch list, and making myself sick with a small snack. it was a frozen cheese pizza. i put it in the oven and left it in longer than the directions said and it was still cold in one spot, which was frustrating.

when mom came home she asked to see my acceptance letter from florida and the paperwork i gotta send in by monday. she said things like “why aren’t you excited” and “you don’t seem excited” and “i just thought you would be happy that you got into one of your top choices” and “you should be more excited” and it made me kinda mad, so i acted less excited and even more vague and tight-lipped about it.

i watched the wind blow the leaves in the tree in our backyard while mom talked to herself about the logistics of coming to visit. it was nice out, but i didn’t want to go outside. i ended up not taking wiley for a walk today. i wanted to give my bug bites a little time to heal, and also i lost track of time and forgot. i’ll take him for a long walk with asher tomorrow maybe.

oh yeah, she told me about her boss’ daughter’s experience with mental health hospitals. she went to a fancy one down south that apparently cost “90,000 dollars.” she said that the daughter’s diagnosis was that she was “addicted to pain” and “could not be happy unless there was something wrong with her” and she had to have a whole bunch of surgeries before she came home, and also had to stop taking her meds. i kind of squinted at mom, trying to figure out what she was implying. well, that’s a lie. i knew what she was implying. i was trying to figure out if she was doing that on purpose.

i told her about the place i found that i liked and was gonna set up an appointment with before my sister and i leave for the concert next thursday.

quick aside - my sister loves k pop and we have tickets for the bts concert. it is an 8 hour drive away. i spent some time with my therapist trying to figure out what i was gonna do about my meds if the concerts went on late into the night.

anyway, mom decided it was necessary to tell me multiple times throughout the day that my aunt and her sister were both familiar with the mental health facility i was looking at. i couldn’t figure out why, so i ignored it, and then when she came home from work she asked if i had called and asked my aunt about the facility. 

man, i don’t tell no one in my family about how i’m doing except sometimes gramma. i’m pretty sure they can tell there’s something wrong with me, but i don’t talk about it with them and they don’t generally ask other than a casual “how are you today?” which is our usual excuse to launch into long stories about whatever financial garbage we’re dealing with or if something has changed about our summer plans.

you know, stuff that’s more or less relevant to the whole family.

oh yeah, i got super mad in therapy today. not with the therapist. i was telling her about my hospital stays and how mom always talks over me. when i was in the hospital back in january after dad brought me home mom was telling the doctors about how i felt. and they were deferring to her when asking questions about my health! and i asked them to put the iv in my left arm instead of my right, so i could use my right arm, and they totally ignored me. i had to do everything left handed. like paperwork.

and the time after my heart surgery when a radio station mom liked was doing a fundraiser at the children’s hospital. we went to go on air and mom told everyone about how my whole life no one ever knew anything was wrong and it was so scary and she started crying and talking about being a parent. 

i knew something was wrong. i started figuring it out around the time i started wanting to die in christian school. nobody had listened to me. they’d just called me lazy or said i had no pain tolerance. and even after the doctors said, you know, i have a huge heart problem and i am in like a lot of pain whenever i exert myself, i would ask to use a wheelchair at the mall or whatever and mom would say “you don’t really need that. everyone’s going to stare at you.”

so, like, my problem turned into mom’s sob story about how scary it is to have something wrong with your child. the dj never asked me one question about it. i just stared at the two of them sitting on the bench while mom cried into the microphone. i was 11. i knew how to talk.

after that when i would bring up therapy, like, after i turned 18, mom would jump to either i’m seeing a therapist because “you have ptsd from your heart surgery” or “you have autism.” i was talking to a therapist about my... depression and nightmares... but you know, whatever floats your boat mom. tell me more about how i’m addicted to melatonin and my medications turn me into “not yourself.”

man i’ve complained about this like five times and i’m still salty and don’t know what to do about it.

the one useful thing mom told me is that she looked into why doogles is eating poop. apparently pack animals do that to hide their pack’s tracks from other predators when a member of the family is sick, so they don’t get picked off by stronger animals. it is a reasonable fear, considering the coyotes that wander around in the ranch land behind our backyard. they are technically capable of jumping the fence, though i don’t think they would do it while our dogs were actually in the yard.

it’s because she knows eve is not doing well, probably because of the tumor. she tries to cover her own “tracks” too. when dad caught her at it tonight he got super mad and yelled at her. i told him there was a reason and he said he didn’t care. i set my jaw and followed him inside.

i had some stuffed mushrooms as a snack. i feel... ok, i guess. and i had plain pasta for dinner. i couldn’t finish the little bowl and i felt kinda junky but not too nauseous. 

i think i lost track of time and started writing late, because it’s just past 12:40. i know i didn’t start until a few minutes after 12 since i was downstairs eating... i don’t like how easy it is to slip from my schedule. and no matter how early i get to bed i can’t seem to get up before 10. i go to bed at 1, can’t get up before 10. i go to bed close to 12, still get up at 10. i want to have a little more time in the mornings to maybe get stuff done, and a little more time between my morning and lunch medication doses, but that doesn’t seem like it’ll happen unless i can trick myself into getting up at 9 or 9:30.

ah, i forgot to draw today. that’s what it was. i don’t have too much to do tomorrow, just the phone call... and then i’m hanging out with asher in the afternoon. i will put my sketchbook back on my desk so i will see it when i get bored and open up youtube.

there was something else i wanted to talk about, but i think it was kind of a meta anecdote about how fleeting the little moments are, and how difficult they are to capture and write down. every now and then i’ll stop and think, and i’ll want to write the thought down here that evening, and i’ll have totally forgotten what it was by the time i sit down to write. sometimes i’ll send a message about it to asher and then write down what i texted basically word for word, but i don’t like to bother him constantly. 

like, my life in my writing seems to take place in some nebulous black text in white space, but it doesn’t quite... give you the experience i was having, the tile on my feet, the bug bites, diogi snoring behind mom’s chair, the darkness of the house’s downstairs and how the windows are always shuttered, the wind chimes, the specific hue of the sky that always makes me think of my dreams and i can’t figure out why because the sky is usually the wrong color in my dreams. the million side programs running in my head while i try to have a conversation and i end up just saying nothing because why bother, or worse, i have something to say and just freeze up or stutter. and then mom sighs, because of course, and of course i’m just too stupid to talk coherently. one of my feet is super sore on the bottom every time i try to walk barefoot. my stomach is always uncomfortable and i almost always am aware of it. the split skin on my finger’s joint stings all the time. 

there’s just so much stuff that i plain forget to talk about, and my posts ARE ALREADY SO LONG! there is too much that happens in one day to talk about all of it! even when nothing happens!!!

it’s 1 now. i should try to sleep. i’m real thirsty, but if i drink water now i’m gonna have to get up in a half hour.