5 Years

I’ve been having a hard time. After finally jumping through the various hoops and getting a psychiatrist who put me on lithium, I was getting a little better. But then, after the 2nd visit I went to my local pharmacy and was told there was a problem with getting my medication paid for (by my Medicaid and HMO). the resulting process I've had to go through is so needlessly complex and convoluted that, honestly I don’t even understand it enough to describe it or rectify it. I was actually told that it should be all set in 14 business days, and whatever the restriction was will be lifted so that I can go down Liberty avenue and pick up my medication.

I’ve gone into a kind of frozen state of hopelessness where nothing about my life feels good to me, I just feel alone and stuck. Knowing what I know about my mind, this is just the shade that my perception paints everything, but knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better.

I haven’t felt like writing or doing anything else, which all takes a certain degree of confidence that I just can’t really get at.

It’s been almost exactly 5 years since I first came to NYC. Having deleted Facebook, I don’t know the exact date, but I know it was around this time in march of 2020. Come to think of it, it’s kind of nice not to have Facebook joyfully remind me of documents of the worst parts of my life like they would a trip to universal studios Florida, or something.

The last time I was attempting to write anything it was in the vein of thinking about being here for five years, and all of the things that happened here since the day I got on the new jersey transit train from Asbury park to New York City, having been booted out of a sober house for failing a drug test with no where to go . I was feeling way more rosy about life when I was writing this, and I never finished it.

My mindset now, is like “what the fuck am I doing here?”.

This is home, though. There isn’t any feasible way that I could just go somewhere else, and besides that there’s no “oh, i’ll just go back home, now” type situation for me to return to. Not in Boston or Jersey or anywhere else.

I will say, despite numerous awful experiences in the past 5 years, it’s balanced out by powerfully positive and cathartic. Without being here, i’d have never really learned that I was able to write, or be creative in the various ways that I've learned that I can express myself. For all the knocks I took, and maybe because of them I know more about who I am and what i’m capable of.

It’s getting nice out. I know that within the next few weeks i’m going to find myself walking somewhere with my headphones on, and the whole question of what i’m doing here won’t make any sense. I have to just wade through this unpleasantness, like I always have, I suppose.

I wanted to see if I could still get something out of the keyboard, I’m way rusty.