Got a half hour with nothing to do at school, so I figured I would get a head start on my blogging.

Messed up again, sigh. According to the schedule I was using, I didn’t have class this morning. So I slept in. Then I sit down at the computer at around 9:30 am and there’s a Facebook message from my classmate Josh telling me that I was supposed to be in TV Pilot 3 class, like, NOW.

This puzzled me. I dug through my school emails and found the latest version of the schedule, which I precious had thought I was already using, but turns out, nope.

I clearly remember downloading that version of the schedule and replacing the copy of it I had saved previously of the previous schedule. So I was, until this morning, confident I was look at the current one.

But nope. I had been working off the old one. D’oh! At first, I was going to just skip the class. I don’t handle the completely out of left field unexpected very well, and my first instinct was to skip the class and pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened and basically go back to doing my day exactly like it would have been had my schedule been correct.

Irrational, I know, but I was not exactly at my best.

Eventually I came around to realizing I had to do my best to attend at least some of the class. Denial was not an option. What put my over the edge towards the right side of the equation was the fact that I had to come in to school for my afternoon class anyway, so I might as well come in a little earlier and get some of the class I stupidly missed.

I swear, it’s like I am doomed to humiliation.

Whatever. I am here now and my stupidity of the day is in the past now, and I have a pretty good episode pitch for next class, which is Writer’s Room. It’s pretty good quality but if it isn’t chosen, I won’t be heartbroken.

I just like to contribute.

Home now. Mine didn’t get chosen. Whatever.

Our teacher told us that we need to start to let our egos dissolve away. I’m hip. If I get a job in a writer’s room, I will be happy as long as the checks clear.

For a while, at least. I suppose if I had been there for weeks and nobody seemed to even be listening to me, I might take my efforts to be heard and recognized up a notch. I’ve been ignored for long enough in my life.

The trick would be to do it in a way that isn’t aggressive or obnoxious. I think I could pull that off. I have a natural charm that can keep me in people’s good graces, plus I am a sweet and somewhat hapless fellow and people respond to that.

Also, I have the spooky ability to read people’s minds in a non-paranormal way. Hopefully, that would let me absorb the mechanics of the existing group dynamics of the workplace. And tailor by approach to best make use of that information.

Hopefully, I would become one of those guys who doesn’t fit in at first, but two weeks later it’s like he has been around forever.

I just have to trust my empathic and deductive powers.

Anyhow, the episode that was chosen seems like it will be pretty good. There is one particular plotline I am particularly interested. it centers around the definition of masculinity and how there is more definitions than the standard societal ones.

And hopefully a little about romantic niche appeal and spots in the ecosystem of love.

I am loving this Writer’s Room course. Today was our first day of collaboration and it was great. I feel so relaxed (comparatively speaking) because it’s not all on me. I don’t have to generate all the elements and pull them together into a narrative and make it coherent and all the rest of it. I just have to contribute my ideas and such.

I can totally do that. To be honest, it kind of feels like I am getting away with something. I am so used to being the sole progenitor of all the creativity in my life.  It’s always all me. Even when I have worked with others, it’s always been me pulling the goddamned train.

But not in Writer’s Room! We’re all pulling the train together now, and it feels so good. I asked the teacher if this is really what a writer’s room is like, and she said yes.

Well count me the fuck in, partner, because I absolutely loved it.

There was one little dip in the experience. About an hour into the class, I realized that I had lapsed into listening mode. I was jetting the whole thing wash over me passively when I should have been contributing.

Luckily, I was able to shift gears into here and now mode so I caught up with  the group pretty fast. I will have to learn to be a little more mellow about whether I feel like people are listening to me or not.

Again, as long as the checks clear, I am happy.

The trip home was pretty standard. I walked right past Bob’s and was not tempted to go in. I have been letting my tight-fisted frugality loose  in the run-up to Vancoufur this weekend.

That means I have clamped down on discretionary spending. I will need cash for meals when I am at the Con.

We’re not getting a room this year, though. Joe didn’t feel like it, and he’s the one wither the capital. Plus, the convention is like five blocks from here. So why not sleep in my own bed at night?

Who knows. I might even take some company back to my bedroom for some frisky fun.

It could happen!

I am looking forward to hanging with the fuzzies in RL for a change. I always enjoy myself at these conventions. It’s so nice to let my fur down and, just for one weekend, be part of a temporary community where we are the mainstream and others are the freaks.

