I signed up for BetterHelp.com to try to get some online therapy. I’ve got this nagging inner voice that is very masculine in nature and definitely not me that just won’t quit most of the time. I signed up, explained where I am in life, and started blogging. I paid $260.00 for a month’s worth of services.
Basically, the next day, they refunded me my investment in the service and told me they cannot help me. I wonder if that’s because I’ve taken dozens of psychology courses and because I’ve seen other therapists to understand myself better? Or maybe it was because I have some legal issues to deal with and what I really need is a lawyer.
I posit I don’t need anything but word of mouth and open therapy.
Open therapy: discussing one’s life openly with the public to look for feedback, potentially compassion, and definitely new perspectives regarding the experiences in one’s life that have happened, are actively happening, or potentially may happen.
Welcome to therapy, my friends! That’s what I do all day every day so I can come to terms with the shit other people heap on me and leave me to rot under. Thanks, bro. I needed that.
NOT.
Nobody needs problems heaped up on them. Not a single soul on planet Earth has a shortage of personal issues. Not even me, the chick that always smiled at work, no matter how cracked and faded I felt from pushing myself too hard or dealing with too much. I just tried to put my best face forward. I know smiles tend to create positive ripples in communities, therefore I try to smile as often as possible. I put away my personal problems and charge through work with a can-do attitude. I wish I could keep doing that, but I am far behind in my therapy and need to catch up. In order to process my world, I must write about it in some capacity, and I stopped writing while I was dating Psycho Boy Ben. You know, that guy I took to that wedding that one time.
It was that wedding — my coworker’s Indian wedding — that convinced me that I was with the absolute wrong person. My coworker is from the most stringent sect of Hinduism and he invited me to his wedding. A friend advised me it was semi-political, it was an invitation out of politeness because I’d only known him maybe a week or two at the time. I was kind of important in the area I’d landed in, so I was a senior. It was one senior inviting another. I was over the moon. I would get to attend an Indian wedding ceremony. ❤ You have no idea that I do absolutely know how rare that is, which is why I showed up at the auspicious time of 7:03 AM that Saturday morning, the very moment the ceremony was meant to begin (so I thought, being a dumb American… there were things prior to that time that had already begun!)
To your bride: I am so sorry if I made you feel at all insecure. I was so excited to witness the union, the love, between a coworker and his bride. I know we weren’t aware of each other prior to that morning and I know it was tough because of the pandemic and your sister being stuck in another place, unable to be there for you. You must have been having nerves and all kinds of things that day. Your wedding was very beautiful, thank you so much for allowing me to witness it. If you had asked me to leave, I would have, to respect the union between you and your husband. (No, I won’t name him, everyone important knows already.) I am also really sorry that so few people had arrived by the auspicious time. I know that those times are important, astrologically speaking. It must have felt something like a snub, especially with your sibling so far away and unable to hold your hand or give you hugs when nervous. Your husband told me she was coming States side. I really hope you’ve gotten around to spending time together since I last spoke to him. I wish you and your husband the best of luck and I hope your love proves eternal.
Indian ceremonies like that are really long, y’all. The entirety of the service was in Hindi, too, so it was not easy to follow along, but I was spellbound. Because I was spellbound, people watching me watch the newlyweds go through each ritual would explain to me what was happening, even the priest who was leading the ceremony itself if he wasn’t actively performing any of the wedding rites. It was then that I realized that Benjamin Andrew Carter would never, ever ask me to marry him. I was a toy to play with and if I had a heart, well, that was an inconvenient thing to him, altogether.
I regretted taking him to that wedding with me because all you lovely people are highly romantic and thought we would be a forever thing. I did, too… about three years before you met him. Before he told me how he desired to fornicate with just about everything that walked upright. He didn’t tell me just once and leave, though… He told me every turn we took, every chance he got. Over and over, like a mantra to meditate to. (RED FLAG: THIS IS NARCISSISM.) I finally told him to just do it. Do it and see what happens. Subtext: Just wait till you see what I’ll do to you.
In fact, I thought he was gay, so I encouraged him to make a special friend of the male variety. You can’t choose whether or not you’re gay, you know. It wouldn’t have even hurt my feelings, we all get confused from time to time and I’ve never dated a straight man before. They’re all weird in one way or another. He met someone and convinced me they were male in order to obtain my blessing to fornicate with them, only to reveal directly after fulfilling that act that it was a woman. This lie was so heinous following this wedding that the two things in juxtaposition convinced me that he had no heart whatsoever.
