Pressure & Sanity

The girl in the mirror

May 11th, 2022

Today was weird…

…cool weird.

It’s the day after my 30th birthday.

I’ve been joking with my friend about how I’m just going to “stay 29 forever.” I knew that I didn’t really care….

I was making those jokes ironically!

right…?

….shit.

My social circle is really small. It’s just me and my best friend.

_{(…and my cat)}

The only other people I interact with are my coworkers.

I’m not against having friends…I’ve just been…kind of a shitty friend….like…really shitty.

I can’t go back in time, but I can make sure I don’t forget that. One of my favorite youtubers, Larry Lawton, has a catchphrase:

“I don’t believe in bad people, I believe in bad choices.”

So I’ve got a lot of good ones to start making.

But that’s a story for another time.

Oh, right…back to my social circle…

I went out of my way to hide that it was my birthday to my coworkers. I even deleted my birthday from my employee profile, just so it wouldn’t show up in the daily birthdays list.

…That sounds like I was afraid.

I couldn’t stand the thought of being reminded I was 30.

I get along with everyone I work with, and the most that happens on everyone’s birthday is you walk in and a few people give you a lazily excited “Happy Birthday!”

I was afraid of hearing “Happy Birthday.”

…On my birthday.

sheesh…

That’s why today was good weird.

Yesterday ended up being my favorite birthday ever.

It was special as fuck and I was not ready for that.

I went to work and happened to have an earlier shift, so I got out at 3.

The plan was to go hangout with my bestie. (I promise to not overuse that word)

I thought I would go to her place and we would just talk, and have coffee.

I knew she had gotten me a gift.

And I was really excited for that. I just wanted to see my friend for my birthday.

So I go to her place, she had gotten me a couple outfits since I had been wearing, literally, the same 5 outfits every day….since last august.

I washed them, I’m not that gross….

but more on that later.

I changed into one of the outfits and loved it.

Just a super casual shirt and pants, but it really matched my personality.

I never understood that phrase until yesterday…

But that’s not even the cool part.

We sat and talked for a while before going to our new favorite coffee shop. Then we drove around the city and just laughed like two morons.

I felt completely out of my shell. I didn’t even think about being trans. It’s happened only one other time before this, and it’s weird.

It’s AMAZING, but weird.

Both times it made me feel like I had just caught up on a decade of sleep the next day.

I forget how much I can get in the way of myself.

The last time this happened was a little less than a year ago.

The first day of my new job. It was my first time working at a place that I was out before they knew me.

I definitely let myself fall back down again after that.

It’s okay, because as I wrote at some previous point in this…mess of a blog…

I am really good at fucking up.

But I keep getting better, in measurable ways after.

Not that I want to keep fucking up, but I do need to stay proud of the fact that I’m getting much stronger when it comes to pulling myself back up.

but…more on that later.

Last I wrote here was a couple months ago when I was starting to crack the surface of whatever the hell I was trying to do.

If that last sentence was awkward to read…yeah… but that’s about the only way I can describe it…

two days ago, I was 29.

I had convinced myself I was a complete failure and had nothing to show for my twenties, other than debt.

Today, I am 30

I spent the last year personally chauffeuring my self around my own personal hell, and I’ve come out of it with two incredible job opportunities, that are the result of my hard work.

_{(a little dramatic in the first half there but…f*ck it, it’s there for flavor…)}

They both pay essentially the same that I make now, but they are two opportunities that I helped create, along with very kind and genuine people, that will likely never know they were helping me.

So, it’s another small step.

But finally acknowledging the girl in the mirror

feels huge.

Thank you,
Coding in the dark.

March 25th, 2022

My last post was pretty dark

I went back and fourth on deleting it, but I am going to keep it for two reasons.

One, because it was how I felt in the moment, and I felt I needed to write it. Maybe just to get it out…When I started this anonymous-ish blog, my number one goal was to not delete anything, and I am going to force myself to stick to it. Maybe if things get better, it will be healthy to look back and see where I was…I don’t know.

