It's accidentally been a long time since my last blog post. Almost a year, actually! Life got away from me, as it often does. I've been keeping busy and truthfully, I just haven't had it in me to make more time for hobbies (including this site). I've made a few attempts at blog posts within the past year and just never followed through. But now that I've reached a year sober, I feel that an update is overdue. A lot has happened in the past almost-year, so let's get into it.
Sober Housing
Typically when one graduates rehab, the next step is to attend an outpatient program (think rehab stepdown) and move into sober housing. Most people that find themselves in rehab don't have homes to go back to - those bridges have been burnt, and they have no recourse, nowhere to go. That wasn't necessarily the case for me; I had a place with roommates to go back to. I didn't go back for long, though - as it turns out, I'd burnt that bridge too. The structure wasn't sound enough for me to stay. Resentment had built up all around. In the end I made the decision to move out; I burnt what was left of that bridge and moved into a sober house. It was a hard decision for me to make, and I agonized on it for a while, but it was necessary. The environment wasn't conducive to recovery, and I wasn't really welcome there anyways.
Living in sober housing has been an interesting experience, to say the least. I could go into detail, but that really should be its own post. Suffice it to say, it was the right move for me. It's not without its frustrations. Living with people, especially people who are in early recovery and relearning how to be functioning members of society, can be messy. This is the one and only sober house I've ever lived in, so I don't have a proper point of reference, but I've heard some horror stories from other sober houses. There's been occassions of drama in our house, but comparatively, it hasn't been that bad. And drama is par for the course, when you house a bunch of queer addicts together.
Pheonix, neighborhood cat and frequent visitor at our house.
My room is tiny, but I have it to myself (a luxury in sober living). The house has been a revolving door of residents (common in sober living), but I have a couple of mainstay housemates that I've grown close to. I have one housemate that I abhor like no other, but he's already making plans to move out. The biggest downside is that there are no pets, so I can't have Katrina with me. She's staying with friends and is well taken care of, but they're busy and don't often have time for me to visit. It's been two months since I last went to visit her :^( To be completely candid, I miss her so much it's pathetic!! And she's getting on in years... she turns 14 soon. When I think about it for too long, I get disheartened. She's been a pillar in my life for so long, it's been rough to not have her at my side for this past year.
All that's left for me to do is to keep working hard, so that one day me and my girl can be reunited... hopefully sooner than later.
Holding down a job
Turns out, holding a job down is easier when you're sober! It also really helps when you don't hate the job, or if the work isn't taxing and dehumanizing.
Without giving too much away - I'm working as a receptionist at a community gym. In short, a desk job! Do you know how long I've dreamed of having a desk job? For as long as I've been working. So that's... a decade of dreaming. I'm here to tell you, never stop dreaming - even your mediocre dreams can become reality!
My mug of choice at work.
It's still a customer-facing position, but it's a far cry from my years toiling away in restaurants or catering. In fact, the customers (members, we call them) are largely pleasant :^) It's mostly retirees coming in to get their steppies. I've built a rapport with a lot of them, and greet them by name. It's a chill job - sending e-mails, answering phone calls, folding towels. Honestly, I enjoy the work! It's nice to be serving the people that live in my community, my neighbors - and not rich out of towners that struggle to see me as human. I don't get tips anymore, but some of the regulars like to bring us snacks!
The pay is minimum wage, and I only work part time, so I'm still living paycheck to paycheck. But I'd rather work part time here than work full time somewhere else, likely retail or food service. With my skills and work history, that's pretty much all there is for me on the job market. Plus I've been keeping active in the queer sober community, and maintaining a semblance of a social life; I'd have a hard time managing that if I were working full time. For now, I'm content with my job situation.
RIP my beautiful claws, and shoutout to that dude in the background
Plus, I was able to grow out my nails - you can't do that with grueling physical labor. Ahh, growing and maintaining them was a labor of love, but alas, it was not to last - I made the difficult decision to trim them back to nubbins' recently. I had a lapse in self harm and my claws, although pretty, were too much of a liability. Also, using my nails to self harm is not good for nail health!! A regrettable but necessary decision. Things have just been rough recently :( Speaking of...
