Man. I watched The Great Gatsby last night because I thought it would be an amusing thing to have on in the background and then got SUPER involved in it and now I'm kind of wrecked. I think I need a blanket rule of not watching Baz Luhrmann films because JESUS CHRIST his portrayals of love and romance are TOO MUCH and always leave me feeling fucking hollow for days afterwards.

I do have some Feminist™ feelings about the story but they're pretty lost in a sea of pining.

Initially, it felt Bad™ because I couldn't come up with any achievements outside of "planned a wedding I didn't want to have" (editors note: definitely wanted to get married, just super didn't want to deal with wedding bs) and "showed up at a wedding" and "started seeing a new therapist for the 4th time in 6 years." But, like, fucking whatever.

It is true that I really wish the wedding hadn't taken up like 80% of all of my bandwidth this year, but it was a nice party and in the end I did really appreciate having friends and family around to share the occasion with us. It was surprisingly impactful to have their love and support. It was good.

It's also true that this year was a lot of hard work. I did start seeing a new therapist for the 4th time in 6 years. One of the things I'm working on is making space for myself and feeling proud of the things that I do! It's hard!

But, while I was self-denigrating for my lack of gold star-worthy achievements, I remembered the poem "A Good Day" by Kait Rokowski.

"Yesterday, I spent 60 dollars on groceries,
took the bus home,
carried both bags with two good arms back to my studio apartment
and cooked myself dinner.
You and I may have different definitions of a good day.
This week, I paid my rent and my credit card bill,
worked 60 hours between my two jobs,
only saw the sun on my cigarette breaks
and slept like a rock.
Flossed in the morning,
locked my door,
and remembered to buy eggs."

So. I don't know. I'm proud of me! I'm proud of the things I've done and the way I've taken care of myself. I think that can coexist with feeling tired of always feeling like there's more work to do.

I think there are a couple of things in play here. One is that I think my standard of "what's good enough" is probably wildly out of step with how being a human works. The other is that I'm living a radically different life from where I was three years ago and I haven't calibrated to what I want out of it. For all its shortcomings, my life in Portland was one that I crafted very deliberately. It was built out of things I loved and that were very important to me. Figuring out how to move on from that is hard.

---

So. It's still feeling awkward. I'm waffling on whether to just sign an "all the best for 2023!" sentiment into the cards and send them as-is. I don't have to have a showstopper year to be worth expressing love for those around me, I guess. Or maybe I'll put together some real sappy bullshit. "Yes, hello new in-laws. I am, in fact, a complete weirdo. Surprise!"

...I like it.

Well, the whole global landscape of social media is changing I guess. And here I am again!

I also signed up for a Neocities site today because apparently it's time to take my internet experience back to 2001.

---

I have kind of a migraine this morning and instead of doing work spent time flipping back through my old LiveJournal posts. Sometimes I feel like I should delete the whole thing and call it a day, but I've started diving into "childhood experiences" in therapy and having a reference back to the ways I felt about things in my teens-twenties is probably an okay thing.

Being a person is weird.

Every day I say to myself, "Self, today we're going to call Mom because it's been like three weeks and you need to do it."

And then I don't.

Oops.

Within the last month or so I hit a point where I no longer feel like I have to leave Portland to survive. I'm still not convinced that it's my best possible place, but I do feel like if I do end up here forever I'm not doing myself a huge disservice. This makes Portland, after 8 years, the only place I've ever lived that I didn't want to leave.

I think this might be what growing up feels like.

The key difference between being someone who wants to do something and being someone who actually does it is actually doing it.

This sounds trite or derisive, but I promise it is not.

The simplicity belies how unreasonably hard it is to convince myself to do things that are good for me; I desperately want to be the kind of person who comes home from work and then spends an hour doing yoga and yet here I am doing absolutely none of it despite the fact that it would be so, so, so easy.

Good job, self. You’re doing great.

Things that I did not expect to be wrapping up 2018 with: discovering that I have honest-to-god PTSD from the shitty way my stupid bullshit fuckface asshole high school boyfriend treated me 20 goddamn years ago.

So, that's cool. And definitely something I wanted to be dealing with right now/ever.

Today marks 7 years since I left Austin behind me and drove away with Murderface and all of my worldly possessions in a big, yellow Penske truck.

What a wild fucking ride.

TEN DAYS UNTIL MOVE-IN.

At which point I will become The Fanciest and completely wash my hands of all you normies. So get this while you can.

I broke up with Trish 10 days ago. Today we talked about a timeline for moving out.

Tomorrow she is leaving to go on a week-long roadtrip with a friend. In that time I will call my parents and tell them the news, and probably do up some social media announcements (it's like a reverse save the date).

In three weeks I'm going to start looking at apartments.

And maybe then things will be better.