The other reason is that I am still pretty deep in that headspace and I don’t think it would be healthy to pretend that I am not. I have this issue in the real world, I might as well work on it here.

So, what have I been up to…

Like most weeks, I have my manic ups and downs.

I am trying as hard as I can and leaving no stone unturned. It feels like I am working 10 times harder than I did in graduate school. I don’t know if it is good or bad, but I enjoy this kind of lifestyle(ish).

I love the hunt for the next thing; how does this work, how does that work, why is this, why is that etc…

I love to learn.

What I don’t love is when I can’t take a break from it for a moment to relax and refresh, but, one thing I learned for certain in college is that every second I am taking a break, someone else is working…or something like that.

So, this is what I have been working on.

I’ve always been tech-curious. I tried (very half-heartedly) ca. 2008 to learn visual basic and asp.net. I don’t for the life of me remember one iota of either. The ‘problem’ I ran into back then is I sucked at math. Hard. I remember having to give up all my lunch periods freshman year to work with a tutor because I was one of those kids they worried would bring down their state test scores.

I never understood a lick of any of it. I was convinced I was dumb and that I was never going to get it. I quickly gave up on programming because it looked and felt like math, so I figured I would quit while I was ahead.

I have been going over every possibility of what to do for a career. I’m more than 200 apps in now (I recently learned one of my issues might be that my resume doesn’t pass applicant tracking software – which…just fuck every piece of that nonsense.)

My hobby/escape has been…being super tech curious. I have gone down so many rabbit holes in the last 3 years.

I said I used to be tech curious, but I completely abandoned that when I started college in 2010. 3 years ago I couldn’t figure out how to shut off a windows computer, and I only knew the word Linux, but nothing about it.

Now I have resurrected a long-dead MacBook pro I never got around to recycling and installed ubuntu. I can navigate around decently well through the terminal, I have installed and messed around with python and JavaScript on it, and just yesterday I went through a tutorial to make a color-flipper in JavaScript and IT FUCKING WORKED!!! I have also tinkered with 3d modeling on my windows laptop, learned the basics of blockchain technology, learned a tiny bit of SQL, went through the entire HTML tutorial on w3schools, among like 30 other things.

The above paragraph made me smile as I was writing it… It’s the most basic of the basic, but it’s all stuff I never in a million years thought I could grasp any part of….

The reason I wrote this post is that today was a very bad day. I was working though the w3schools JavaScript tutorial and struggling hard, and I had the crushing realization that people spend years in school to do this…how the hell do I expect to ‘catch’ up on my own within the next 50 years….

I know I can’t think like that, and I think I know what I want to do. I want to find a mentor. I’m having information overload and I can’t tell what I should be focusing on. I need to start from the beginning, but I don’t know what the beginning is, and I can’t tell what I need to know…I like to learn by project, but in this new space I am at a loss for how to project plan….

The good news is though I am desperate to get into a job making more than $15 an hour because healthcare would be cool…I am intrinsically motivated to keep learning and trying to build because even though nothing is making any sense, it’s all making sense…if that makes sense?

I’ll put it this way: When making my JavaScript color flipper yesterday, everything was working except the layout. The tutorial took about 40 mins for me to complete, and it took and hour and some change for me to figure out I made 2 typos in the html, which fixed the layout.

I didn’t feel angry or stupid, I just laughed and thought to myself “there’s gotta be a spellcheck in this thing somewhere” (I’m sure there probably is…I just haven’t figured that out yet)

Thanks for reading.
What now?

February 8th, 2022

I’ve been off all my meds for a little over a week. I have gone through various stages of withdrawal and I am fairly hopeful it will even out soonish. I went from manic and angry and have settled into sleepy and emotional. I haven’t been awake too much this past week, I mainly go to work and go right to sleep after. Going off the hormones I haven’t noticed any real physical symptoms, at least I think, but emotionally it is hurting worse than I thought. I knew I had to do it, but finally cancelling my future appointments and cutting the relationship with my doctor made it a reality for me that it’s over. I don’t really want to talk about that right now though.

So what now?

