This begins my personal blog where I’ll put things I’d like to remember. I have a pretty shitty memory as it is, so as I piece everything together I hope to be able to hold on to it for a long time to come instead of being scared it will just disappear one day.

By the title you can probably gather that I feel I’m coming out of a lost decade. This post will be both about that decade and also a bit of a general introduction to me as a person. It’s my one year anniversary where I work and that means that after July I’ll officially be in my longest position I’ve ever held. My boss speaks highly of me. I’ve accidentally made myself an important part of the team. Things are going well there.

As I type this, I’m aching. My left hip is throbbing and I’m missing a chunk of time from the night before last like a cheap knockoff of The Hangover. I remember waking up around 1 AM and realizing that my two closest friends had each been having violently bad reactions to drinking a bit too much at the bar my brother-in-law works at in two different rooms of my apartment. I just had to pee pretty bad. Honestly I’m not sure where I ended up doing that. 

I hadn’t gone out and ended a night with friends sobering up in an apartment in years. And I’ve never had two guy friends who I felt absolute closeness to as friends pretty much ever. There’s some level of stability with me at a job that pays the bills and is on track for a decent raise coming up.

In many ways, I’m living my dream life. Or at least one of them–and only kind of. I’m still finding myself and, even at 36, consider me to be on the younger side of things overall. But I saw myself a bit better-off than I am now. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve really bounced back recently, but the rapid rebound has been kind of exhausting. But I’m definitely just now comfortable enough to say that I’m emerging from my lost decade. An awful series of set-backs that I was lucky to navigate as well as I managed to, given some of the stupid choices I made along the way.

I was a full-stack software engineer a decade ago. I do still have a knack for picking up languages pretty quickly–even if I don’t use that skill that often anymore. I got locked in to Ruby on Rails with a little javascript here and there for the longest time for some reason (big reliance on the number of years you’ve done something for money on resumes I suppose). Now it’s a totally different story. SQL, which did me in at the job I had after my “breakout” tech role (eye roll) shut down–more on that later. First, I’ve got to get to my lost decade. It began around this time in 2015. 

In 2015, I–well, I’m not entirely sure. I have a famously bad memory, so I’ll walk my way back there.

I went back to finish my degree at UGA in 2013 and finished that december. Spring of 2014, I lost the job that was flexible enough to let me work remotely while I went back to school (they got bought by the City of Albany for whatever reason). So, there I was with a fresh Political Science Diploma–which I got while working my tech job. A job that had morphed from educational tech support to coding an inventory and GSM modem activation system that worked together to having no funding left in the block grant that created us and laying off most of the staff. I vaguely remember most of the people from that time in my life. The receptionist who got let go at the same time I did was always a bright spot. 

I remember when they fired me because it started by them telling the lady who did finance, Rita, to deactivate our phones in the morning before firing us all mid-day. A clear sign that something was up.

So… out went what I had worked on over the preceding months–mostly while listening to the song “Die Young” by Kesha on repeat in my closet of an office (a converted doctor’s office and my office was where that doctor kept the pill samples). I drove home and drank a very large glass of Pinot Noir on the couch while letting my mom pump me up so that I could get such a better job. I was upset, though, because I figured my path down the road of web development was over. 

I’ve always loved the internet. The very idea of it. The availability of information as someone with the working memory of a goldfish and long term memory of whatever the opposite of an elephant is alone very appealing to me. Granted that’s an elastic statement over time. To an extent the further ago something was we’re only expected to remember it if it’s formative. Like a phone that used your favorite tech and also pulled on the nostalgia of a fucking 25 year old.

My nostalgia was truly my downfall in the end.  

As an officially elderly man at 36, my favorite phone (contemporary to when it came out) is still the Palm Pre Plus I had on Verizon in college because it was all web-tech based. I even bought into the original Chromebook idea for the same reason. I viewed the internet as a shared computer platform for the future that you just needed a web browser for. This is why web development was always my interest when it came to computers.

Simple database management applications like what I was working on before losing my job in the spring of 2014 came easy to me. I loved logic. Symbolic Logic (although the actual use of this has since been lost by me) was my entry into logical systems so I’ve always approached development work in that way, as just a series of logical systems.

