Oy, what a day. Ever have one of those days where you just can’t seem to sync up with reality and so it feels like you are constantly running to try and catch up with it?

A fool’s game, surely. If the rates are not the same, you and life with continue to fall out of phase and you will have to keep putting in more energy to catch up, over and over again.

The smart money is on stepping off the damn merry-go-round, catching your breath, getting your bearings, then waiting for the right moment to hop back on again.

But usually, when I end up in this state, it’s because I start moving before I start thinking and when that happens, I don’t have the energy to spare to stop and think of what the logical next step is.

I’m too busy trying to catch up!

I have been somewhat under stress this month because of the financial damage done by V-Con. Well, V-con, and then my GST reimbursement check being around fifty bucks less than I thought it would be. That is what did the real damage. That was fifty bucks that just plain disappeared.

Lesson learned. Never count on money you don’t have yet. I don’t know what abstruse formula the Canadian Government uses to determine the amount of GST I paid in the last quarter, but evidently it does not produce a reliable result.

I knew this, but somehow I didn’t expect the variance to be as high as fifty bucks. Perhaps the two quarters previous had been abnormally high. I don’t know.

But it was a kick to the nads and so I have been just barely scraping by, and now, I find myself in the position of needing to borrow money, which I hate.

I hate borrowing money for so many reasons. For one, I am borrowing from friends, which makes me feel like I am presuming on their good will, and I had that.

Plus, I don’t like having this financial obligation hanging between me and my generous friend. It makes me feel like I am in the wrong now, and only paying them back will put me in the right again, and that is why I am always quite eager to pay it back and get right again.

On a purely personal level, I hate borrowing money because that is money that will, in effect, disappear in the future. At some point in the future, I will be starting out a month already in the hole, and I hate that so very much.

And perhaps most of all, having to borrow makes me feel like I have failed to manage my money properly and that always makes me feel stupid and lame. I do my best to manage my money carefully, and to mess that up makes me feel less secure.

And I am someone who needs to feel materially secure because he can relax. One of the things that will have the most benefit to me, mental health wise, about my coming status as a fully disabled person is that the extra money will not just buy me nice things.

It will make me feel a lot more secure. I won’t be just barely scraping by any more. That means the world to someone like me, who takes security very seriously because it has a huge impact on my self-esteem and my mood.

I still remember how low I got when I lived with Angela and had almost no cash. Good thing the food bank was there because otherwise, I would not even have been able to afford bus fare to go places.

But still, it really felt like I was a ghost in the world of consumer capitalism. Other people passed me by, people who could afford things, people who could buy things to make themselves happier, people who did so without even thinking about it, people who had no idea how good they had it just because they had money in their pocket that they could afford to spend.

It is a very very cold and lonely and isolating feeling. I was there with them, but we lived in very different worlds. Poverty does that to people.

So yay, coming greater relief from poverty. $900/month is still not much, but it’s $200/month more than I am getting now and therefore it’s almost a thirty percent increase.

That is going to make a huge different in my life. And there is a purely psychosocial factor too, in that this new status means I am disabled, period. I have the status of someone who society officially says is not expected to work and not expected to get better either.

This will hopefully do a lot to help me feel less like a failure and more like a person who is ill and therefore not expected to do the same things other people do.

It’s not, I suppose, as good as a visible disability in that respect, but then again, those tend to come with way too heavy a price to wish for.

I mean, I have a lot of health problems, but at least I can walk, see, and poop unassisted, and that is something to be truly thankful for.

So really, good things are coming my way and I have a lot of reasons to look forward to a brighter, shinier, warmer future.

I just wish it wasn’t more than a month away! The waiting is going to drive me nuts. This next month, my last at $700/month, is going to be very annoying.

I can’t help thinking “if only I had started this process a week earlier, I would be getting a bigger check this month instead of the next!”.

But that’s just the way the Happy Fun Ball bounces, I guess. In the future, I am sure I will look back at this painful interregnum and laugh a witty, urbane, knowing laugh of seasoned nostalgia.

“Ah, life. “ I will tell my handsome and intelligent husband. “To think, I spent all those years living in the dark before finally finding you.”

Hey, if you’re gonna dream…..

Seeya later folks!