Plus, ya know…. we’re adorable.

It makes us very telegenic. I bet there will be reporters there.

I will have to make sure I clean up real good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am pretty scared about what happens after graduation.

And excited too. I go from one to the other. Right now it seems scary. I’ve just realized that it means I will be once more cast into the existential void of infinite possibilities. There will be no external structure keeping me held together and forcing me to focus and work and show the fuck up where I am supposed to show up.

It will all be on me. That’s why I am not going to give myself a single day of rest before starting my job search. In fact, I might not even wait till graduation to start.

If I give myself time off, I will dissolve into depression again. Not the harsh kind that makes me suicidal, just the soft grey kind where I let the days go by as I indulge and distract myself and everything seems okay as long as I don’t think about it too much.

In other words, I would go right back to how I was before Kwantlen.

And that cannot be allowed to happen. So I would have to instantly develop a daily discipline focused on something strictly quantitative, with no room for interpretation.

Like my 1000 words a day.

So it would have to be X number of jobs applied for, or the like.

I am rather worried about job interviews, though. Seeing as there is a strong possibility that all the jobs I am applying for will be in either Los Angeles or Toronto, I am really hoping that in-person interviews will not be a huge thing, at least at first.

Because how the heck would I get to them? I can’t exactly afford plane tickets. And getting there via Greyhound is time-intensive and not free.

The problem with going Greyhound is that whatever you save on the ticket by not taking the plane, you end up spending on accommodations.

Either that, or you sleep on the street somewhere, and I am way too old for that kind of adventure. Or I suppose you could try to find one of those youth hostels. Those aren’t free either but they are, I assume, way cheaper than a hotel or motel.

Or, I suppose, I could Airbnb my way there. That might be even cheaper, and I would get to meet new people and practice using my innate charm on them in preparation for using it at the interview.

Does that seem inhuman or cold? I hope not. I can’t always tell.

No matter how I economize, though, it will costs me more than zero dollars, and that’s money I will need to get somewhere. I don’t want to have to borrow still more money from Joe,. so I hope there might be some form of government funding available for that sort of thing. After all, the government has a vested interest in turning me into a taxpayer instead of a tax burden.

Then again, they have a rather spotty record when it comes to realizing that.

Got an email from the student loan people that basically said “We know you will be graduating soon, so here is how to start paying us back. ”

Hold on there, folks. I will be happy to make student loan payments once I am employed. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay?

Of course, my dream scenario would be one where I really am as amazingly talented as I sometimes think I am, and the studios will engage in a fierce bidding war to see who gets to hire me, and be falling all over themselves to pay my way, first class, to come visit their studios and be entertained by them in order to convince me to work for THEM.

Extremely unlikely, I know, but it’s a nice fantasy.

I think the prospect of employment will be the impetus I need to buckle down and make my work the best it can possibly be. I am supposed to be doing that in school, but at school I can coast and get by fine,.

But when I am competing with all the other graduates of programs like mine plus the randos from the street who think they can make it, I have got to put my very best face out there in order to stand a chance of winning the race.

I mix metaphors like Sherman-Williams mixes paint.

I have pondered what approach I should use in interviews. I am thinking that it should be me turning on the charm, but not all the way up. I can be quite overwhelming if I go with my instincts and push out all the personality power I possess.

I mean, it might work. I might charm the heck out of them and make sure that they remember me when hiring time comes, and that they are left with the impression that I am a super awesome guy to be around and it would be kickass to have me around.

But ti might fail and fail big time. Instead of being charmed, they are made intensely uncomfortable by my high volume personality, and they are left thinking that the last thing they would want is for that obnoxious, pushy guy to be around them all the time.

So I dunno. I will probably at least try the full on personality mode one time to see how it happens. It might work out fine. But I know that, unchecked, I can be pretty obnoxious, so I will have to make sure I don’t get too carried away and end up scaring people.

I am probably best off with a mix of high personality and my usual shyness and reserve. That can be a winning combo when done right.

Of course, I might get work here in the GVRD. If not in TV, then in writing for video games. There are a ton of top level video game studios in town, and I might just be able to get work writing for one of them.

It’s not what I want to be writing. I want to write TV. But it would pay the bills while I looked for something in my field.