Better yet, I always learned code of any kind best by reverse-engineering. I used to save the HTML of sites like Google and Amazon then open them in Dreamweaver as early attempts to learn the markup languages of the web. And in 2014 frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django for Python were quite popular. This was a boon for me because the generated scaffolding acted as great example code for me to build off of while I learned. I was better with Ruby for whatever reason and leaned in that direction as I built early projects as a student worker (Managing the room checking schedule as a student tech support worker for the student center–although we ended up going with PHP because a coworker was more comfortable with that.) and then again when I was building out that previously mentioned project for SGRITA.

At the time start-ups were X-shops Node.js-shops, Python-shops, Ruby-shops. I had not planned this out, but I had pretty much set myself up perfectly to get a job at a Ruby-shop start up after I lost my job. A lovely recruiter named Betty helped massage my resume and got me an interview with BLiNQ media. The interviews with Zack and Jaron and Brett went better than I had expected. They had recently been purchased by Gannett, and the perks all seemed amazing. Sometimes I have flashes of the steak salads I would get for free while working at BLiNQ. Had I been less of a fucking idiot, I would have really taken advantage of the benefits there more. I don’t think I know what the inside of the building gym even looked like. 

Honestly, as a bigger dude, it makes me wish I was straight (i mean, not really, of course, but…) cause then I could live an idealized Roseanne-adjacent life where I turn to my wife to get me through life. But in a weird way (that I’ll probably go into a different blog post) that would be kind of just replacing my mother’s role in our family. At her height she had big Roseanne energy (the character not the IRL Roseanne Barr) as the brash but steady-ing mother-figure in a big extended family during trying economic times. If a strong woman was pushing me at this time I may have made a few decisions differently. But, you know, that’s not how brains work or whatever, so gay it is!

So, 2014 to 2015, I was working for BLiNQ Media, a G/O Digital company under the Gannett banner (Tegna at the end, but whatever). My friend Stephanie let me live with her for a while and then I eventually settled in a house with two roommates: Katie and Nikki.

BLiNQ was a very fun and informative introduction to adulthood. BLiNQ was a company that made a programmatic way for companies to buy ads on social media, particularly facebook at first. Although, I certainly did the mid-20s thing and drank too much too often. That actually wasn’t what caused my spiral which eventually led to me withdrawing from society as a whole and losing touch with most of my friends.

It began when BLiNQ shut down. Although, this wasn’t the start of my self-destructive behavior—the drinking definitely went overboard a few times. I can remember some that led to angry, almost friendship-shattering fights. It definitely accelerated into a spiral when BLiNQ shut down and I began stressing about money while taking increasing numbers of trips both to my mom’s house and to my college town for alumni stuff.

To rewind a little. I was a Very good kid in high school. I got drunk exactly twice a year at the drama cast parties and that was pretty much it. I didn’t have too many after-school friends. I spent a lot of time watching TechTV and Degrassi and listening to Twee indie music. I was definitely a drama magnet since my un-medicated drama teacher decided to target me out for no apparent reason. Honestly, after that point (Spring of sophomore year), I didn’t go to another party until college. Instead I just came up with dumb mini-adventures to take with my friend Carla to the far-ish Mall of Georgia or Little Five Points. And hanging out (kind of? I was bad at it for reasons that became obvious by all the gay porn I was watching) with my two very cool high school girlfriends: Mary and Paige.

But, in college, after a tea-totler first 3/4ths of freshman year I started letting loose when I met my friend Jess and my then-girlfriend Ericka. They really helped me open up and become more myself. I remember drunkenly speaking in terrible French with them on the steps outside our freshman dorm. I had switched to French because that girlfriend told me I spoke German about as well as I kissed one day when I got a D on a German exam.

The next year, however, began my FRC era. The FRC was the Franklin Residential College at UGA and I joined up because it was the cheapest dorm on campus and was exempted from the lottery system. Instead, you just had to apply in a student-run process. Years 2-3+5.1 of college were me in Rutherford Hall’s FRC. Many of us were secretly there because of the price. As such, there was a lot of hanging out together in the lobby because we didn’t have anything better to do. I’m a firm believer that being poor (within reason) while you’re in college is a rite of passage. This is where I met Henry. He changed my life. 

