You must log in or register to comment.
Better than last week, so far. I made a decision earlier in the week to try something that I’ve been wanted to do and pitched a cowriting project to my sister, who was really enthusiastic about the idea. We’ve both struggled to write in the past, I think we both have a hard time getting stuck on details. I feel like there’s a real chance that having a writing partner will help us both push through those times when we get stuck on a word or phrase or detail, because we tend to obsess about different things.
Also, she’s better at punctuation than me, which is good because my approach to commas is usually just to sort of sprinkle them liberally wherever I would naturally pause. I know that isn’t right but so far it’s a habit I haven’t been able to break.
It’s been a bit of a shit one. Finances are rough right now as I’ve been looking for a job for quite some time, and I learned just yesterday that my roommate is moving out on the first of February and didn’t think it was something she really needed to tell me in advance. So I’ll be on the hook for the full rent amount, which is around twice what I have in my bank account right now.
I did apply for a really cool job with a queer non-profit, so fingers crossed I’ll get that and my luck will start turning around!
I’m American and yesterday I realized I made a mistake on my taxes less than an hour after I filed them. Some googling told me it’s not a huge deal, just have to file an amended tax return after my initial one is accepted but I can’t ignore it because the IRS will know I did it wrong because they will have received a form from another party with the numbers I forgot to put in. It’s baffling to me why it’s a weird negotiation to pay taxes instead of them just telling me what I owe since they do know what I owe.
While I have my W-2 and a bunch of 1099s and 1098s from various banks, I’m still waiting on a few more things. But yeah, definitely silly that I have to gather these forms, tabulate them in the 1040, and technically send them off to the IRS, when these banks have also filed these with the government already. Electronic filing or not, it’s annoying. It doesn’t take me long to do my taxes, maybe like 1-2hrs (and admittedly I use H&R Block via the IRS’ Free File program), but still. So stupid.
The IRS is trialing a “Direct File” system this year, but it’s not open to everyone. Hopefully that turns out alright. I know that still requires people to file in the first place, but I still think it’ll eventually get us to a point where the government “files for us” and we simply confirm the amounts. Anything that removes the influence of the proprietary tax software companies is a plus in my book.
It’s baffling to me why it’s a weird negotiation to pay taxes instead of them just telling me what I owe since they do know what I owe.
You can thank the Intuit lobbyists for that one.
Ah yes Taxes. The things I don’t mind paying but wish the rich kids would pay too. :-(
Pretty good, got a date on Saturday with this super cute girl that has similar interests with me and has autism (like 1/2 my friends have either ADHD/Autism and that seems to magnetize people with either together in a weird way, so that looks like it might work out well), then I have another date not currently on the books but theoretically planned with the girl that I mentioned who was asexual on the Sunday, but not 100% if that’s actually a thing yet.
Bad.
My wife and I broke up several days ago. We were never legally married, and I suppose that makes it a lot easier, but still not easy.
We both had severe emotional control issues, for different reasons. I tried countless meds to help, and keep myself, and us, together. Tried therapy. But in the end, more often than not, there was no voice of reason in our relationship. We could reach points where we’d go a month or so without fighting, but it’d always happen again some day.
Finally, at a time where we were both calm and unemotional, we came to the decision that we needed to work on ourselves separately. When the consequences of our mental illness were not just hurting ourselves, but each other, it was just too hard to cope with.
We’re still friends. We’re still supporting each other, but I feel like I’ve lost the best thing I’ve ever had in my life and it’s my fault. I’m happy that she no longer has to feel chained down by my angry outbursts, my constant panic attacks, and wondering every day if I’m still going to be with her tomorrow, but I wish none of those things existed in the first place, so we could be happy together.On top of all this, the catalyst for making this decision in the first place was that there was a new guy, who was very interested in me. When he found out I was already taken, he tried to back off, but… I guess now my ex-wife encouraged him to keep going. We’d been open to the idea of polyamory from the beginning of our relationship, so that’s how we were hoping it would go. Unfortunately, it turned out he couldn’t be comfortable with polyamory, and wanted an exclusive relationship.
And that’s when we suddenly realized that there was a choice. I could try to stay with her, hoping one day things would get better, or find a new relationship and hope it doesn’t end the same way. We realized quickly that the second was the only healthy option, even if we really, really didn’t want that.And now, several days later, this new guy is already telling me he’s in love with me. He said it was love at first sight for him. I told him I’m going to need a long time before I can even consider anybody else romantically, and he’s told me he’s willing to wait however long it takes, but the concept scares me.