Since January of last year I have completed 141 job applications. Out of all of those I have had 4 interviews, and 0 offers. I was very lucky that my current job initially denied me, then had some people drop, which they came back and offered me a spot last august. I have applied for retail, hospitality, finance, education, IT, HR, and even spent some time figuring out if I could go into adult entertainment. I think at this point I just want to feel wanted.

Of those 141 applications, the last 30 I have applied to under my deadname. I think in my head I wondered if maybe it was a discrimination thing, since apparently every company on earth is desperate for workers and I can’t get anything, but it seems that I am just wholly unqualified to do anything.

I always said that I don’t regret going to school, but lately I have been wondering. I make $15 and some change an hour, which don’t get me wrong, I get is considered ‘good’ (at least I think it is?). This makes me feel kind of bad for complaining about it, but I don’t know what else to do. $15/hr with 11 years work experience and a masters degree isn’t livable. It takes two paychecks just to cover my rent and I live in the cheapest place in a 50 mile radius (according to apartments.com).

My next step is going to be to try to hold steady until August when my lease is up and see if I can move to a cheaper state. If I didn’t have my cat I was going to try a year of car living, but she means more to me than the breath in my lungs so I wouldn’t do that to her.

In the meantime I am just kind of floating. For the time being at least I can’t apply to any more jobs. I have been begging at my own company to figure out what skills to gather to apply to different positions after I have been there for a year, something that was heavily covered in orientation, but even there I can’t get an ear. I have asked my boss at least twice a month since September and it’s always “I’ll get something on the calendar for next week.” I tried to take initiative and applied for an internal position and contacted a different manager to ask about said spot. I didn’t get the interview and I got scolded for going behind my managers back as it is their ‘biggest pet peeve’

I can’t fill out any more applications, do any more stupid fucking personality assessments, or pre-recorded phone/video interviews or any of the other stupid bullshit hoop every application asks for. 141 times I guess is my limit.

So what now? Where is this employment blacklist I must be on? I have historically been an extremely patient person. Is it selfish to say that 11 years of hard work, patience, and collecting any scraps I can, only to completely restart is too much for me? I don’t want anything special, I just want to not feel like a pile of trash for once.

Am I a bad person? These days it feels more and more like I should just quit complaining and suck it up. I don’t have much of a choice but to do that, I guess.

At the moment I’m out of fight.

To quote an old favorite song of mine:

The child is grown
The dream is gone
Revisiting my holiday

January 22nd, 2022

_{re-write of Happy Holidays}

This was my first holiday season alone.

I estranged myself from my family in August, and just like that, thirty years of tradition became sitting in my apartment smoking weed into a box fan…my friends were out of town, or I was ignoring them.

There was an unhealthy mix of both.

I always thought that Christmas time was my favorite time of year, but I think I like the idea of Christmas, not the reality of it.

I should be more self-aware here. I like my idea of Christmas, not the actual reason for Christmas. That’s not a political statement, I just don’t know enough about it to claim any authority over the meaning.

I would always talk to my friends and coworkers about how much I loved Christmas with my family. Each year though, Christmas got a little colder, and yes, that’s a metaphor.

Looking back, I think I was really remembering just one Christmas and I convinced myself it was every year… It was the last year my brother and I were still in high school. We went hard that year. I’m sure my parents put a little extra in because they knew change was coming.

I was too naive to think that far ahead, but I don’t think any of us were ready for that change when my brother moved out for college….

anyway…

It was as I was coughing my smoke into the back of the fan that I realized something I never gave my brother credit for. Which is something we never gave our parents credit for. And our parents never gave us credit for either.

That was a linguistic journey up Mount Whatthefuck…

anyway.

We never talked about being the first one (I’m back to my brother by the way) to leave the family circle. He got a lot of shit for from all of us for becoming a ‘yuppie’ when he went to college. The same shit I got when I went to college because….Karma. He wasn’t a yuppie, and neither am I. We just expanded out horizons and went beyond our safe little hometown.

I wish everyone could just put their collective guard down, and talk.

Talk about the feelings.

Talk about the pain.

Talk about everything.

Just talk.