I did party in college. More than I should have. But, also, it was more my poor use of the time when I wasn’t partying that was the problem. And then that partying cost money once I hit 21 and wanted to avoid “annoying freshmen at house parties” (deep heavy eye roll here) for the most part. Year 4 of college, when I had a house, I started to experiment a tiny bit with drugs. Mostly just letting my friend Walker make “Green Dragon” on my stove since he lived in Rutherford still that year. I was a bit of a wanna-be hippie but was still (and to this day never have) too scared to proposition a dealer for drugs. We sat in my living room and smoked Salvia maybe twice. And we went to a rave on a research chemical called 2CB (or I, I’m not too sure) but I was literally the only one who had a mellow euphoria instead of a bad trip so we didn’t repeat it.

There’s something wrong with my personality in that I can never seem to be the person that gets included in stuff automatically. More like an early invite in wave two of invites at my best of times. But I would get attached to friends who would bring me along to things. That’s something I’ve really missed. In college it was Henry, Sam, Walker, Nicki, and Nikki at various times and configurations. So, in college I didn’t drink every day. Except for the summer in 2013 I went back early and lived with Sam. We became wine moms and it was a bit worrying. But we recognized this at the time and cooled it. There is truly a reality where I got on the right project at BLiNQ and moved to Chicago and am still besties with her. I just know it. She was truly one of my favorite people I’ve ever met.

That brings me back to the end-times at BLiNQ. I have terrible social anxiety. To this day, I find excuses to not go to parties at work because we don’t have an open floor plan and I get nervous around people I’m not comfortable with. So, I found comfort in my college literary and debate society. I had really poured my all into it back in the day and when I went back in 2013 to finish up my degree jumped right back in. Made friends as a 22 year old with a bunch of 18 year olds because a lot of my friends had graduated by that point. I kept in touch and once I got a job in Atlanta and was intraday driving distance, I started visiting a lot. Especially since that was Sam’s last year in town before moving to Chicago for Grad school.

Work started getting stressful. Apparently there was a lot of pressure from above. This would not become super clear to me until they shut the fucking company down, but I’m an idiot after all. My back started acting up. I began going out more and going to Athens more. I met this guy in Athens and young people plus polyamory plus people who love drama led to it kicking off a spiral for me in February, a few months before BLiNQ shut down. Around this time my mother had been falling victim to one of those pill-mill doctors and had copious amounts of oxycontin laying around. Her main actual malaty was COPD so the opiates are terrible but she was also in a ton of pain so it was hard to figure out what to do honestly so I don’t blame her for seeking help.

Also, I guess her attitude toward them, at least at first, was a fragment of prior times. If I had a migraine that was really bad or when a tree branch fell on my arm, she would give me an oxy or part of one. IDK if you’ve heard, they’re really fucking addictive. I remember my aunt giving me a mystery pill that knocked me out for 12 hours when I had a sinus headache one time so it seems to have been an attitude in the south in the 90s.

I remember the details the first time I realized how nice the oxy was. I was visiting home and had been SO SMART and gotten a hangover from the night before. The dehydration meant that I pulled my back out when I got out of the car and started unloading my bags. My mom just gives me a tiny blue pill and tells me to take half. A Tina Fey + Paul Rudd movie called Admission was playing and it was the best movie ever after that half a pill. I then got really productive on my laptop. And my back felt so much better. Was this a miracle pill? Absolutely not. But can we get back to the recurring theme of how dumb I am?

Previously the local hospital hadn’t given me anything for pain when a fucking tree branch fell directly onto my arm when I was testing a rope swing for my niece the week before my BLiNQ interview. My mom gave me one. That was the first time I knew I liked them, but that giant bruise and throbbing arm was a bit different from taking them in a situation more suited for Advil and/or a muscle relaxer.

I started fibbing about pain at first and then basically taking half and saving half for later in a little stockpile. Or because my back does not enjoy desk jobs I would get her to give me some to take back with me to Atlanta in case my back would be bad. Of course, I’d just take them when I was bored one night and binge some American Dad on Hulu. It helped me forget the impending doom of the job hunt I needed to be doing after BLiNQ shut down.

