I have no idea what’s going to flow out of me tonight, so this may turn out to be a really random and badly written journal entry. Sorry not sorry 🤣. You are under NO obligation to read it of course. Also…see my Disclaimer 🤪.
My whole life has gone in cycles.. I’m used to big changes happening every 3 to 5 years. I was in year 7 of the same cycle and completely at a loss as to what I was doing and where I was going. In 2019, I had started saying NO to taking on new projects and was letting some things go or at least trying to shift my focus. My significant other was getting harder to deal with – I’m not going to lie and say it was all his fault, mostly it was just my own demons eating away at me. It was the beginning of the end of my kiddo’s high school career and after that she had her plans in place.
I felt another shift in the universe beginning and I was going to ride it out and see where I landed.
Then something happened to someone I deeply care about that made me lose faith in my community and wtf is the point of putting all this positive energy out there if bad shit just keeps happening and the world keeps getting worse, regardless?
Usually I can get myself out of that feeling pretty quick but this time it was different. There was a giant cloud brewing over me – and I was NOT dealing well and I started my slow descent into complete introspection and escapism. By the time that Covid-19 was starting to really show up in the states, I had been lost in my own head for a bit longer than I should have been. Needless to say, I greatly enjoyed the shutdown as it was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise very intense time period.
I needed to decide if I would continue doing what I was doing or move on and start a new adventure on my own.
Relationship-Was I going to stay with my significant other or not… There’s only so much negative energy I can handle and he was throwing it out there in waves. His constant remarks that I wasn’t doing my job the right way or wasn’t being what he wanted me to be were really f’n getting to me.
Sleep-I was experiencing some major insomnia and could not sleep no matter how exhausted I was.
Family-my mother announced that she was told that Grandma was coming to live with me because my aunt was moving out of state. Grandma wanted to be with me, but she wasn’t welcome at what I thought was my home. Another minus factor on the relationship tab. Now I have mom telling me to get a “real” job and a new place for my grams and me to live when she gets here or else. Or else what and why was this my responsibility alone? I don’t know, which is why I just kinda go with the flow of those around me – fighting it generally gets me nowhere 🤣.
Work-I was doing 2 very different jobs, because 1 just wasn’t enough 🤣. I was a consultant/subcontractor – working on multimedia projects and running social media and other kinds of campaigns. I held some pretty kick azz events for a few different local organizations. Got way out of my comfort zone and was doing things I had no formal training for. After a few years of struggle I had finally achieved a point where I was making $40 per hour doing stuff I loved. I also was in charge of the family hobby farm and was selling veggies, eggs and random junk. Both of these were very time consuming but enjoyable. But how I got there was a little random and unfocused, so I truly needed to gain some focus or give something up.
May 2020, my beautiful baby graduates college with high school to follow shortly. As I said, she had her plans set and for the most part, was now in charge of her own destiny. I’m here if she needs me, but I tell ya that girl is better equipped for life than I ever was.
June 2020, Grandma arrives and is given a space at my parents house because I am still undecided on what to do. We realized fairly quickly that this arrangement wasn’t going to work for the long term as the farmhouse just wasn’t set up right for her. She was needing more care than we had been expecting. The garden turned into a festival of weeds and there was no time to play in the dirt. Which was fine because there wasn’t really much going on in the farmers market world that I wanted to be a part of.
July 2020, the shut-down has really started to affect my consulting gig, communications are in limbo. My parents start talking about moving and my lil sis (I have a few, this one’s the littlest of my mums kiddos) and her husband want to buy the farm so talks about that start to take over. Obviously this means that my farm job will no longer be relevant. I’m spending more time with Grandma and less time at home.
August 2020, my parents go on the annual family cabin trip and I spend the entire week on the farm with grandma. At the end of said week, my kiddo makes it back home from her summer travels and I find out my significant other had brought one of my fur babies back to the farm and set him free without telling me. I rescued and bottle fed that lil poo and he was 1 week away from his visit with the vet to get fixed. (the appointment wait time was insane because everything was shut down) If I had known he was on the farm I could have saved him – as it was he disappeared and I’ll never know what happened to him😭. Thus ends the relations with my not so significant other. Fuck him, he can take a flying leap off a tall building for all I care. Unfortunately, he’s friends with my stepdad so they still hang out 🤬. This is not the first boyfriend I’ve had that has inserted themselves so far into my family that they stick around after a break up, but this time around I’m pretty pissed about it.
September, October 2020, My lil sis puts her house up on the market and it’s pretty much bought on the first day. Guess what, time to move into purgatory as there is definitely not enough room for all of us on the farm until Grandma’s forever home is found. That’s about catching you up to where I began this rebranded website.
So, what did I do with my consulting gig? I gave it up. After all these other changes, I wasn’t really the same anymore, I wasn’t left feeling all happy go lucky and pretending otherwise was going to just lead to more issues…
Back when the orange tyrant was elected, I had to unfriend a few of my family members and friends on Facebook. As I mentioned, I was running my own and some other local businesses and organizations social media campaigns and the control I had to have to not lose my cool on people was tremendous but I knew I was “this close” to snapping and doing some serious damage.
Now add in the fact that everyone had been cooped up for months and people have just completely lost it in regards to trying to be civil and inoffensive-I couldn’t take it anymore-I had had enough of social media. In August I deleted my Facebook account altogether and ended relations with other clients.
Know what happens when you are no longer reachable via Facebook after having had a pretty big presence beforehand? Everyone was worried. They’d reach out to my kiddo for information. Like hello peoples, I just left Facebook, I didn’t cease to exist anymore. I’m hiding but not hiding. It’s really kind of funny in its own bizarre way. Basically, I ghosted the world when I left because very few have reconnected. That’s just fine with me, I’m enjoying a quieter period in my life and spending quality time with those that really matter (just wish my kiddo was a lot closer).
And thus ends the tale of how I spent my 2020 🙄.
True story from an American Misfit, [she/her/hers/trying to be humanish, maybe]
xoxo
-DH
Journal Entry for TTBH; Topic: 2020, #3
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