How could he watch such a marvelous, magnificent, romantic thing and still do that? I don’t know because I cannot think like he thinks. I cannot function like he functions. If I were to guess, he was hurt by someone in his youth and is a victim himself, but instead of growing wiser as he aged, he stuck his head in the sand like an ostrich and just waited for it all the blow over so he’d never have to mature in any way, shape, or form. [NARCISSIST.]
I don’t even like lying. I actively avoid it at all costs, offering ‘answers’ that don’t actually answer anything directly rather than telling a lie of some sort. Falsehoods always have a way of catching up to you, as you undoubtedly know by this point in your life. I think it’s natural for lies to happen for a short period in every life, especially when one is young and dumb/naive. Maybe if you are part of a nurturing home life, you can skip this stupidity. I’d wager every human being on planet Earth has told at least one lie.
I’d wager everything because by the time you talked to them all to prove me wrong, I’d already be dead.
Maybe there’s at least one human being out there who hasn’t lied yet. They’re called babies.
That’s why I love animals so intensely. It’s not in their nature to lie. If they’re little stinkers, they’re little stinkers. That never changes. It’s up to you to learn how to handle them so that you form a symbiotic relationship with them. So that you can fulfill their needs (and, often, let’s face it — their every fucking whim, if you’ve ever known a cat) and they can bond with you as their lifebringer.
I imagine the ant colony I’ve adopted has taken to calling me lifebringer. I keep feeding them. I give them odds and ends from my vegetables. They love protein, especially peanut butter. They also loved the endive I fed them and the remains of my yummy soups, most of the time. They’re a low budget ‘pet.’ What do I get out of them, you might ask? Entertainment as I watch hundreds of them swarm a food offering. I’m intending to set them up a tiny little picnic table ‘shrine’ to put the food scraps on, complete with tiny little chairs and maybe an umbrella.
I imagine the plants I try to keep alive calling me the same thing. I’m terrible at keeping them alive, though, and it’s starting to aggravate me. I’m quite annoyed with myself; these tiny little lives that depend on me to continue thriving have expired because of my own ineptitude. I mourn them greatly. I have a little plant graveyard right now with seven or eight plants in it.
My cats, on the other hand… I think they must call me shithead. I keep leaving them alone for far too long to try to take care of all the things that need taken care of. I fail to take care of much of anything because I don’t have the energy to do all my chores. Part of the reason I fail to do them is, indeed, a streak of laziness. But the rest of the reason is much bigger than that sliver. I’m incapable. I’ve gone from high-powered completely capable individual to someone who can only stand for about one hour a day, if I’m lucky.
My coworkers might remember I had a desk so I could stand or sit at will and I used it less and less the closer we got to pandemic. It was a sign of my illness creeping in, in retrospect. I was losing my go power. People kept trying to make me eat — but I couldn’t, and not because I didn’t want to. I was barely able to eat food at that wedding even though I wanted to have tons of everything! It all looked so delicious and there were so many dishes I’d never had before. I always loved food, all my life.
That’s because I’m a foodie. I have come to terms with that over the past few years… I didn’t really think about how what I ate for happiness also was nutritionally sound, at the end of the day. The sheer variety of food I’d ingest was impressive, now that I look back. (Volume, too, but let’s not get into that.) In an active week, I’d eat Thai and Ethiopian, plenty of breakfast items, and tons of different things such as salads, sandwiches, and soups, pretty much at random and based on ‘cravings’ my body had. I since learned that a craving was basically my body asking for nutrients of some sort and I did some research to determine which cravings meant which nutrients. For example, a chocolate craving is most likely my body begging for magnesium. The fastest, easiest way to get magnesium? Chocolate. [I bet a bunch of former chocoholics are glad to hear that.] I tried to stop eating based on cravings and start eating the nutrition that my body actually wanted. If I was aware when my period would come, I could eat a steak or two that week (or any high iron anything, really) and I would no longer want chocolate during my menstrual cycle. [You should totally try it, Ms. Skeptical Reader.]
Then I started eating to lose weight starting in 2018. I was under the supervision of a doctor to do it so I thought I was safe! She prescribed me the ketogenic diet and calculated my macros to be 172g fat, 96g protein, and 30g carbs (or something along those lines), which I tweaked to 172g fat, 96g protein, and 15g carbs. If I had to sacrifice anything out of this, I shot for the carbs. If I ate too much protein, each 1g of extra protein meant 2g less fat. This is probably not news to anyone doing keto.