I found a job relatively quickly, actually. At Insightpool. They were wanting to expand into the area BLiNQ had been in, but using Twitter instead of Facebook. I also lost it relatively quickly. I was doing alright until I got tripped up on a problem. I had been given a user story to make something fast and the suggestion by our lead dev to use native SQL. At the time, native SQL was only a thing I used during configuring a SQL server for an app. I blanked. 90 days. Probation up. Asked to pack my bags.

It was a big hit to the ego and the first time I had really been fired without the rest of the company actually shutting down. They were directly saying I wasn’t good enough. I popped more pills more frequently. Mixing in some clonazepam here and there. I had to cancel my planned move into a mid-rise building next door to Paige and her boyfriend because I wasn’t certain of finding a new job. I moved in with my mom and step-dad. I started secretly straight-up stealing pills at this point. My back was spasming all the time because I was incredibly out of shape. This was my first big weight-increase since the period where I had to leave school after 4.5 years without a degree and drank a ton of wine and watched a ton of NBC’s Smash. I ballooned. While wondering why my back fucking hated me. 

How did I rationalize my growing addiction? My mom was planning to sell a majority of her pills each month to my cousin because, again, even for my mom’s opinion she was being over-prescribed–and we were quite poor at the time. Also, again, I was dumb.

Ok, so I was getting fatter and my back was getting worse. And I was getting more dependent on pills. Because of all the drama before I left Atlanta, none of my friends were talking to me anymore. I’d occasionally drunkenly text them, but they’d either just answer yes/no to stuff or ignore it completely. 

My mom was also getting worse and I needed to physically help move her around and take care of her more and more. Around this time, my mom also wants to be closer to my sister and her granddaughter, so my step-dad applied for a job with the State of Alabama and we moved from Albany to a cute little house in the Old Cloverdale neighborhood of Montgomery, Alabama.

I was honestly excited. Also, circling back around to being out of shape and dependent on pills, I relied on SO MANY pills to get through the move. Mostly just given to me when I asked in this case because two people had to pack up and load an entire house of stuff (for not the first nor the last time either).

This is where things got pretty dark for the longest. On the surface things were mostly fine. I was in a new city. My sister had a pretty nice place at the time too. She still does, but I just liked the layout a lot from the house she had before she and my brother-in-law got married.

I was working remotely for a company that didn’t have a central office so commuting from Albany and then Montgomery for bi-monthly meetings at a rented law-firm’s conference room was perfect. I didn’t have a schedule and used that to my full advantage as both my mom’s caregiver and someone abusing oxy at night while he stayed up watching the Big Brother live feeds and joking about them on Twitter.

I had no idea about how to make friends in a new town that wasn’t that big and didn’t exactly have a gayborhood to speak of. Even though I was born in Albany this was true there as well while I had this remote job that started about a month after the 90-day dalliance at the Twitter Ads place. I moved to a suburb of Atlanta after elementary school and then a different county after middle school. I didn’t really have any friends that carried over like that. We just weren’t as connected back then.

But, instead of making friends, I got really close with my mother. And, knowing now that I’d lose her in 2020, It makes it complicated about regrets I have for the past. Had I been less of a fuck up I’d also have spent less time getting to know my mom as an actually person. Though I sometimes wonder if the stress over me was what drove her worse I know that’s not true.  She was honestly probably no more worried about me than she was while I was growing up. That’s some wisdom I’ve learned watching my sister raise my nephews up close. The worry is always there. 

Since calling out that BLiNQ shut down in spring of 2015, exactly one year and one month after I started working there, and then saying I worked somewhere for the 90 day period, I’ve been pretty lax on the timeline. BLiNQ shut down in 2015, and I renewed my lease in September because I got this new mostly-remote job the same month I lost the 90-day one where I’d be “leading a team” and a bunch of other things that never panned out for various reasons. That’s the job that allowed me to move in with my mom to help take care of her full-time and fully in Albany by September 2016. 

As lame as it sounds, sitting in Albany, with my sick mother who had a ton of pre-existing conditions and watching Donald Trump win in 2016 scared me alot for my mom’s future. Him being in office had me scared he’d do the things he’s now doing in his second term. So when Tom, my step dad, got the job in the same city my sister lived in, I was so on-board with moving physically closer to family. 