My last relationship ended largely because of emotional and psychological problems that feel insurmountable. I’m terrified if this goes anywhere that I’m going to screw it up the exact same way.I just don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve checked up on my ex a few times, and it feels like she’s handling this better than I am. At the very least, she’ll survive, and that makes me happy. I was friends with her for a long time before we even started dating, and I’m just really hoping I can learn to see her that way again. But this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with emotionally and I don’t feel like I’ll survive, even if I know consciously that I will get through it.
Hang, in, there. I can’t understand nor relate to your situation, but you’ll find with time and reflection that things, did in fact, stabilize. Just know there are people that care about you and that you generate meaning and joy for people in your life.
I don’t know why, but the support I get from people who can’t understand but still want to help means the most to me.
Luckily, I’ve had a load of messages from a million people on just about every platform I knew anybody on filled with support and encouragement. Everybody’s making really sure I don’t feel unloved.
Best of luck. I can only imagine how difficult this has all been. I think keeping the new potential SO a bit at length while you sort through things is the right call but I’m also a random internet person with only the info you presented, so “take with a grain of salt” for sure lol.
If they start love bombing or similar just be direct and clear with them. You like them, you see something there, but it needs to come with time and dumping all these feelings on you as you go through this separation is not productive. Just my 2 cents.
It doesn’t sound like it was all your fault, nor was it all theirs. It sounds like two people who care very much for each other realized that the patterns they were reinforcing were not good for either of them, and took painful steps to keep the relationship they could. I’m really sorry you’re in this position now, but I’m also really hopeful that you see the good in your decision and that you were able to make it calmly despite the emotions of the situation. That’s a crappy consolation prize but maybe you’ll learn and grow your emotional toolkit to make the ability to handle situations like that even stronger.
Something that helped me to become better at communicating my feelings (and communicating when I couldn’t manage it well) was reading about mediating other people’s conflicts. Self help / self regulation books and the like weren’t helping me to navigate these situations but ones about mediation in the workplace or at home helped me to see the types of patterns that played out in my relationships. Discussing these techniques - like lots of “I feel” statements and no “you make me” statements - with my partner and agreeing to try them gave us the emotional space to really start practicing better management of ourselves.
I hope I’m not overstepping with this, but I am scared alongside you about starting anything else this quickly afterwards, and especially this intensely. It doesn’t sound like you’re being kind enough to yourself to give enough time to process, or to build up the emotional management skills you’re hoping to. Coming on so strongly to someone who’s just been through something like this doesn’t speak very highly of this guy’s character either, from where I’m sitting (just north of total ignorance, but still).
Whatever happens, I hope you find the space and peace to train those relationship and emotional skills you want for yourself, and the person or persons who help you to reinforce them.
Your suggestion in the second paragraph sounds good. Most of our fights were more or less caused by extrapolating information incorrectly due to our high strung emotions. Things like she’d mention a famous person in passing, and I would happen to know said famous person had a horrific controversy, and I’d suddenly go on high alert thinking she supported said terrible things, which would snowball into “If she supports that terrible thing, she must support all these other terrible things as well,” at which point I’d explode, she having no idea why because she didn’t know about said controversy and didn’t even like said famous person very much in the first place.
When she’d blow up at me, it was usually because I ignored a load of warning signs that she was in a really bad mood, because I felt bad not helping when she felt bad, but the only help she actually needed was for me to leave her alone until she could settle down.As for the new guy, the situation is a little complicated by the fact that he did actually try to do the polyamory thing at first, and a bit into that is when he first confessed that he was in love with me. However, we realized that what he was really hoping for was that I’d fall for him so hard I’d decide I wanted to be exclusively with him. Once he realized that, that’s when we realized polyamory wasn’t going to work and I had to make a decision.
It still disturbs me a bit that that happened so fast, but I don’t feel like I should be judging since I was exactly like that with my ex before we started dating. Just fell so deeply in love that I couldn’t bear not telling her.
At the same time though, maybe that should make me more worried, because I was absolutely off my rocker back then and the first year of our relationship was almost entirely her reigning me in and teaching me how to approach relationships in a more healthy way.more or less caused by extrapolating information incorrectly due to our high strung emotions
💕 the topics are different but the pattern is similar to some of the struggles my wife and I have faced together. In many cases, my own anxiety and hypervigilance tendencies have caused me to react to small things and turn them into big deals. It’s incredibly easy to just… be in those moments. “I feel” statements have helped me to give agency back to myself in those times, and I hope you discover the tools that best help you in those situations.
My knee-jerk reaction about the person is changed because of the complications; my hope for you to have the time and peace to choose how you decide to is not. Whatever you decide to do, use the opportunities you get to practice the skills that will help you be the person you want to be. If that involves him, I hope you do great. If it doesn’t, I hope you do great.
