One of my best friends is dead.

I'm getting used to saying it now. At first, it felt like I was trying to convince myself. How could she be dead? I just talked to her. She was here a moment ago and now she isn't. This isn't how I am used to death. Intellectually, I know that it happens like this, sometimes the clock just stops. When I was very young, I had a friend who choked on a grape and died. I didn't understand then, because how can someone just cease to be there? When my grandmother died, the first one,I only heard about it about a year later. So it was less of a feeling and more of an abstract fact. I loved her very much, but she had been gone for a while. When my other grandmother died, I saw it coming. For months and months, I saw it coming, so I was able to make peace with it. Even when the lady who lived downstairs died, all I felt was relief because her pain was over, and she was with her husband now.

Catherine was 24. She was exactly a year and a day older than me. We spoke on a thursday, she died on a saturday.

I find myself struggling with concepts that were already hard. As someone with depression, sometimes (most of the time) the very idea of existing is difficult for me to comprehend. I find that society here is so strange, I can't reconcile contributing to it in a manner that is expected of me. The idea of working and working and working and doing things you don't like so that later you can do what you want. Clearly there is no guarantee of a later. But things aren't built so that you can easily do what you want WHILE you are doing what you have to do. And the arbitrary way that what is "necessary" is decided baffles me.

This has been more and more apparent as I try to go back to school. People keep asking me to justify the choices I make. Why are you taking this course? What are you going to do with it? What are the career opportunities? I don't know. This is just what I want to do. I'll figure the rest out later. When I was 17 I had half a dozen people jammed so far down my throat telling me to map out my entire future that when the slightest deviance happened, barely out of the gate, I couldn't cope with it. The entire projection of the future that I had built up suddenly folded like a house of cards, and my already precarious health situation went with it. I am 23. I cannot tell you what the road I am on looks like. I am trying very hard to climb out of a pit I fell in years ago. Upwards progress is still progress, even if it isn't going forward.

And I get upset about the strangest thing.

I was in the doctor's office when I got the message from a mutual friend about her passing. All I could think was that she died before she got to see the season finale of Once Upon a Time. And she would have loved it. She was a kind woman, a sweet soul who was unfailingly there for me. Did she know how much she meant to me? How could she, I barely knew until it was too late. Did she die feeling like her life was a good one? Was she proud of what she had accomplished? Did she know that she would touch so manly lives like she did? In whatever way she is still with us, be it her spirit, or the very atoms of her body, dispersed into the air through a lifetime, a short one, but a lifetime nonetheless, does she know these things?

How do I move forward in a world with the certainty that every struggle and every hardship, vastly outnumbering every good thing I have experienced, could be the total of my life, that the curtain can drop at any moment for any reason, and a life filled with unhappiness and struggle could be the only legacy I leave behind. I do not want to be the storm that devastates those around me. I don't want to make anyone feel like this. But I wouldn't do things differently, either. I wouldn't skirt her friendship to avoid the pain of losing her.

And I don't know how to make peace with that.

1. My wrist started to hurt in February, and I just assumed it was because the chair I was in at work was so low that my wrist was constantly resting on the edge of the desk. I figured it would go away after I quit. It did not. After a particularly cold day, it got worse, and I invested in a wrist brace. Mom thinks arthritis. Went to the doctor, and ended up with a NP student from Queens. She thinks tendonitis, and I respectfully disagree, but I'll follow her treatment. Colleen thinks carpal tunnel syndrome. She's probably right, but either way, my right hand has been pretty out of commission. It's made eating sushi with chopsticks a challenge.


2. Had a major depressive melt down on friday. I'm continually frustrated with how shitty the system is. I can't get a job because I'm an uneducated transman. I can't get an apartment because I can't get a job. I can't go to school to become educated so I can get a job because I need a job to pay for school. The cycle goes on.


3. Found a potential apartment though. It's out of my price range by a lot, but if I manage to get on ODSP, and I go back to school and receive CPP, I will be able to afford it. Trying to find a way to make this happen.

I pooled funds from some gift cards and government cheques that I completely forgot about and bought a tablet so that I don't have to haul my laptop around everywhere. It has been a gift re: fucked up wrist. And it's fun, and is very light, so I don't have to lug my big laptop bag around and hurt my shoulders.

Saw Spider-Man with Amanda and Andrew, and it was nice. She got a new job and is moving up to Ottawa, for which I am annoyed but I'll deal with that later. Saw Captain America with Aleatha and that was wonderful.

Ariel and Sappho got their own apartment across from the mall, and Sappho has been in Calgary for the past two weeks, so I've hung out with Ariel a few times, which is really great. She is buckets of fun. I brought her some of my canned food that I haven't gotten around to eating, and some box sets and movies. I might bring her my other playstation 2.

I have been playing Animal Crossing which is NOT good for the wrist, in an eternal search for wolf villagers. I should probably join some villager exchange sites.