Featured image by: Josh Nuttall
I haven’t lost that obsessive spark.

January 22nd, 2022

The Prompt: Take inspiration from a night sky. Or, write about a time when “the stars aligned” in your horoscope.

There was one summer about ten years ago where I spent every single night taking time-lapse videos of sunset and sunrise.

I found one and watched it recently. Holy pickle-chips has video quality come a LONG way! It wasn’t a great video, I just used the built in time-lapse function, but I remember being so obsessed. This was before I had a smartphone. I would just stand in my backyard all night with my video camera and a really shitty tripod doing my thing.

I definitely miss those times, but I think younger me would be pleased to know that with things being the way they are, I haven’t lost that obsessive spark.

I enjoy trying and failing, because there’s always a lesson somewhere. I am learning to look back at the zillions of unfinished or half started projects as pieces of my puzzle. The more I think about all of it, the more I realize it’s been connected.

I can’t quite pinpoint how yet, but I think that’s going to be the next lesson.

Like the most famous legume based pop-rap musical act once said –

I gotta feeling

*_{ok, that ending was so cheesy it would make Chester Cheetah go vegan.}

Featured image by: Khamkéo Vilaysing
what if…?

January 22nd, 2022

When I was a lot younger I wanted to be an Air Traffic Controller. I would spend hours on flight simulator, back when you would join servers through, I think it was MSN Zone? It’s been a while…

I never really figured anything out, I just really loved the idea of flying. I’m talking days I would spend doing this, much to the dismay of my family…

I remember I got this Air Traffic Control prep book (I was a freshman in high school), my favorite fiction book was Tracon, and I wanted a piper J-3 cub so bad.

At that time I had never even been on a plane before, I just loved it!

until I stopped.

I don’t blame anybody else for any action I’ve ever taken, I want to be abundantly clear on that, but it has been healthy for me to look back and reflect on how I felt back then.

I didn’t loose interest in being a pilot, I thought I wasn’t smart enough. My grades were bad, my parents were trying to dissuade me from thinking about going to college, and I had to spend every lunch period with a tutor who had awful coffee breath and zero pedagogical prowess, because the school didn’t want us morons fucking up their test scores.

I had one teacher that I felt really connected with. I had known him for a while, and he was the first adult that I felt like I was ‘cool’ with. He was old as dirt and I think was more excited someone would listen to his stories, but still, I felt like the cool kid for once.

We were talking just after school one day and he asked what I was thinking about for college. I told him I really wanted to be an air traffic controller, but I was afraid I wasn’t smart enough.

He said “You don’t want to be an ATC, do you know how high their suicide rate is? you’ll go crazy. You should think about [What I ended up studying].“

yeah, it wasn’t one of those heartwarming ‘you can do it!’ moments. My proverbial bubble had been popped. I remember saying “Oh, definitely!” and booked it out of there to find a place to cry.

It isn’t that I don’t love what I studied, I do. But I have been wondering, what if.

It’s all in the past, and I just wanted to get that out. I don’t hold any resentment toward that teacher. I can acknowledge he said a terrible thing, but maybe that was his old-guy way of saying he saw something else in me.

hmmm

Featured image by: Beckett P.
Would it help?

January 21st, 2022

*deep breath

I feel like I am back in touch with reality after getting my venting out. It was kind of a weird day today and I was very tired, but it was great to have some time to remind myself of my favorite lesson.

“Would it help?”

While all of that may be true, I have been bracing for this moment for a long time. I know that I have done my best, and that’s not what I need to focus on, but what I want to focus on.

Yeah I’m still a little down, but I feel healthier admitting that this situation is tough, I tried. I know I’m not always going to win, and that this is going to be challenging for a while.

But if I can get through this, I know I can get through anything.

and even with all my mistakes in life thus far,

I wouldn’t bet against me.

Goodnight.

_{Featured image by: Tim Mossholder}
One teacher made a hell of a difference

January 15th, 2022

_{The Prompt: Write about a teacher that has influenced you.}

I was really bad at school.