I remember moving to Montgomery and it being cold. My mom and Tom had gone ahead and were staying with my sister as he started his new job and looked for/finalized plans on where to live. Big Brother OTT was on at the time (October 2016) and I would once again stay up late watching while popping pills, drinking those large alco-pop can drinks like the Mike’s Hard ones from a gas station around the corner, and packing up our lives for one final long-distance move. All with a hot pink under-cut that I swore was cool.

I would drunkenly call some of my former friends until they would eventually stop answering. The reasons were alway different. They were getting busy. I misjudged how close we used to be. They were getting new, better jobs and meeting new people and sometimes even falling in love. I was popping pills in my mom’s house and holding her up as she tried to walk to the bathroom on the bad days. And watching TV and talking about life with her on the good days. Oddly, I remember that when she’d cut me off and I’d start withdrawing, the thing getting me through the rough time of it was her just talking to me. When she could. The other was the Gabbapentin so that my skin wasn’t crawling all the time. We tried over and over to get me off them. Funnily, I had swapped the opiates for Gabapentin when my mom made the call that she herself would be kicking opiates to the curb because she was worried about COPD.

The final reckoning had my mom and Tom demanding I tell my employer that I had a problem and needed to go somewhere for it. They were banking on FMLA time for me to go to a program using the insurance I had. Instead I was immediately fired.

I believe this was by December 2017. I know we moved into our new house in December and I know we only lived in the first Montgomery house for about a year. Renting from my sister’s friend ended up being a bad idea for that first place. Keeping things impersonal is the way to go with land-lords. Also, the power was really unreliable over there and my mom’s oxygen maker really liked to be plugged into power. But, I do know the final time I kicked the oxy was on the couch in that long living room with the white built-in book shelves. I’d go on walks with my niece to the nearby park sometimes to help get some exercise and try and regulate my terribly dysregulated body. It wasn’t when my mom made me tell my former employer that I kicked it. It was after my mom was hospitalized for low CO2 for the first time. I stayed with her in the ICU the entire first stint she stayed. Sleeping in those chairs made me go back to the pills. But I had to quit after that because her COPD no-longer jived with pills that lower your respiratory rate like opiates. Life became all about my mom’s CO2 levels.

I was mostly able to get over the psychological parts of the final withdrawal relatively quickly. The physical symptoms went on way longer than I had expected. And I was losing my insurance. Because of this is where the Gabapentin started. Not only did it help with the physical withdrawal symptoms, I realized it made my anxiety completely go away.

I would still take Gabapentin for anxiety if prescribed it by a doctor. To this day it’s the only thing that’s ever for-sure helped me get a better base-line of anxiety in my day-to-day life without resorting to benzodiazepines. I’ve been prescribed it myself for this a few times since but switching insurance/doctors makes that kind of stuff tricky. 

From December 2017 to July 2018, I was unemployed. That July I actually started making good money again for a while and bought my mother a puppy. A beautiful chocolate lab. But the guy who hired me was very picky about my code. So it was short-lived happiness.

On top of that, it continued the yearly summer hospitalization for my mother. Every summer around when Big Brother would premiere my mom started having to go to the ICU to have her CO2 levels lowered.I think this is the one where I took my laptop to watch Game of Thrones with her after she was out of the coma.

In November 2018, my sister got remarried to a great guy. In November 2019, they had their twin sons, my nephews Henry and Sam.

Summer 2019, when my mom was hospitalized, something changed. It was harder to get her back this time. But, by fucking god, she made it to see to grand babaies get born. There was a good spell again there for a few minutes before she went into the hospital after Christmas and never came back out. When she died, I had thought I was working on climbing back from the dark part of my life. 2015 to 2020 was a blur of me thinking my world was over, numbing myself to the outside, and struggling to find remote work. I wasn’t prepared for 2020.

I had gotten a seasonal job at Target that fall. I think I still have the Fossil Wear OS smart watch I got for christmas that year somewhere in my office because it’s the last christmas present my mom ever got me. (She was able to chip in on top of a bit I had left and my Target discount even though we were going through a rough financial patch).