And, I've lost 20 pounds on my ADHD meds. Concerta gave me headaches, so I switched to Adderall, which thus far seems less effective, so I might have to go up in dose.

I have a pile of meetings on Tuesday to try to get my shit together, so hopefully that goes my way.

I kind of had to turn my brain off for a few days. After things kind of imploded with Derek, it was nice to let myself indulge in my freedom. I took a day trip to Kingston and wandered around and did things that I wanted to do. I bought myself a tablet because I wanted it. I bought poetry books.

I really needed the rest. And! I got some post cards from the post card group. So I have a post about that to do, and revamping of the tumblr, and write some stuff. And I have a ticket for Veronica Varlow's tarot seminar tomorrow, so I'm excited for that. I should figure out how to record it.

1. Went to Kingston on Monday. They transformed market square into a huge set for a new Hiddles movie. My friend Brandon got cast as an extra, so I went out to support him and to shamelessly ogle. Mia Wasikowska was there and it was wonderful. I also got to talk to a bunch of the crew, most of whom worked on Pacific Rim and Hannibal. The stunt director let slip a spoiler or two and it was wonderful.

I also got to hang out with Hugh Dancy's stunt double Joseph Racki. He was hella cute, quite chatty, and absolutely hilarious. Everyone I talked to seemed quite pleased that Jobo and I were interested in talking to them and not just asking where the big name stars were. After the shoot, I took Brandon for sushi and it was wonderful. I really do miss Kingston. Perhaps I can persuade him to move there with me.

2. When I got back, Derek threw a fit du shit, and apparently thinks that paying me on time is a negotiable thing and not, you know, THE LAW. So I peaced out. And now apparently he's closing the store, so I guess all that lip service about there being all these other people to work so I didn't have to pull 80 hour weeks was just talk. Well, good riddance.

3. Which means that I have TIME TO DO THINGS AGAIN YAY MAKIN STUFF

Quit my job.

*throws hands up*

I gave my notice. Derek's reality and my reality are very different, and his pipe dreams and what ifs aren't going to pay my rent or get my groceries, so that's it, that's all. Hopefully this means that I will have more time to do things I want to actually do.

Also I found my old scene card and it's got 5000 points on it, so I'm gonna go see some free movies heck yeah.

Been kind of up and down recently.

Because I didn't have a ride to the doctors, I missed a T shot, and ran out of some of my meds, so everything has been super off. And working 98% of the past three months didn't help either. So Derek came back, promptly gave me a day off, but managed to completely wreck it, so I was stressed and exhausted and he told me he's hiring someone else (yay) and that my pay is being slashed in half (less yay).

30% commission was not a liveable wage. HALF of not a liveable wage is STILL NOT A LIVEABLE WAGE. I am tired, I am stressed, I am on the edge of another grand mal anxiety attack. So I threatened to have myself committed to a 72 hour psych hold if he didn't get me some days off. Somehow he managed to materialize someone to cover for me. Funny, that.

So after showing the girl the ropes yesterday, I went to see the councillor who started work at my doctor's office. She's pretty cool, and we have a LOT to work through. She seemed a little gobsmacked by the utter fuckery of my life.

So today, mom and I went out to the rez, and we stopped in Kingston for some craft supplies (of which I got many), and food (which has now made me sick), and I napped pretty much the whole way home. It was a pretty good day, and I'm glad I got TIME OFF.

Tomorrow, gonna go see Sappho and Ariel. And make stuff.

Also, postcards. 

Derek is coming back from Brazil tomorrow. Which is fantastic if he plans to come into the store and actually work and terrible if he flakes off. I am just really tired. It's been three months of 80 hour weeks. I didn't sign up for that. This was supposed to be a partnership, but he's obviously got all the power. And I stay because I need to find a new home soon and nowhere will hire me. It's a vicious circle of unhappiness, and I hope to break it by reducing the amount of time I'm there.

I'd like to finally be able to work on my own things. I've been collecting bits and pieces of stuff for new pieces. Jewellery and maybe little sculptures or decorations. And hopefully at the new place, I'll be able to set up an actual workspace and not just be spread out all over whatever flat surfaces I have. 

Looking over all the craziness with Ellie definitely solidifies my position that toxic people have no place in your life and you should get rid of them as soon as they start to poison you.

It's been so long since I've been on LJ that I have no idea where all the active comms are, so I'm going through the list of top communities and adding all the ones that interest me.

I was thinking about my friend Tasha a little earlier, and how I missed her. I find that distance kills a lot of my friendships, and that I have a hard time maintaining contact with people when I get busy. And I've been busy. And then, as though I called her to me, she shows up in my store in the mall.

And it was really nice to see her. She's gotten together with a nice woman, found a good roommate, and is doing a bunch of cool stuff with her art. And I'm really happy and a little bit jealous that she can devote herself to her art that much. I wish I was at that point with my stuff that I could pull it off.

Hopefully one day I will be able to focus far more time and energy on the things I want to create.