At my wits end

I don't know if anyone reads the personal blog posts, but it's been a while since I made an update. If you do read these, please feel free to submit comments.

A dear friend of ours, of which we have very few left anymore due to self-imposed social isolation as a result of depression and stress overload over this whole landlord situation, recently told me, more than once, that I need to start writing out my feelings. We occasionally see some people out and about that we would like to spend more time with, but that's beside the point.

Losing people is really hard. I've lost people to death, and that is definitely very hard, especially when it's unexpected. Like, my biological half-brother who would be about a year older than me, had he not killed himself some years before I started looking for my birth family. I always knew I had an older brother and was devasted when my mom told me what had happened. But, she had a daughter with another man, who she'd been married to, after giving me up. As upset as I was over finding out I would never get to meet the only biological sibling (half or otherwise) I always knew about growing up, I was elated to find out I had a sister because I had always wanted one. She occasionally posted on Facebook about our brother, and one time I know I left a comment about being sad about him but happy to have her. She unfriended me over it, leaving me crushed and also confused. When I sent her a message asking about it, she had a made up story about me supposedly hurting one of her sons, which most definitely never happened. The one time I was fortunate to be allowed (by her) to meet her, she was constantly telling me how worried she was that her older son was going to deliberately kill her newborn because she kept catching him trying to. The only thing I can even thing of is that I had been trying to help the younger one and she thought I was mean to the older one, but given the circumstances she certainly has no justification for using that against me. She was also freshly recovered, or perhaps not, from postpartum psychosis. It's possible she imagined her toddler trying to kill her newborn at the time, and it's possible she imagined me being mean to one of my nephews, and that neither of those things actually happened at all. Mental health is complex, adding postpartum hormonal complications like psychosis to the mix is no joke. I couldn't hold it against her if that were the case, but she ended up telling me I was cruel and I haven't heard from her again since.

Then there's another friend who I've been on-again-off-again with since we met. We're currently off-again. I texted an apology to her, but it's been so long now I can't expect to ever hear from her again. God, I miss her so much, though. As with yet another friend who went off on me for asking her why she wouldn't accept that I was right about something I was, in fact, right about. She kept trying to say I was wrong, but I really wasn't. I snapped at her, very briefly, but then I decided it was best to temporarily block her because I didn't want to see anything hurtful she may say and didn't want to say anything else hurtful. I unblocked her not long after the incident, but haven't tried reaching out and haven't heard anything from her. She retaliated by removing me from someone else's Discord server on which we coordinated to play Minecraft together, in turn cutting me off from an entire group of friends.

For months, I was escaping to the post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland that is Fallout 76. It's pretty sad how much I preferred it to real life. I had a quest to launch a nuke, but I kept getting lost in the silo. I finally found another player willing to help me, which was nice because I wanted to complete this quest for two reasons. One is simply because I don't like leaving anything in games left uncompleted. The other is because I wanted a healthy release for all this anger and heartache I've been feeling for so long now over what our landlord and her son are doing to us (see related post, if you see this and haven't seen that). So, like I said, I finally found a player that was willing to help. We get near the end and find out that I had not done one thing I needed to do, which was fine because he had a decrypted launch code in his inventory. I pick a location to bomb on the map - Huntersville. I had died at the hands of far too many super mutants there, so it felt like retribution. But, something crazy happened with my interface and, after choosing the location and exiting the terminal, I couldn't do anything with my pip-boy, which is like a smart watch. This presented so many limitations for me, some of which could've been avoided if I'd ever bothered to set up my ring menus more efficiently. I tried fast traveling back to my camp, to no avail. I had no choice but to log off the game. I haven't logged back on since.

There's another game I'd resumed playing, not long before the Fallout 76 incident, after being asked for months to go back to. Although Palia is technically also a post-apocalyptic game, its graphics had been far too bright and cheery for me to enjoy for a long time. But, I finally gave it another chance after the most recent update led me to believe I may finally figure out what the creators decided had happened to result in humanity being wiped out. It didn't take long to get up-to-date with the new quest line, so I was trying to finish up the one last thing I wanted to do in the previous zone, which was also my favorite map to spend time in so far because of the colors and activities - the Elderwood. The friend who'd been asking me to return to the game was spending almost all of her time in the new zone, except when I was spending time in the new zone and then she was in the Elderwood. It would have been helpful if she had come to the Elderwood with me because, with us having been in a party, it would have made my task go much faster. It would have been really nice if she weren't in the map I wanted to be in only when I wasn't. I felt like she was avoiding me. I finally said something about it, which happened to be not long after the Fallout 76 incident, but also expressed some deep mental health struggles I have been having lately because of the landlord situation. She completely dismissed me, so I deleted her and haven't been back on Palia since.

I tried a couple of other games, but couldn't get into them. The only thing in life, besides Greg and Casey, that has brought me any amount of relief, despite the small amount, and now I've lost interest in it, too.

With everything the landlord and her son are doing to us and the impact it is having on my physical and mental health as well as my ability to function normally, work, or complete my schoolwork on time, social isolation is the last thing I need. I miss all of the people I have mentioned here and all of the people not actively in my life that I didn't mention here.

I miss my life.