Who knows, I might even like it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Recently, my psychiatrist upped the dosage in my two antidepressants, Paxil and Wellbutrin, and so far it’s going quite well.

I feel far ,more focused and energetic. I feel like some of the fog that clings to my mind and makes it so hard to think and remember has lifted and I can feel my own drive and will for the first time in what seems like forever, and overall, I’m feeling much better now.

jj

I feel like I can handle things now. I might still stumble now and then, but I stand a much better chance to get my poop in a group now that I am fully awake.

At least I think I am fully awake. If there’s a more awake state for me possible, I am not sure I would want to go there. I think it might be kind of scary.

I mean, I probably would be even more hyperintelligent than I am now. I might even be more competent. But I would really be riding the thin and trembling edge of mania, and mania might be fun while it lasts but it’s dangerous as hell.

Especially with a mind like mine. I might go full on supervillain. Insane cackle and all.

So I am feeling much better now, but it’s a cold kind of improvement. I don’t feel any increase in emotional warmth. As far as I can tell, this increase in dosage’s effect is mainly intellectual. The wall between me and the love of the people who care about me is still there. In fact, it feels firmer than ever.

But maybe that’s due to my highly cerebral nature. It may be that there is nothing the drugs can do about that. That will take spiritual and/or psychological growth in order to overcome that deep deep core of animal fear that keeps me from being able to let my guard down and feel comfortable in my own skin.

I want to feel comfortable in my own skin. I want to pierce the heart of my depression and melt the ice around my heart so I can let the sunshine in. I want to feel connected and whole and warm. I am tired of being frozen robot with a busted antenna and a lot of broken circuits that keep my parts from forming a full robot.

You know, that gives me a heck of an idea for an existential science fiction story. A robot that is the last of its line of products and therefore a version that was put out just to make the investors happy, and therefore his design was not given much thought and he was more or less just left on his own after activation.

And now he floats in deep space at the very edge of a solar system, getting by on what little sunlight he get from the distant star he orbits. He spends his days monitoring the broadcasts from the solar system’s one life bearing planet, and communicating with other robots via that planet’s networks, and looking at all the things he will never see in person and listening to the music of people he will never meet.

He has to do all this monitoring because when he stops, he starts feeling sad about how he has been abandoned by his makers and left alone to fend for himself when he was never even fully assembled.

But that he does not know is that he was never abandoned. The problem lies in his antenna. It was sabotaged by a cruel robot when he was fresh off the production line, and that made it incapable of picking up the signals of all the robots who care about him who have been calling for him and looking for him this whole time.

It also means that he could not receive the vital heart-signal that reassures all robots that they are connected and functioning and will be there for one another at a moment’s notice.

The busted antenna also makes it so very hard for them to find him in the deep dark expanses of space because it doesn’t respond to their signals. Many robots have sent out the strongest signal they can but still received nothing in response.

Eventually, they gave up. But others took their place.

So what will happen to our sad little robot? Will the other robots find him? Will they be able to fix his broken antenna? Can they finally finish assembling him so he can feel like a whole robot again? And what of the dark forces that broke his antenna in the first place? Are they still out there, lurking, waiting to victimize poor defenseless little robots once more? Has this happened to other robots too? 

Man, do I know how to create an allegory. Obviously, that robot is me, and his tale is mine as seen through a layer of metaphor. I could go on and on, of course, but I think I have indulged myself enough for one night.

Still, that could be the nugget of a very good short animated film. With merchandising opportunities. Imagine how many people would love to have their own sad little robot whose heart glows when you hug him.

Hmmm. I would kind of need an ending, though. A big boffo super happy ending to make up for the pathos. The robot is rescued, repaired, and assembled properly, and taken to a robot hospital where he will be cared for and loved for so he can finally be fully activated.

If only it was that simple in humans!

But no, we have to deal with neurochemistry and all that entails. It’s a little galling to find out that after all my theories blaming all kinds of different things for my miserable state, the whole thing turned out to be merely a case of bad brain chemicals.

Still, the damage remains and I am going to have to fix it or the problems will occur. I have treated the symptoms but the disease remains.

However, I feel far more equipped for that journey that ever before.

And who knows, maybe this new cold power will warm up in time. I remember when I first went on Paxil it made me very numb and disconnected and like my head was floating.

But over time, the feelings came back. And I greeted them with open arms. Even the bad ones. Because it felt so good to really feel again.