A very wise person once said “the only way to win is to deny the battle”. This advice is working well for me this week. The guy at university that I have developed a strong aversion to keeps trying to talk to me, and I have been ignoring him. If you’re reading this and feeling inclined to call this mean, this situation has arisen because he repeatedly refused to respect my boundaries (and I genuinely cannot express them more explicitly than the literal words “do not touch my laptop”), repeatedly started arguments because he can’t accept his opinions are not facts, and repeatedly obstructed our group project to the point that I ended up doing every single task that was assigned to him, because he either didn’t do it, only did half of it, or did it so badly that it was unusable by the rest of the team. He is quite capable of talking non-stop for 8 hours without even pausing for breath, including talking through lectures, talking over other people, and talking while others are trying to concentrate on their work. He does not think the word “no” should ever apply to him. He has broken my belongings, lied about it, and when confronted about it, neither apologised nor offered to pay for them.
I’ve been getting some pushback on my decision to start pretending he does not exist, because he’s neurodiverse (autism+ADHD+oppositional defiance disorder) and we have to “be kind to him”. I’ve really struggled with this, because I normally have no difficulty getting on with neurodiverse people and I have genuinely tried my best to be understanding with this guy. My default approach to interactions with anyone is to be(e) nice. But that has to be a two-way street. Having had my very reasonable boundaries trampled over multiple times, with all the evidence being that he misses the unspoken social cues, isn’t listening when asked politely, and argues about why “no” should mean “yes” when asked grumpily, my conclusion is that my own self-preservation has to take priority now.
By refusing to engage with him, he has no opportunities to ignore my boundaries (except for his continued attempts to keep talking to me) and he has no opportunities to start arguments. He can’t do any of his usual shit if I completely blank him when he speaks. This is the most control I’ve had over my interactions with him in four months, and it’s the least stressed and suicidal I’ve felt in two months. I would also, perhaps, argue that this is the best way I can “be kind to him”, because the one thing that will consistently make me lose my temper is when someone keeps pushing me even after I’ve told them “no”. Refusing to give him the opportunity to keep pushing me is a kindness to both of us.
Well done. Can remember you mentioning this person before.
Yeah, it’s been an ongoing saga. I’ve tried going to the teachers, but their hands are tied because of his neurodiversity - this is where the “be kind to him” instruction came from last week. And it’s like, I did that for months and all I have to show for it is exhaustion, anxiety, and depression. So, nope. Not doing that. He can just stay away from me.
slowly recovering from tonsil surgery! pain’s still a problem but i’m most of the way back to eating normally which is nice.
the foster dog still has a limp in her right front leg after she’s been napping, so i’m setting her up for a vet appointment.
RAGBRAI (largest organized cycling event) announced the route for this year, which will be shortish but also very, very hilly. guess i’ll need to get some hill training in before july!
i’m taking some time off alcohol, currently on day 10 with the plan being to stay sober until valentine’s day. i really only drink on weekends when i am drinking, but it had gotten a little out of hand with the holidays like it tends to, so a break was much appreciated.
Boo, the nice asexual girl I was talking to and planning on a date with just silently unmatched me on bumble without a word, feels great man. Like I get the fact I am likely option #20 on the number of potential dates but it still feels really shitty to do without a word.
Still have two other dates with two other girls but this really bums me out since I liked her the most so far out of all of them.
Work is still challenging, but more manageable. Hoping to make some sort of career change this year, even if it means lowering my pay for a bit to get my foot in the door.
Thanks for asking. Doing better this week than last; feeling better and handling things better. Kiddos are still annoying, but not as as stressful. Work stuff is still anxiety inducing. trying it ignore it.
How’re you doing Alyaza?
a wonderful new year update: we are currently paying $1,600/mo for this shitty apartment. love landlords
I got married Monday at a Mexican restaurant. We decided Friday night, bought pawnshop rings on Saturday, and got the certificate on monday morning before work. My cousin is a universal life church minister so he signed it for us and our waiter was witness. As untraditionally romantic as this seems, it was one of the best days of my life.
Last week I got the breast cancer diag, so hopefully this is more positive :)
To me, this is the epitome of a romantic wedding, so it gladdens my heart to learn of it.
All the best with everything that comes next, now you’ve been diagnosed.
EDIT: Listening to Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker didn’t help lol but I don’t know, it was so gripping I couldn’t stop listening… it was like looking in the abyss… and feeling like loosing yourself. I want to make some music like that.
My mind has been conjuring the worse nightmare and sad shits I thought I could imagine. To fight this I decided to release some of my music. There aren’t much people that listened to it (30!!) but the good comments help me get through the last days.
We got some good snow overnight and I took the skis out to make some trails for myself. The skis were great but now I’ve got to go replace my boots. I still went and took pictures for you all because it was so lovely. Still, I’m a little sad that my time on the skis ended like this:
