Shut down all the trash compactors on the detention level, please, life.
I am feeling very, very pessimistic. It really feels like the walls are closing in on me and my ability to connect with the world at all is slowly abandoning me and I can’t get Doctor Chao to view that as urgent and it really feels like I am sliding downhill towards an unkind fate as a helpless drooling diapered gimp in a hospital bed who can barely even swallow any more and so takes all his meals via IV.
And there I will be in my ultimate hell, buried alive in my own body, and full of tubes, including the dreaded one down my throat that will make me feel like I am eternally being smothered despite the fact that it’s actually the only thing making me breathe.
The failure of the neurologist’s office to process my referral on time was the final nail in the coffin of my hopes. Now I have to wait another month before I see anyone about my condition and who says I even have that long?
I will do my best to see Doctor Chao and Doctor Caswell ASAP. Maybe I can finally get one of them to take me seriously enough to actually try to save me.
Plus I have the rashes on my legs and perianal region to show to Chao. Those, I am fairly confident, he is competent to handle.
Although who knows. Maybe all I will get from him is a referral to a dermatologist who won’t be able to see me until Christmas… 2025!
If he and I can’t resolve my issues together, including the progressive muscle weakness, I am going to have to complain to the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians about him and request a new GP.
One who is capable of understanding the concept of continuing to search for an answer until you find one, no matter what.
After all, my symptoms are persisting. So should he. Right?
I need to get angry and stay angry because otherwise I will take the “easy” way out and succumb to fatalistic despair and self-pity and withdraw even further from the harsh and arbitrary cruelness of this shitshow I have no choice but to call “life”.
It’s very tempting. It’s the path of least resistance, after all. The path that requires the least courage, effort, and self-discipline. The path I am most familiar with.
The path that feels like home.
But I can’t do that. Not to myself but especially not to my friends.
Because if I give up on myself, I am also giving up on them, and leaving them to helplessly watch their dear and special friend fall apart and die and do absolutely nothing to save himself.
And if I’m not helping myself, how can they help me?
So I will try to keep my rage burning fierce and bright despite how hard it is for me to stay focused and fight the tide.
Despair might be a lot easier.
But fighting is a lot better
More after the break.
The “wrong” direction
I’ve been going downhill my whole life.
By that, I mean I have been just going with the flow… and water flows downhill. I have a life long pattern of just doing whatever was easiest. I have done very little in the way of actively steering my own destiny and even then, it tended to be a matter of choosing which downward slope to ooze down.
I have almost never fought my way upstream in order to forge my own destiny.
The one exception was my whole Kwantlen/VFS journey. I am still proud of doing that, seven years later. It was not easy doing all that commuting, but I did it, day after day, rarely even missing a single class.
But even then, the main initial appeal was that I only had to get the process started. After that, the educational process provided all the momentum.
The path of least resistance was to go to class. So I did.
And that’s fine for school. But the rest of life ain’t like that. Jobs expect you to have actual experience and verifiable skills, not just academic brilliance, and that is something I clearly do not have.
Despite being 50.
Good at school, not at life. Typical former “gifted” kid.
But this does suggest a potential way forward : more school.
This time, though, there would be no fucking academic bullshit. I would be going the directly, even brutally vocational route.
I would be learning something that leads directly to employment because it’s an in-demand skill and emphatically not the dream job of thousands of starry eyed losers who will have to compete like hell for the dozen or so actual jobs in the field.
I exaggerate. But not by much.
I could still try to get jobs in my field, television writing. But my VFS education is seven years old now, and therefore a tad stale.
So I would have to take the route of entering competitions in order to try to make some kind of name for myself and establish a track record.
For that, I would need to access my long dormant killer instinct and go into those contests determined to smash the competition with my mad writing skills.
Because I’m fucking awesome, god damn it. And it’s time the world learned that.
So yeah. Maybe I can do this. I could find contests that appealed to me and then work like hell to make something truly amazing, and blast lesser talents away with just how easy I make being amazing look.
That might be the only way to inspire myself to get over the whole “submitting first drafts” thing and actually stick with something long enough to make it as good as I possibly can before sending it out.
Because I want money, glory, and opportunities.
And I am finally willing to just god damned take them.
And hey, it would give me something meaningful to do with however much time I have left as a slightly functional citizen.
So…. yeah. I could probably do that.
Doubt I will. But it’s nice to know there’s a way out when I am ready for it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.