After my mom died I remember getting so drunk that the next day I couldn’t move. I tried to watch Community on Hulu but could barely stay awake. I was completely devastated and utterly lost at what to do with my life. I had taken a pause in my life to help take care of her but I had hoped that would end with her getting better and moving into an assisted living place with my step dad at some point.

I basically don’t remember 2020. A year later, I’m more-or-less told I need to move in with my dad because my step dad couldn’t handle my depressing ass being around or whatever. A little more than a year actually, I remember I was still in my depression-bed when I was watching January 6th happen.

Relative to my dad, I’ve always had a better relationship with my step dad but when this happened things changed. Basically, I never heard from Tom unless I reached out first. Which was exactly the communication pattern that Tom knows led to me becoming estranged from my father. Which, to me at the time, made me feel like I had two father figures who just had me in their lives begrudgingly.

I tried really hard to crawl out of my depression hole during all of this time. Before moving to Athens with my dad, Tom had let me subscribe to a (shockingly cheap) online antidepressant program and another one for my migraines. I was trying to work on myself. But also I could tell I was failing. How do you climb out of a mental health problem when you don’t have any money or insurance? How do you hold down a job when you literally don’t want to do anything?

When I moved in with my dad, things were fine at first. I started putting in the work for a job hunt. Online, in person in Atlanta, Alabama, and locally. I cast a wide net. And I found a job shockingly fast within my first 3 months there. There was a company that did white-label registration flows for appliance and electronics companies. I bought a car around this time, too, so the introduction of an unavoidable bill is added.  I really liked the team. I really hated the technology stack. Mainly, the templating system was set up in a way that infuriated me whenever I needed to edit some of the more dynamic parts of the applications. The money was great though, so I tried to hold out. But by September 2021, after 7 months, I remember running into a brick wall with a bug that I couldn’t figure out.

I had been working on finding a place to live on my own. But I just really really hated the job and knew I wouldn’t be able to quit no matter what if I moved out on my own before finding a better fitting job. At this point, however, my dad’s partner’s dislike for me after the hours of 9 PM (mostly the fact that I was awake) became a lot clearer and she pushed hard for me to get out. I begin interviews for new positions.

After a couple of months striking out, in February 2022 I got the call to interview with a sex education nonprofit. The goals, aims, and ideas all appeal to me so I sign up to help them out on the tech side of things part time while I continue to look for more work. I’m still looking for mostly remote work since ideally I’d live near my sister’s family in Alabama but work for a tech company based in a city. Meanwhile the backlash to the pandemic-era rules lead 

In the background of all this is a raging depression. 

Also around this time I started experimenting with farm bill edibles and intermittent fasting. Weird combo, I know. But it’s important because my dad ate an entire Delta-8 chocolate bar I ordered online which definitely didn’t make him happy with me. That plus him really thinking I stole money from him via PayPal when all I did was request money and he approved the requests. But, anyway, I moved back in with my step-dad in Montgomery May 18, 2022 and he made a big deal about how he wasn’t ready to help me before because he needed to help himself but he is ready now. I’m thinking things are looking up.

My part time job starts to pick up steam for a while. I work closer to full-time, and I’m able to bring my brother-in-law on-board and I grow closer to my sister from being over there more often. She also leaned on me a little more with the twins now that they were a bit older. In a good uncle way, tho. Unfortunately over that Spring/Summer of 2023, things start to go downhill at the part-time job as non-profit stuff starts to slow down a little in general. I have to start delivering food occasionally again to pick up the slack, something I had started doing between jobs when I lived with my dad.

It’s a bummer, but oddly, things are looking up anyway, at least with my mental health. I joined the invite-only version of BlueSky around this time and met some of my first new friends in years. Yeah, there was drama. But it was a group of overly online people hanging out. Of course there was drama. I was able to find a bunch of funny and genuine people talking about absolutely anything at any time.

Meanwhile, in late October, I randomly messaged a guy I knew from Montgomery through my ex-niece of all people. I figured he was around her age, and I knew he was Bi so I figured maybe he’d be in with a queer friend group of some kind. He had reached out several times before but always ghosted. This time, Jacob came through and over the course of talking every day during one of the most stressful times in my life he became the closest guy friend I’ve ever had.

Hard times, by the way? The landlord gives us 30-days notice on November 28th 2023 to evacuate. I knew something had been fish with nim going month-to-month and showing up more often. The whole saga was a mess and the landlord smelled like soup.

I find out from my step-dad that wherever he ends up, it’s with the intention of his girlfriend eventually moving in with him after they get married and that I was not invited. I kind of figured I would have had a little extra time. Like I could have temporarily slept on a couch or something while I looked for extra work toward a downpayment at least. Since this wasn’t the case and I was short on time. I still miss that beautiful chocolate lab but that man literally hasn’t reached out to me once since I moved out after the move stuff was done. Didn’t even tell me when he got re-married, engaged, or how the pup is doing. At this point I just have to try and move past it.

Thank god I joined BlueSky on that whim, too. Because the group of friends helped me share a GoFundMe which raised enough money for the down payment and first two months’ rent. The two months were important because I was waiting on a new job at Walmart to start at the end of February. IDK why, but when you get hired by that company there’s a painful length of lead-time before you start work and then your first paycheck.

I worked customer service and was oddly good at my job. By May I had fallen into a little groove. I would work at Walmart and do my part-time coding job. And deliver DoorDash if an elaborate spreadsheet I made said I’d be short for the month. Jacob was coming over to my apartment and hanging out. My 35th birthday was a mini housewarming shin-dig with my sister and Jacob and a few friends who are closer to my sister but still like me. It was small and a far cry from the ragers I used to throw in Athens. Or even my Atlanta house parties that were a bit more tame.

But I remember looking around and being so happy at where I had come over the last four years. I thought I was finally on my way to crawling out of the darkness. 

I was close, but not quite there yet.

Last May (2024), shortly after my birthday party, I got a random email. Someone at the state was writing because I had applied but they thought the resume had a wrong phone number on it. It did. The system for state employees is automated and I hadn’t realized the resume wasn’t updated. I only updated the section where you enter the work history individually.

So, I have a phone interview with this guy. And then another one. After that I come in for an in-person interview with the rest of the team. They offered me the job. 

I’m able to quit Door Dashing. I quit Walmart. And, after a transitional period, I quit the part-time coding job. I’m able to just work a set schedule day job and try and build a little life around it for myself. I’ve already grown my closest friend group by one. He was passed out on my couch while Jacob was trying to rally in the bathroom. You know, like besties do.

Basically from the time I withdrew from life around 2015 and started to mentally kinda spiral to just about now that I’ve gotten stable at my new job and don’t have to work supplemental jobs to survive and built a small but close friend group and reached a new, better level of friendship with my sister, and stepped up as an uncle. I even have multiple bills on autopay now, a thing that used to scare me so much. A payment coming out without me clicking a button? But I might not have money?!

In many ways I’m back where I was in 2014. Just a little wiser and more experienced. And way less likely to make stupid decisions. The bar this weekend was an exception, not the rule. In fact it was the Friday night of a three day weekend and I’m spending Sunday night writing this. My closest friends as a 36 year old are 23 and 24 years old respectively, but as I think back on my missing decade it seems even less weird to me now.

I did miss out on a decade. And I really fucking wish my mom was here to see me now, but I’ve definitely come back to the land of the living fully. I realized when I got to make a collective mistake with friends on a night out.

But no drama or strife, just a lot of fun.

If I could go back and be the me I am now at 26, I would have been so much stronger and able to persevere under the stress of living. But, I was scared. The anxiety that I’ve let define me all my life drove me underground at the first struggle I had to face on my own. But I’ve come back out, and luckily there’s no UV underground so I haven’t aged that much. 

Funnily if my friends now knew 26 year old me instead, however, I’m pretty sure they’d hate my ass. I’m honestly not sure how I’d feel about that guy myself.

But I try to keep myself from looking back too much. And I try to not feel pressure to catch up to my actual peer group. Because I also know that if I manage to keep my current job for just 9 more years, I’ll have a guaranteed pension for when I’m 60 by 45. As long as they don’t try and pull a DOGE in Alabama, I’m on a pretty good path surrounded by some pretty good people that I love quite a bit.

What’s a lil decade-long mental-breakdown between friends, eh?