Hi in Going public

I have had a wild few months since I last wrote.

I took legal action against my most recent ex boyfriend. I don’t remember how much I have written about the situation, but here’s a quick rundown. We started dating in Nov 2019, and I broke up with him in April 2020. I blocked him pretty soon after we broke up, because he was sending me desperate and pleading text messages which were not fun to read. Of course, being pressured like that that drove me away further.

One day over the summer he came to my apartment uninvited and called me from a burner number. I didn’t answer, so he went to my apartment’s front desk and left a fucking creepy handwritten letter with them. At some point I discovered that I could still see blocked text messages on my phone, and that they just got filtered into another folder. He had been sending me weird desperate shit regularly for months. Over time the content got worse. He had been obsessing over me for more months than we had been in a relationship.

I filed an anti-harassment order against him in November, and we had a court date. He hired a lawyer last minute who got the case postponed for a month. Then, I got a lawyer in case shit went sideways. He and his lawyer proposed a settlement in which he paid me $1000 to drop the case, and we signed an agreement `in which he agreed to not contact me or be around me for 5 years. If he breaks it, he has to pay $2000. However, I found out that he got a job as a contractor at my company (a huge company, for those who don’t know where I work). It’s still an issue though I think, so I’ve got a meeting with HR next week to figure out what to do about that situation. Hopefully me talking with them prevents them from hiring him full time in the future.

I got scar revision procedure for the scar I got from my post-surgical abscess surgery. How fun is that sentence? The scar was puckered inward and just looked weird. I got it done before the new year so that it would be free, as I had met my insurance out of pocket max. Luckily the procedure could be done in-office. Basically he just cut out the scar and stitched it up. The first wound never had stitches because it had to be kept open to let the infection work itself out.

I was in pain later that day, but by the next morning I felt great, and healing has been going well. I now have two large-ish scars below my jawline, but I don’t really care from an aesthetic point of view. I feel like I have a lumpy bit in between the scars, so I don’t know what that’s about. I’ll see what he says at my next follow up. The other lasting effects are that my jawline is numb and the whole area up to my ear is painful to the touch. I also still have something called ‘first bite syndrome’, in which one of my salivary glands goes into painful spasms when I first start eating. The traumatic botox experience I had a few months ago didn’t help at all. My doctor swears this will go away, but it hasn’t improved in a few months. AFAIK there is no treatment, so I’ve come to terms with the fact that this is my life now.

We had a bit of a cute chat about our careers, and I told him being a doctor would make me really nervous. I asked him if he ever got nervous, and he said “well, YOUR case made me nervous”. Ha. I already assumed as much, but it’s still kinda hard to hear. He said he always knew things would turn out well for me, but that I have had a series of rare / difficult things happen. But then he said the nice thing about difficult cases is that he gets to know patients (me), so that was sweet. He’s a really great guy.

The holidays were meh. I was dating a guy in the fall and we spent part of Thanksgiving together, but I had such a bad time that I broke up with him after that, lolll.

On Christmas it was raining so outdoor hangs were not a possibility, but I (separately) saw a few friends to give them baked goods and say hi.

I got very sick over new years. First I got a UTI out of nowhere (usually I get them from sex, but I hadn’t had sex). I started treating it myself because I have UTI test strips at home, and I see a urologist who gives me a standing antibiotic. However, a few hours later I became incredibly nauseous and started vomiting. I couldn’t keep anything down, including water. After a day, I went to urgent care. They couldn’t really find anything wrong with me, so they gave me more but different antibiotics, decided it wasn’t a kidney infection, and sent me home with zofran. I violently threw up in the car on the way home. I figured that would happen so I had brought plastic bags with me, ha. I also remembered that I had some nausea patches at home (that I use for traveling, back when that was a thing I could do), so I put one of those on and from there I started to get better. The antibiotics really made me feel like trash, even with Zofran, so I was suffering the entire first week of January. Honestly I was just laid up on the couch feeling like every movement was impossibly hard. I was a wreck.

This past week I’ve been on call for work, and it’s been a shitshow (more on that later). The stress (I’m gonna blame it on that) made me have a bad coldsore breakout. I felt like such extreme trash, my whole body just ached.

I don’t understand why my body can’t catch a break. This isn’t even the only issue I have going on right now, I have a couple other health things I’m dealing with (nothing serious). But like.. I’ve been actively sick for soon to be 3 weeks, and frequently sick off and on for the last two years with my throat stuff. I fucking hate being a sickly person. It makes it impossible to make progress on my goals because I’m constantly having to drop everything to just focus on survival.

I rage quit all dating apps before Christmas. When the legal stuff was going on, I felt like I couldn’t be genuine with people I was seeing. Like, I didn’t mind talking about it, but it’s a fine line before it becomes an over-share, you know? I just didn’t feel like putting energy into censoring myself.

One funny thing is that while I was looking for a ‘real’ relationship on one app, I used Tinder to look for flings. I set the age range to be 40+, and had a pretty good time with it. A lot of men in this age range are divorced and have recent baggage, so they’re not looking for a relationship and just want a simple fun time. I’m still in contact with a few of them, but I haven’t seen anyone since before Christmas. As a result, my leg hair has gone ages without shaving and it’s kinda shocking.

