Made jambalaya right after my last post and gave myself the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had. I was shitting myself for a week. Beware the jambalaya of a thousand sorrows. Got some weed and played video games through most of it, then had trouble shaking the weed for about another week afterward. My mental health and work suffered as a result. The sickness sucked. The weed helped that, but it might not have been worth it.
“You go on one little bender, and suddenly shit’s falling to pieces. I must be getting old.”
I’ve been spending money on Winter clothes lately. I’ve spent too much. Time to cut that out, and focus on paying down the van. Paid about 3k over the minimum on it over the last few months.
I also need to prepare my budget for this Summer. Gotta live cheap. If peeps wanna see me, they gotta come to me.
The department chair told me today that it’s very likely that they’ll want to hire me for one more year, and not for much longer after that. I told him one more year was about what I was thinking. That will net me enough money to pay off the van for sure, and have some savings for while I figure out what comes next.
Which raises the question: what comes next?
The last few days I’ve been writing for 2 hours a day, mostly transcribing all my old journals to a digital format so I can back them up. There’s some crazy shit in there. It’s disheartening to see that I’m still dealing with many of the same problems, but encouraging to see how much progress I’ve made. Hinayana it is then…Mahayana can suck it.
Starting to write more does make me question whether or not making money as a writer is really a possibility. Seems so far removed. But it is a thing that happens, and it could be worth a shot.
I’m also not ill-disposed to the idea of going back to school and moving into biology / climate-science. Take another run at academia while sober, and with a (better) handle on my mental health issues.
Speaking of which, I got angry at the voices in my head again today. They were lightly poking fun at me, and I went sideways hard. Then their attempts to affirm me and bring me back into the fold made me crazy with rage. Same fucking story. I managed to check the magnitude of the response and didn’t go off the rails too badly, behavior-wise. I hated the way I felt. Getting back to that place now reminds me of how bad it was. Seems like a nightmare that happened to someone else. But no. It was my life, and it went on for decades.