That’s why I controlled what I ate that whole time. That witch put me on a destructive diet, all in all. She didn’t inquire further into what I was eating, check in on me nutritionally speaking. My lab work was only to prove my health markers were normal or getting there. She told me not to exercise because I was at risk for a heart attack. I was one of the people who didn’t exhibit most of the signs of being on the brink of a heart attack, but I had enough health concerns that I should not exercise.
I started that diet the day I chose a primary care physician on U.S. Bank’s health care plan. She was supposed to fulfill that role. I think she’d forgotten that, especially in the pandemic. I saw her every month like clockwork around the beginning of the month for two years. The first Wednesday or Thursday of the month, depending on what was going on in my life.
My chiropractor asked me more general wellness questions than that woman did. My therapist diagnosed me with my true issues well before that woman even began to think she should take me seriously about my dignified complaints regarding my well-being. I even asked her if it was okay to lose 10 pounds a month since conventional wisdom indicates that I should lose a maximum of 2-4 pounds a month if I’m playing it safe.
‘Oh no, you’re fat enough it doesn’t matter.’
…
I think that woman might be evil. She can’t be on the diet she prescribes to me… it’s impossible. I went to her for two solid years, losing 86 pounds with her. (Sometimes I gained weight back and I didn’t fully figure out how to lose 10 pounds a month like clockwork for almost an entire year and a half.) I didn’t see her waistline budge an inch the whole time. I was watching because someone said to me once rather sarcastically that somehow it’s always a fat doctor telling you to lose weight.
Yeah, that’s right. My weight loss doc/PCP looks at least 30 pounds overweight to me. It might even be more than that. I’m not judging. She’s no Skinny Minnie and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
I feel like I was set up to try to murder myself with poor food choices. She gave me a cheat sheet of things to eat, facsimiles of what normal Americans eat, in order to break into keto. This sheet included suggesting eating coconut shreds in low-carb milks as breakfast cereal. There were about a dozen ideas to help people on a normal American diet eat keto without too much stress. I believe she gives this to each and every new client as part of her routine, too. I thought it was really convenient at the time, as I recall.
I didn’t start off allergic to coconut, but I’ll tell you right now: I’m allergic to coconut. I can’t eat a damn thing that has coconut in it. I was consuming ungodly amounts of MCT oil to hit that damn fat macro. Butter, too. Then walnut oil, almond oil… you name it, I’ve probably tried it. Little did I know I was destroying myself with this nonsense. Not until it was nearly too late and I was well onto the road to disaster.
I could not eat. As of August 2020, my ability to consume food was compromised, thanks to that bitch. I could eat all of ~400 calories every 2-3 days. I’d either push myself for more and have to take two days off or I didn’t have perfectly ripe apples and pears to eat so I waited. Everything I consumed felt like sandpaper going through my innards. It was excruciatingly painful.
It wasn’t just that diet that led me there, but I still blame that woman. My ob/gyn ended up prescribing me Zoloft because I found myself in her office, in tears. I’m a lady, goddammit! I DO NOT CRY! And there I was, broken down, sobbing at her. She gave me a plausible excuse: nobody likes seeing an ob/gyn for a pap smear. That wasn’t it… By the way, thank you Dr. Jill Scherbel. I love you more than I could ever express just for listening to me. Screw the Zoloft. You took me seriously when very few other people were. I was dating a psychopath that I wasn’t even sure was a narcissist at the time. (I’ve come to decide that psychopathy is extreme narcissism since then, in case that statement is confusing.)
That Zoloft prescription got me into my therapist’s door. Dr. Dawn McFarland, you are a STAR! J’adore! I would give you 50 stars on a 5 star scale. You saved my fucking LIFE! You! The woman with the I.M.A.E.T. machine! Thank you! A million times, thank you thank you thank you!
Ironically, Dr. Death referred me to Dr. McFarland on the basis that ‘even judges in the courtroom listen to her when she speaks.’ I chose her because that sounded like the best of the best and I wanted to delve in as deeply as I could manage. I’m an amateur psych buff, meaning I read psychology books for fun. One of the nice things Dr. McFarland did for me was recommend books to read on topics so that we could discuss them together as we progressed through my therapy. I really appreciated being treated like a mature adult. Thank you again, doctor.