Work has been kind of butts. My team got merged with another team. I kept my manager and old teammates, but several people and a BIG project got added to our team. This means my manager has had less time for me, and I’ve had to switch to this new project. In theory I like the work more, but in practice I’m clueless and useless all day everyday which FEELS BAD. Like I said earlier I’m on call right now, and I actually had a 2am incident the other night. Usually it’s somewhat rare to have severe incidents, but I’ve had several this week. That means you have to drop everything and work on it until it’s fixed. But these are incredibly complex problems that I have no idea how to solve, so basically I have to message people and ask them to help, and it’s just so stressful and bad for my self-esteem.

To be clear, everyone has been nice to me and they don’t expect me to know how to do things yet. I haven’t been getting bad feedback from my manager, either. But the idea of a promotion this winter has evaporated.

I moved apartments mid-December. I stayed in my same building, but changed units. Rents in my city are dropping due to tech workers moving out of the area now that we all work from home. Because I spend all my time at home now, I decided I wanted an apartment with another bedroom (instead of having my ‘office’ in my living room), and a place with more natural light. My building was offering concessions for new tenants, and I told them I was going to move out unless they gave me a promotional rate on a better unit. They agreed, and I got to change units and am paying the same-ish amount in rent! It’s a big win. I moved down one floor, gained another bedroom and bathroom, and am on the corner so two sides of the apartment are windows. It also has finishes I like more (dark floors, white cabinets). The only downside is that it faces the construction site next door where another apartment is being built. I could hear the construction from my old unit too, and I guess being next to it, it’s at least interesting to look at. But yeah, 6 days a week there is a background of jackhammers and dump trucks and hammers and such.

Moving was actually WAY more work than I anticipated. I borrowed plastic containers from one of my friends and half-packed my apartment ahead of the move, and then packed the other half the day the movers came with their boxes. It was a fucking exhausting day and took way longer than I anticipated.

I also decided to get rid of some furniture, and get some new stuff, so there was a period where I was selling a lot of stuff on an app, and getting a lot of deliveries / making trips to Ikea. Turns out it’s a really tough time to get new stuff because supply chains are fucked and everything everywhere is sold out or super delayed. I seriously had the hardest time finding a duvet cover for my bed! Another example is that I ordered a Casper mattress and that arrived before my new bed frame, so I was living in a state of half-completion in a lot of ways. But now I have everything I ordered! The only thing I haven’t done is hang stuff back on the walls, and finish organizing my guest bedroom / office. Perhaps I should tackle that today.

Hopefully next time I move it will be paid for by a new employer, so I won’t have to lift a finger, haha.

I do regularly think about my future here. The appeal of staying in this area was the connections I had made here, but covid has all but killed those. I have no idea what I’ll have left after this pandemic. For awhile I could say that it would just be a matter of time before things got back to normal. But now things have changed permanently - people have changed jobs, moved away, etc. There IS no going back to normal because most of the things I liked about my life are just gone. After we all get vaccinated and socializing is a thing again, I’ll have to start over. That makes me think, since I’m not in love with this area, why not just start over somewhere else? I even have the option of keeping my same job.

My plan is that once I can travel again, I will take a trip to Chicago and see if I still like it there. That’s the only thing I’ve got right now. A plan to see if I want to make a plan.

On that note, besides my entire childhood, this has definitely been the worst year of my life. I just have no purpose anymore. I pretty much just work, workout sometimes, and watch TV or read my phone. I baked around the holidays because I was able to give most of it away, but I can’t really bake as much as I used to because I just overeat sweets and it’s unhealthy and makes me feel bad.

I’m a person who thrives when in a routine, and when I have places to be and people expecting things of me. I was so much happier when I was able to have plans to structure my life around. My natural state of being is a piece of shit, so I need structure to drag me out of my natural inclinations. But with covid the only structure I have is.. work, therapy once a week, and my personal trainer once a week (off and on depending on the current regulations).

Obviously I should fix this by being a self-starter and having goals and expectations for myself but it seems that I just.. can’t? Being alone all the time, I very quickly just fall into a pit of uselessness and despair. I go to these talks at work about how to be effective working from home and these men with families are like ‘just get dressed every morning!’ and I’m like, bruh, all you gotta do to get dressed is run a comb through your hair and throw on a t-shirt. Try having a head full of frizzy hair and putting on a bra. Plus, the thought of people getting to hang around their families all day makes me want to die (of jealousy). I do get that that’s not a perfect life either, especially if you live in a bad situation. But I would really like to not be alone these days.

It’s like.. in theory I could have accomplished a ton in all of these solitary months of covid. But life hurts too much. Or something. I dunno.

A little bit of gratitude before I go. I am grateful for:
- My job, financial stability and excess. Money is of little to no concern.
- My relative health, the fact that I can move my body easily and do not suffer from chronic pain
- My sweet cat
- My apartment, which is a comfortable place to stay
- The outcome of recent elections
- Supportive and meaningful friendships that I have