I posted my first entry on this blog one year ago.

I remember trying to get this blog set up in April of 2024 but I just couldn't juggle all the various coding while I was hung over from getting drunk all the time. For a bit I sorta relegated it to the pile of unfinished projects.

My life is filled with unfinished projects. Since I was a kid, I'd get really excited for something, hit a roadblock, and stop. After a while, it became disheartening.

Obviously I'm on a couple different spectrums. I've never been diagnosed with ADHD, Autism, or Borderline, but I've kept an eye on all three and taken many screenings with a few different professionals. My Dad raised me with the idea that being mentally ill or in any way special needs would make me less of a person, incapable and permanently crippled. So I ignored many, many things I should have been doing for my health throughout my life.

When I was in my early 20s, I tried to tell him and my Mom that I was depressed, and this made them very upset. At me. I described to them the symptoms of both depression and anxiety saying I don't feel normal and they both told me "that's just how life feels." I was encouraged to "be a man" about it and deal. It is not lost on me that they obviously had problems they refused to treat.

It wasn't until I got lucky and made a bunch of good friends and started exercising regularly that suddenly things were fine and I could do things like focus on school and start accomplishing things. It's hard to describe, but the difference was stark. It seems that when I have what I need, my symptoms of neurodivergence are basically nonexistent outside my kinda weird demeanor.

So, some theories of addiction posit that the addiction is a symptom of another problem, some kind of psychological need not being met. The times of my life I struggled with addictions, chemical and otherwise, were during periods of isolation, abuse, negativity in general. During the Spring of 2018 I had quit alcohol after a six month partial bender the year before. I found myself having no trouble staying sober despite having felt like a subhuman piece of garbage while quitting over the winter. At some point during these good times I stumbled across the story of Rat Park.

My life in 2017 had been pretty garbage. I'd been in three (very short) abusive relationships, I'd lost most of my friends to calling out the abuse, and I'd been forced into a fairly unpleasant housing situation after working a series of really shitty jobs that didn't pay worth a damn. So I drank a lot. I watched virtually all of Stranger Things season 2 blind drunk, and I still don't really remember it, though I'm told it's the same if you're sober.

It was probably the worst situation I've ever been in. I had gone to Columbus to change the world and it seemed I had failed. I couldn't be a Navy Officer due to some fuckery in the government, I couldn't go to grad school 'cause I owed the school money. I was scared to go back into the political campaigning life due to how scary American politics had become (lol). My housemate couldn't keep up with the rent and left piles of garbage all around the house to boot.

The only things keeping me afloat were my three closest friends who kept me in their life, who either didn't believe or ignored the rumors about me. They'd come and visit me despite every part of my house but my room being a pigsty, and they'd buy me meals to help me stay afloat.

I went to my folks' house in Northeast Ohio for the winter, and stopped drinking then. The withdrawal was short and was far from the worst. I asked my Dad if I could come home at the end of my lease, and he said sure. I felt pretty defeated, and it was time to just accept that my big grand insane plan had gone where most big grand insane plans go.

So I started painting miniatures. Old ones that I had wanted to have finished since high school, mostly individual characters. It was the first thing I could take pride in since my college days, little as it was. They came out well, even in spite of my shaky hands.

I went back to Columbus after the new year. I told one of my closest friends, a person I had recently designated as my sister from another mister for how much she saved me during this awful time of my life, that I would be leaving Columbus in some months. She urged me to give myself a chance to find the perfect job, and to try and build a good life even without accomplishing my silly dream. I didn't think I'd succeed, but I promised to try anyway.

I'd met a guy not too long before who worked in IT. It sounded like a cushy gig. I had a pretty rough time when my laptop burned out and my phone broke in the same week, leaving me without any access to the internet outside of the library. He gave me an old laptop his company was chucking (that was somehow way stronger than mine had been) and basically saved my bacon there. My Dad had been a field service IT guy for his last job, working for Hewlett-Packard in Arizona, and had raised me with networking our computers and learning to troubleshoot them since I was old enough to read. A little before that, even. I was using DOS prompts before I was reading Berenstain Bears.

So I took a chance and applied to some IT jobs. And most of them felt I was overqualified or too unfamiliar with something specific. But one day I wandered into an office for an interview, and one of the office supervisors was a friend of mine I had met some years before doing mushrooms in the woods at a hippie thing, and she cinched me for the position as one of the IT grunts in a call center.

I was elated. I was so happy you wouldn't believe. With my first paycheck... I paid the rent and got us out of an eviction, and also bought an umbrella, but also and most importantly I bought myself some sushi from the sushi place around the corner from me. I felt so bougie.

I was proud to walk around the city again. I was offered a weekend job at this awesome vintage toy store in town called Big Fun Toys, which was like a dream come true. I bought a weight set and started working out on my floor. I started going to theater events and finally was able to become friends with this cute person who had been in my circles for a while and by the end of the summer we were dating even despite the horrid living condition of my space (that's how I know I'm that hot). The winter ended up a little dicey, but by the end of January, I had a new job as the IT guy of a small company here in town that would pay me a thriving wage.

That time of my life always makes me think back to Rat Park. How those rats had no interest in chemical stimulation when they had what they needed, and neither did I.

Well, nowadays feels like Rat Park again. Of course I thought about it all the way through my latest foray into alcoholism. And I tried to establish it a few times, but some stressor or another would always keep me dragged in. Also I think the SSRIs I was on actually made certain things decidedly worse.

Y'know, while it was a challenge to stay sober the first eight months or so, things have since changed a lot. My Mom settling down in the city and becoming a bit calmer has helped, and me finding more community and friendship has filled a couple gaps. Picking up some new hobbies has given me something to take pride in (my fingertips are mildly calloused now, I am so amazed it happened so fast). And of course, coming around to some old projects.

In the year I have had this blog, it's become a lot easier to express myself both here and elsewhere. I'm still a pretty shy texter, but I'm back to the whole charismatic socialite life again. The weirdos of my stripe are recognizing me and finding their way to me once more.

And man oh man am I in shape I am getting compliments constantly. I'm going to a small fetish party at the end of the month and I'm going to dress sluttier than I ever imagined I could. New things for the sake of it, y'know? Also I'm learning some basic gymnastics, since I can still do a cartwheel I figure why not see if I could learn to do a back handspring like I wanted to when I was a kid.

My Dad would probably disapprove of a lot. He admitted to intentionally discouraging me away from arts and theatrics while I was growing up when I went to college. He wasn't a fan of me being bi, and he didn't approve of me running in circles of joy and whimsy. I'm still trying to unlearn that puritan work ethic, and considering I'm writing this while procrastinating putting together some software packages at work, I think I'm doing an okay job.

But y'know, we outgrow our parents. They're always a part of us, but sometimes there are places I can't take them. My Dad and his HTML tutoring are always on my mind when I work on this site, and he has a habit of popping up in a lot of things in my life. He'll always be a part of me, and I will always love him so very very much, but I have to also accept that he was a toxic person with control issues, that would manipulate me to try and make me the person he wished he was, rather than letting me be the person I wanted to be.

The other night, my sister from another mister came over after goth night, and talked to me about things in her life while I strummed on my guitar practicing Bizarre Love Triangle until three in the morning. And sitting there, listening to her and practicing those three simple chords felt so very right, like this was a moment very true to me, like this is the person I was always meant to be.

Good days in Rat Park. Thanks for reading.