Getting sued
I'm getting fucking sued, baby!!
It really sucks when I'm catching up with friends I haven't seen in a minute and the only real update I have for them is "I'm getting sued", but yeah. I'm getting sued for consumer debt. Took out a credit card a while back, was irresponsible with it and eventually found myself in abject poverty. I did my best to keep up with payments for a while, but it got to be untenable and in the end I gave that up. The thing went deliquent and I got a letter threatening legal action - I didn't pay it much mind at the time. The debt is barely $6k, that's small potatoes. You're gonna sue me over these small potatoes? The time and effort of suing me over these potatoes has gotta cost more than the potatoes themselves. That's what I thought, at least. Well, guess what?
They sued me over my small potatoes. Life's a bitch!!
Ah, my potatoes...
The whole thing has been a huge bummer and a good source of stress. The good news is that I'm so poor there's nothing they can do to get their money from me! Not legally, anyways. My meager wages are protected by law. If for some reason they try to garnish my wages regardless, I have legal recourse. It hopefully won't come to that, though.
The situation is largely dealt with, and the rest is out of my hands. If I ever start making more than minimum wage, or if I win the lottery, what have you, that changes things. I really don't see that becoming an issue though. Not anytime soon, at least. Haha...
Other things I've been up to
I've been reading an embarassing amount of bad yaoi this year. There's no question as to how or why it came about - I was just indulging in old habits, reliving the times in my youth when I'd stay up late browsing titles and reading through whatever piqued my interest. Man, there's a lot of slop out there! And it's shamefully easy to get sucked into, especially with the vertical scrolling format of manhuas and webtoons. Again, the root of all evil - that damn phone. There's no shame in indulging in trash every once in a while, but I'm telling you, as far as the trash analogy goes, I was sleeping in dumpsters. It's not so much entertaining as it is fascinating: seeing the way tropes manifest throughout titles, the bizarre sexual dimorphism between semes and ukes, the liberal use of pre-made assets to fill out panels and pump out pages... It's all fascinating. There's plenty of material there for analysis, but I'm not about to write a thesis. A blog post, maybe. I'll tuck that idea away for later.
Panels from Eve Festival, a BL that is decidedly not slop
I've also been reading books, especially in this latter half of the year. I've reacquainted myself with my local library, and have been placing a fair amount of holds. I'm working my way through Book of the New sun - I started reading it as part of a book club I'm in with some friends, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I'm not typically one for fantasy or sci-fi, especially in literature. It's harder for me to get invested in world building done through words (chalk it up to comics brain rot...) With that in mind, it's surprising that I'm enjoying BotNS so much; the world building is not 'approachable', but it's arcane in a way that's deeply compelling. Also, Severian is a weird insufferable freak and I kinda love him? I mostly hate his ass though.
The premise is this: what if a goth homeschooled edgelord went out into the world and became everyone's problem? And he has a sick ass sword. That's an oversimplification, sure, but is that not the essence of the series?
The man the myth the legend
I've put my read of BotNS on hold for now while I work through my library holds, but I look forward to getting back to it. I'm reading Mielville for the first time and it's dragging on a bit for me... a bit too British for my tastes, which I really should've anticipated. I wanna go back to far-future dystopian South America (aka Nessus)!
More recently, I installed Linux Mint on a spare laptop I have. I'd been wanting to try linux for a while! I'd already decided a while back that my first distro would be Mint, after watching this video. I'm really enjoying it! It's been fun to set up and futz around in the GUI and CLI alike. What's next for me on this linux journay? Ricing? Distro hopping? Probably ricing. I miss the spotlight feature from my mac, plus I love customizing shit.
Behold, my desktop
So basically,
A lot has happened! Even having achieved a year of sobriety, life remains a bit miserable - but I'd rather be doing it sober than not.
I wanted to share my reflections on one year sober, but this post is already long enough with me recounting the past year. My thoughts on recovery are many and deserving of their own post. I'll be sure to get on that soon, ideally before another year passes :^) Suffice it to say sobriety has been pretty good so far.
Until next time!