Maybe that is what is happening now, and the cold circuit power surge I am enjoying will, in time, warm me up.

Let the sunshine in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hello, my name is Michael, and I am addicted to video games.

Now everyone say “Hi, Michael!” Good. That felt real.

For a long time, I bullshitted myself about my video game problem because, like any drunk,I could always point to people who had the addiction  far worse than I do and say “I can’t be an addict, I’m nothing like (latest Korean to die of video game addiction because he forgot to eat)!”.

But by that logic, nobody truly has any addiction except the person who has the absolute worst case of it.  And we know that isn’t the case. The world is full of addicts.

So that line of justification is total bullshit. Ejected.

The real measure of any addiction is the effect it has on your life, and I have taken a good long hard look at myself and realized that an awful lot of my problems at school have everything to do with my video game addiction.

Time I should be spending doing classwork (which I also enjoy as long as it’s just writing stuff) I spend playing video games. Video games consume my life. I know I am addicted because I have found myself obsessed with maximizing my video game playing time at the cost of deep cuts into the things I actually should be doing.

It’s gotten to the point that I spend nearly all my non-school waking hours playing games. That sure seems like a sign of addiction to me.

It’s not hard to see why. Like I mentioned before, when I am playing a video game, I am happy. Neither anxiety nor depression plague me because I am fully absorbed by the game. Time passes very smoothly in that time.

I get a (false)  sense of accomplishment as I progress through the game as well as being able to get away from myself and live in someone else’s skin for a while.

Someone strong, and competent,. and powerful. Someone who can fight evil and win. Someone who strides confidently forward into the future, sure of their capabilities and ready to take on the whole world in the search of justice.

So basically all the things I hate about myself, reversed. No wonder I play video games instead of living my life.

But like all addictions,. it sucks the vitality out of you and displaces more and more of your life until it hollows you out and you enter the realm of the deadly knowledge that there is a cure for emotions.

It hasn’t progressed anywhere near as far with me. I am pretty sure I could never be a person who does nothing but play video games and chat online again. I would grow restless and angsty and depressed pretty fast.

My recent five day break from classes between terms was approximately one day too long. Last Monday, I was already growing restless and bored. I wanted to be doing something, goddamn it! 

But still, the addiction creeps in. I think the fact that I can play the latest games and at a high resolution rate makes it worse because the experience is so much more real than any games I played before the new computer. It makes it so much more immersive and thus more addictive to a person with an escapist personality like mine.

I used to say I have an addictive personality, but that made it sound like people get addicted to me, and that would be scary and weird.

And the real problem is the need to escape. The ability to step out of the frame whenever you like that comes with certain combinations of intellect and character encourages one to think in terms of hpo to escape your negative emotions.

I mean, if you had the ability to instantly teleport to anywhere in the world as many times as you like, how much time would you actually spend at work. Or doing anything anything you don’t enjoy. When escape is oh so easy.

Far too easy.

I can only surmise that healthy people lack the mental maneuverability for such escapist behaviour and thus are forced to deal with things instead of escaping.

Way better way to live. But escaped into my kind when I got raped  at the tender age of three and I have been doing it ever since.

It is my primary mode, and it’s not something I can change about myself. At least not directly. If I got to the point where I feel safe in the world, I might come out of my shell.

Until then, I will be the dreamer who lives in his head and invents magical things there then tries to show them to the world.

But he sucks at marketing himself. That’s gotta change.

Anyhow, back to video games. Yay, I made it back to the point!

I can’t go cold turkey with video games. That would leave me with far too many empty hours in my life. Hours I could spend doing productive things, I suppose.

But I am afraid I wouldn’t. I’m afraid all that would happen would be that I sleep way too much and get really really depressed. Too depressed to go to school, even.

It’s too big a risk to take.

Tapering off a bit is possible, though. I took the first step today by doing my blog before I eat supper, thus freeing up the entire evening for school work.

Which involves the solving of a mystery. Because I have no idea what work I am supposed to be doing.

All I know is that I got an email saying I have “pages” due tomorrow. Pages of what? For which class? How many pages? Is it new work, or updating old work? Who do I submit it to? What percentage of my grade is on the line here?

These questions are rather vital. I would love to spend this evening writing. It’s harder and scarier than playing video games, but it does wonders for my mood and the sense of accomplishment is entirely genuine.

But I have to know what to write!