Anyway, that fancy amazing IMAET machine told us I had mast cell activation syndrome. Dr. Beth O’Hara’s web site & newsletter told me how to handle it. Since I was consuming an almost 100% shelf-stable diet at the time, I decided that I didn’t really need to buy all her fancy recommendations (at least not right away) and I focused on buying fresh produce and meat. I froze any and all meat that I wouldn’t consume immediately, which is one of the only ways to inhibit histamine build up.
I was so sick that I didn’t even put food away, not immediately. It sat around for a while, building up histamines and bacteria. With a lot of effort, I got to the point of covering it at least… then I got to the point of chucking it in the fridge within 20 minutes of exiting the oven, then I got another baby step better and better. I am aware that you are supposed to refrigerate leftovers immediately, and yet that went by the wayside. So many things did. That’s how sick I was. I HID IT.
I didn’t tell anyone how bad it hurt, how little I could eat. I didn’t tell anyone how little I could function. I watched and waited for death to come claim me because it was so hard to eat. And how did this all come about? Biofilm. Mold + dairy + parasites + bacteria.
Psycho Boy Ben’s house was trying to kill me, even long after I moved out. He had a mold issue so severe that a microwave plate cover would grow fur after three days once condensation was on it.
Three. Days.
Three.
Days.
I kept telling him it was a problem. It was abnormal. He might have a foundation crack behind his fancy finished basement walls. He might have seepage through something, somewhere. I’d wager the trees growing in his gutter by the time I left might be an indicator of where the problem began. Every single storm with significant rain brought a waterfall outside his living room window. I tried to tell him that’s not good. I tried to even get it together to clean it out myself since he was doing nothing about it. I couldn’t, ultimately. I refused to get on a ladder without anyone to steady it and by the time he was ready to do such a thing, I no longer trusted him to keep me safe on said ladder.
At any rate, that was there for… wait for it…
Years.
The debris from his enormous cottonwood tree located in his back yard (whom I’ve affectionately named Jasper for no rhyme or reason other than it popped into my head one day while I was looking at it) had collected and become a real problem in his gutters.
Being a home owner myself, I knew the importance of gutters. You have to keep them functional to continue to divert the water away from the house because failure to do so would result in foundational damage. Just like my parents’ house is currently experiencing since they think gutters are completely optional. ‘Oh those just fell off, who needs ’em?’
These are two classic examples of letting a problem go from bad to worse to critical to O.M.G., YOU ARE INSANE.
And I did that to my health. The mold played an integral part to creating the biofilm that would later make life impossible to live. Well, it was merely what was trying to kill me… it’s when I started breaking up the biofilm when I developed leaky gut syndrom and mast cell activation syndrome and God knows what else.
August of 2019, I started vomiting randomly. Previous to that, I had chronic diarrhea, which I absolutely knew was caused by following the ketogenic diet per the macros given (and then altered) and consuming my magic formula for weight loss, which I will not be sharing considering it nearly fucking killed me. I hope you can understand. January of 2020, I started vomiting coffee, which was after I moved out of that house. I thought I was motion sick in the vehicle we were using to drive around California (or maybe too high since recreational marijuana is a thing there and I was on a proper vacation) but no, just a symptom of this sickness that had no name yet. No shape. Nothing to work to fight and counteract.
What I didn’t think about — since I had digestive troubles all my life — is what the effect of chronic diarrhea has on the body. I’m not the fucking doctor and I did bring it up to the fucking doctor. She didn’t even validate I’d said anything about it at the time. It was not once, not twice, but thrice. Three times, I brought it up, indicating that my bowel movements were not right. RED FLAG: NARCISSIST. I mean… uh… Red flag… I should have changed my physician immediately. I was already too sick.
Once I moved out of Ben’s house and into the townhouse, I ate less and less fresh food. It was a reflection of a lot of things changing and a shortage of cash while I paid for my townhouse, the mortgage on my house (long story, don’t ask), and whatever else I was taking care of at the time. Not to mention supporting three young people I was lovingly referring to as ‘my kids.’
I was so sick that I blew my entire savings on those three children in very short order. I know it sounds like they’re narcissists and they extorted me for my money, but I assure you that was not the case, at least not entirely. Only one of them was a narcissist. The other two were kind, compassionate human beings, or at least tried to be. (I’ll let the three of them fight over who wins the title of narcissist if they want to, but I bet it’ll be no contest.)