I liked school, but I assumed early on that I wasn’t intelligent. Looking back it seems a little weird that I didn’t even question it… Anyway… We had a rule in my house that if you got less than a B you would be grounded until the next report card. I spent a lot of time grounded… I was told I was lazy and I assumed that to be true as well.

I would spend all my time and energy figuring out ways to cheat or get by, becoming a very successful D student…oop… Nobody seemed to believe in me, and I don’t think I understood why, I just knew it was my fault.

I always felt that I sucked at everything I did. I’m 30 and finally starting to understand a little bit what confidence feels like…anyway, I digress…

Fast forward to my junior year of college. I was on a solid track to fail out. I had faked it as long as I could and was beginning to figure out how to drop out without telling my parents. That semester we had a visiting professor, a young fresh PhD who I will call Dr. Canada.

Dr. Canada will never know it, but she is one of the most important people in my life story.

She was new, it was a 20 person class, and she was teaching many other classes that semester… she was busy.

A month and a half in we have our second test

I failed for the second time.

She wrote me a note on the test to sign up for a slot during her office hours. I made a time for the next day and spent the night preparing to awkwardly have to explain why I’m a dipshit…

I show up to her office a little early and she invites me in.

We proceed to talk for over an hour… She started out by asking a bit about me, my major, and all that jazz. We shared some jokes, then she asked me a question I didn’t know I needed my entire life:

“I don’t want you to feel bad about your score, I will help you with that! May I ask why you feel like you can’t do this?”

I had not prepared for that question… I hesitated, and said “I don’t know, I just can’t…”

Then out of nowhere, twenty-something years of “I don’t understand why I struggle to learn” poured out….I swear it felt like I lost 10 pounds…

She smiled, we chatted a bit more, then she had me make an appointment for the same time every week until the next test.

I went. every week, and here’s where (I think) It gets interesting. She didn’t really tutor me much on the material from class, rather she worked with me on several different study strategies until we found one that worked. I wasn’t putting in any more time studying than normal, in fact, I was studying several hours less. She helped me save so much god damn time and stress.

The best moment of my entire academic career, was her passing test number three back with a big old 97/100. She had this big proud smile on her face, and I finally felt like I could do it.

That makes me smile to this day. Because of her I went on to do masters and doctoral school.

Thanks Dr. Canada

Featured image by: MD Duran
tale as old as, about 3 years.

January 15th, 2022

_{The Prompt: Write about two people seeing each other for the first time.}

They had been chatting through an app, and finally decided to meet in person for coffee. They couldn’t help but be nervous, you know, meeting a stranger from the internet. They knew what each other looked like from profile photos, but when they met for the first time, it was…perfect.

There was an instant bond and they knew they had met their soulmate. Strangers to sisters at the metaphorical snap of the finger.

Life got a little easier that day 🙂

_{*I’m kind of over the whole romantic soulmate thing, so I decided to borrow that trope and dedicate it to a friend and sister who I owe everything to.}

Featured image by: Ignat Kushanrev
Coffee sucked, but the memories are good!

January 12th, 2022

The Prompt: What’s for breakfast? Dinner? Lunch? Or maybe you could write a poem about that time you met a friend at a cafe.

Before the pandemic, there was this cute little cafe that my best friend and I would meet at every week. Our offices were on the same block and it was our little get together time.

When the lockdowns started, we would always talk about how much we miss going there. It was a nice memory to reflect on.

Two years later we decided to go back. I had since lost my job, and she was working from home. We were super excited to be going back, and both got a coffee. We went to our usual table, it was quiet and we were the only ones there, just like we had remembered.

We toasted our paper cups, took a sip, then immediately started laughing. In that moment, we realized that this place has pretty awful coffee.

We realized that we enjoyed meeting up, and didn’t even pay attention to what we were eating and drinking. This place didn’t get any worse. It was the same terrible coffee, but it made me feel a little closer to my friend. We didn’t need to speak, we just realized that we missed our time together when our lives were moving so fast. Ill take that as a positive lesson from this pandemic.

I think its time we find us a new cafe.

Love you, Bestie ❤

Featured image by: Nathan Dumlao