So I will do my best to figure it out from the school’s Moodle and various other sources.

I might even ask my classmates on our Facebook page.

But only as a last resort. I ask them stuff way too much.

I have to try as hard as I can to figure out myself first.

Growing up is hard to do and happens in little baby steps.

I watched Finding Dory recently.

For those of you who are not up on your Pixar, it’s the sequel to Finding Nemo , which is the tale of a clownfish child named Nemo who gets separated from his family and ends up in a fish tank in a dentist’s office. It is up to his nervous and overwrought father, Marlin (get it?) and his newly found friend Dory to come to the rescue and reunite the family.

Note to self : family reuniting is an excellent plot motivator. Who hasn’t longed to be reunited with their family?

Maybe not all of it, but….

Dory, voiced by Ellen Degeneres, really steals the show as an adorable, lovable blue tang (that’s also a fish) who has a wee bit of a problem with remembering things.

For the most part, she doesn’t.

And while with someone else voicing her that might be annoying, with Ellen that just makes her all the more lovable.

I was not surprised at all that she was the star of the sequel.

In  Finding Dory. Dory suddenly remembers that she has a family, and the rest of the plot is the story of her looking for them.

So technically, it should be called Finding Dory’s Family. But whatever.

In the movie, they delve deeper into Dory’s memory issues. In one scene, Dory is worried that her parents might not want to see her because she forgot them for so long and because she is kind of broken.

Marlin and Nemo (yup, they’re in this crazy trip too) reassure her that she’s a lovely fish and her parents will be overjoyed to see her and that her flaws won’t matter at all.

And in another scene, Dory has an “all is lost” moment where she finally gets to the tank at the Marine Life Institute where she was born, there are tons of blue tangs there… but not her parents. Then she ends up getting washed down the drain into this dark grey area of the sea, and there she is, in the existential void, questioning everything about herself as she desperately tries (and fails) to keep her parents and her friends in her memory. Eventually, she has to give up, and at that point utterly hates herself for her flaw.

These two scenes hit hard and sank deep with me. I am a terribly absentminded person who often beats himself up for being such an airhead and wonders why anyone puts up with him and truly feels like he is broken and worthless sometimes.

This, despite the fact that people in my life clearly value me and my company. And I know that I have a vast amount of talent and ability just waiting to makes its place in the world.

What can I say, depression makes you think crazy things.

The movie also touched on something I wrestle with, which is the unstable nature of the subjective reality of the absentminded person. It’s very hard to develop a sense of stability and safety when, subjectively speaking, things “disappear” all the time. My reality shifts around a lot, and I feel like I can’t keep up with it. There’s always too many variables to track and too much to try to keep together in my head and it all falls apart eventually.

The fact that this also causes you to be repeatedly humiliated by your own fucked up nature and even worse, causes you to fail others only makes things worse.

It is a hard thing to wrap your head around. I know for a fact that, despite my best efforts, I am going to continue to mess up. I know that this will inevitably make me need to ask people really basic things over and over again. I know that this costs me a lot of respect from others and makes me kind of a pain to be around.

Dory and I both handle that the same way : by being really friendly and likable and charming and therefore able to generate the necessary sympathy in people for them to help you when you need it. Ideally, the person or people we prevail upon will just roll their eyes and say “Well, that’s our Fruvous/Dory!” and consider us adorably helpless and quite the character, as opposed to resenting us and wishing we would go away.

Because if you tell us to go away, we will. It’s that easy. We’re quite fragile.

And it works, but it doesn’t allow for much dignity. And dignity is very important to human happiness. Even wacky funsters like myself need dignity. Dignity represents your sense of worth and your boundaries, and acts as a shield against the forces that would crush your self esteem. It also acts as a mask, and while I consider myself a very open and genuine person, a mask may well be necessary sometimes in order to hide what is going on inside and have some time alone in one’s head when in public.

I don’t like being helpless. I wish I could simply get my shit together and keep it that way. I want to be the sort of person who marshals facts and masters his life with the power of his focused and diligent mind. I want to be a person of substance and gain the respect of others instead of being a pathetic clown. I want to feel good about myself and stop constantly tripping over my own feet. I want to be able to present a strong and competent face to the world instead of my usual expression of confusion and worry.

