It’s 6:46 PM on the first of November. I’m really tired, but if I just roll over and fall asleep, I’ll find myself waking up at 4 in the morning, like I did today, which will set me up for another crappy mood. Why don’t I just do something to occupy me until a later hour so that I wake up at a later hour tomorrow? Luckily for all of us, I can type another post here while I listen to my ’90s rock radio playlist. I mean, I don’t know if it’s lucky for you, but it’s really more for me.
I’m not going to get into the minutiae of what happened today; it’s just basic residential treatment facility shit: I smoke in the bathroom, people snitch on me, I blame them for snitching when, honestly, I shouldn’t be smoking in the bathroom.
In the past, on a day like that, I’ve been a total jerk to somebody, maybe even to the point where I got myself in worse trouble than I would have been in the first place, including but not limited to finding myself back on the street. I am very close to the end zone of this particular treatment stay, likely getting a supportive housing situation from an interview I have on Monday by the end of the year (although I am limiting my expectations). This is just the kind of timing where I would normally sabotage my whole situation when all I really need to do is keep my mouth shut.
Today, I happened to have not been well-rested, which puts me at a higher risk of taking things personally and going way deeper than I need to. Like, ‘I am so fucking tired of being in places like this, I wish I wasn’t such a mess.’
Honestly, this is true. I have no idea how many institutions I’ve been in since I started going to rehab when I was 24. I would wager that I’ve spent more time in an institution than I have anywhere else in the last 13 years since then, and yeah, I’m exhausted.
Seriously, I’m tired of all of it. You have to live in close quarters with people you would never choose to hang out with, and come on, it’s not like use drug addicts are the most reasonably well-adjusted humans with the most emotionally and socially mature behaviors that make someone easy to cohabitate a living situation with. I’ve come up with some defense mechanisms for this, including but not limited to constantly wearing headphones so that I can’t hear these people trying to impress each other with their street credibility, footwear, or whatever other limited social currency they can flex to try to look cool. Which is fine; we all have our trajectory, and we are all in different places in said trajectories. I am sure there was a time when a younger me was concerned with impressing the other people on whichever island of misfit toys I was on. I keep my mind busy with other things now. People have pulled me aside and told me that they appreciate how I move in my own lane, and I appreciate the compliment, I suppose. When you have no home or real privacy, you have to find a way to at least feel like you do in your head.
There are a lot of other parts of this type of situation to be tired of, but it’s just going to bum me out to sit here and type all of them out. My point is that without enough rest, it’s easy for me to lose sight of the fact that I was very much a walking corpse, trying to become a non-walking corpse a little over a year ago before I came to this particular institution.
This is a further illustration of my recent writing on perception and how mood affects my perception of everything, and therefore the reality of life. It can be the exact same reality with little to no change, and I can go from feeling great about life, blessed and highly favored, to wishing I hadn’t messed up my whole life to a point where there can be no recovery (and that I should just give up). It is actually a fairly recent realization that my feelings are not factually sound and that it may be as simple as a good night’s rest and a full belly. Sure, bipolar disorder does add a whole host of complexities to my perception that some folks may not have to factor in, but sometimes it’s very simple.
I don’t want to go too far in this direction; it’s a little too psychedelic, but what even is reality to any being beyond what it perceives? Whoa, man.
Anyway, there is one more thing working on me that I haven’t figured out how to think my way beyond, and I hate it about myself. Why does the amount of money that I have do so much to my mental state? The value of money is literally contingent on how we perceive it. I don’t have any, and it makes me feel terrible about everything. I can’t stand that. I can’t stand how I have to ask other people for it. I hate money, but I hate not having it.
And now, here I am a bit north of 8 o’clock. I could probably go to sleep pretty shortly and wake up at my more comfortable, usual 7 AM.
I WILL NOT SMOKE IN THE BATHROOM! everyone else will, but i’m not going to fuck my shit up over something so foolish.
i am in no position to leave out the link that could help with my financial situation, fuck, you know? i’m trying to find some kind of employment that i can do. when i have money i never include this link, because it feels like shit, but here it is, since i have less than 2 dollars to my name: https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