I want to be a real person, dammit. I know that doesn’t make sense to others, but it is nevertheless how I feel. Right now, I am not a real person because I am so incomplete.I have no substance to me. I have never ever earned my keep and that really hurts when you are 43 years old. I feel like I am a bright child who got trapped in an adult’s body and can’t make it in the adult world.

And I want to grow the fuck up already.

Two more months of school, and then….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was a pretty decent day.

Made it to my first class of the term, Adaptation. It was fairly entertaining because it’s taught by Rudy Thauberger, and he has a zillion awesome show biz stories. I could listen to him tell them for hours.

Three hours, in fact. Minus a fifteen minute break.

But I am not crazy about the course, and really wish I didn’t have to take it. I don’t want to adapt anyone’s anything. I do my own work, period. The very idea of me adapting someone else’s work fills me with a queasy feeling akin to the nausea I have when contemplating using someone else’s toothbrush.

Other people’s stories have their germs all over them! In a sense.

I think this is because what I write is really, truly a part of me. That means I can’t ever think of anything I have written as just a product, separate from me. Anyything I write stays a part of me for a very long time, and the sense of connection to it never fades.

That’s why editing myself is like trying to perform surgery on myself. I would be a much better writer if I had an editor. Handing it over to someone else would give me that much needed sense of detachment.

Otherwise, it’s just too painful.

I put a lot of myself into what I write. In fact, the major overall trajectory of my development as a writer has been the pursuit of putting more and more of myself into my words until I am practically climbing through the screen and into my word processor.

It’s not the usual kind of transcendence, but it works for me.

I guess, in a strange way, I am still trying to escape into my books. The difference is that I am doing it by writing them. It’s like the difference between regular dreaming versus lucid dreaming. I know I am creating the dream and that I am in control of it.

And yet, any decent writer knows that they are never fully in control of their stories. At best, you ride them and do your best to steer them towards where you want to go.

But sometimes, the story’s got to be given its head and let go wherever it’s got to go. That’s part of why I stopped making outlines and such before writing things.

What’s the point of planning if the story is going to go where it wants anyway?

Of course, I am going to have to break myself of that habit, at least a little bit. Winging it might work when I’m writing a short story or even a novel. But if I am writing a TV script (or teleplay… love that word), there are far too many moving parts for the winging of it or anything else. Visual presentation demands a much tighter form of writing because so much can be said in the language of the moving image in so short a time that it requires more than good instincts to keep it all going in the right direction.

In addition, the fact that the audiovisual medium is so much more “real” than the written word means that it has to follow a lot more of the rules of reality than a book. Things that would be plausible enough in a book might seem downright ludicrous on TV.

Plus, by freeing the mind from its duties to imagine everything that is happening (like you have to do when you read), it opens the mind to think more deeply about what it is experiencing and thus logic flaws become more glaring than they would be in print.

So planning is a must. At the very least, I will need to make a beat sheet.

Then again, television writing is collaborative, not individual. So t’s not like I will have to write entire episodes by myself, or at least, not right away. And I am grateful for that.

I am perfectly happy being assigned a little piece of the puzzle and doing just that. That is likely where I would be starting and it suits me because I am not ready to handle larger structures just yet. At least,not at a professional level.

But I am damned good at writing funny dialogue and I am pretty sure I would be a genius at desk jokes once I got used to the format. I can write in any genre you can name and I am very good at writing both deeply emotional, moving moments and grand thematic crescendos that take your breath away.

Add to that that I am clever as hell and not at all afraid of hard work, plus I am an affable fellow who is easy to get along with, and I think I have a lot to offer a potential employer.

And if I work hard and get lucky, I might just get a regular paying gig and be able to live on my own, be fully mobile, exercise to get healthy, and leave this entire twenty plus year saga of depression behind me for good.

And let it fade away like a bad dream.

Oh, also in local news : I am taking a higher dose of both of my antidepressants now. I started on Sunday. So far, I do feel considerably better. I feel more “up” and energetic, and I feel hopeful and optimistic.

The really amazing thing is that I don’t view my future as a blank gray horror any more. For a long time, I never thought about the future because when I did, I would be overcome with a wave of misery and despair intense enough to shake me to my core.

It was only when I had recovered enough to think about my future and where I was headed that I was able to do things like go to Kwantlen and then to VFS.

For a long long time, I had nothing on my horizon but a long slide into an open grave.

But now, I have hope that I might actually be able to support myself and become a real adult and finally join the rest of society.

That is my fondest dream.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.