It doesn’t matter. I was sick, I made a ton of bad decisions. The more heinous of all of them was the woman who would not vacate my house so that I could just move back into my property. If you want to point fingers at anyone as the villain, let’s start with her. In 2018, I asked her to let me break our contract and move her into a different home that I could purchase outright (that she could pay me back for over time) and she threw an anxiety fit at me. [RED FLAG: NARCISSIST.] She put her needs before mine without even one iota of consideration; I was trying to break up with a psychopath and she wouldn’t even let me get out of my obligation, since I could scarcely afford life for a time due to taking a job that was meant to be just for fun… it was anything but fun by the time I left it and the pay was peanuts.
That’s right. Christina Krineski Myers. I assume she’s having financial hardships right now due to a long series of terrible financial decisions, including buying whatever food her children can make for themselves via a microwave instead of putting together real meals regularly. None of them work, by the way. Not a single person in that place works unless her daughter got a job to support her deadbeat parents’ habits. (How’s that illegal weed habit, by the way? Did you get your own license or are you just hoping your hubby’s license will make sure the police never show up to question you? How do you manage to buy it at $400/ounce since you both use quite a bit?)
Yup. I’m a jerk.
Also, Ms. Christina Krineski Myers in Arnold, Missouri, YOU OWE ME $45,000.00. SEE YOU IN COURT, BITCH.
Oh yeah, did I mention that I had made a deal with her to let her like, buy my house, and stuff, at the end of a five year contract and I let her off the hook for her rent on the idea she’d pay off her 18k in credit card debt and then save up a down payment? I didn’t? Now I did! She left with 15k credit card debt. And she somehow thought she could buy my house with a disability settlement… no doubt she could… if she stopped buying all those waffles she ended up feeding to the damn dog. Waffles are not dog food, you dickheads!
You wanna talk about animal abuse, you stupid bitch? Look at your own three dogs before you go ape shit over an elderly blind dog with long fucking toe nails.
She chased off my roommates — which were the only reason I wasn’t dying faster than I was — based on the fact that Ming, the old blind dog, wasn’t getting her toenails trimmed regularly. It was a trust issue, which is fixable in time, but keep in mind the poor thing is blind so it takes at least three times as long to get her to trust you again once you do make a mistake.
So my roommates, who were poised to start paying rent/pay me back, were then pushed out of my life by this bitch. A month or two later, I’m aware of my DYING status, panicking, and I could see clear as day that woman did not give two shits about me being alive or dead. [RED FLAG!]
SO… I asked a friend for help. That friend… ah. I love her so dearly. Ms. Myers is like, allergic to phone calls. And Julie called her up to tell her that I needed her out of my house by January 15th, 2021. By November, 2020, I’d started turning the ship around. I bet you wanna know how, just in case you’re sick, too. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you… it’s a little long. I’m sorry in advance. She didn’t leave my house until May 2021, much to my chagrin.
The very shortest explanation was that I began to eat everything I hated. That biofilm inside of me ultimately made me allergic to everything I consumed regularly. Beef, chicken, and pork. All the veggies I ate with regularity. All the dairy I ingested to follow keto. Mushrooms. There wasn’t much left, but I had hope when in September of 2020, two months after I’d become aware of how critical my status had gotten, I decided to just try everything I hated. Carrots, corn, whatever else I could think of that was gluten-free.
I had to throw away all the staples of my diet up to that point. I especially miss eggs, even to this day. They are the fastest snack one can make that is hot and ready to go.
The carrots? They didn’t HURT!!!!! As long as they were cooked soft, they didn’t hurt! How could this be? I had such a problem. I mean, yeah, it was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t sandpaper. How? I knew not. All I knew was there was hope. But what meat could I eat that wasn’t beef, chicken, or pork? What could I get with regularity that would lie outside of these three staples in America?
Lamb. Goat. They were the key.
I bought so much lamb. So very much… I ate an entire rack of lamb by myself (well, with my cat) twice a day sometimes. As much as I could possibly stand. I was taking 66 different supplements to stay alive while I shoved this down my throat, day after day. I’d been eating meat regardless of my guts feeling terrible all throughout this, but I could only eat chicken or beef or pork every three days for ages. Eventually, I’d gotten enough collagen into my innards that the sandpaper was a thing of the past. At least, I thought that was the cure. I was also on those 66 supplemental pills. (Don’t be fooled, some of those pills were servings of 4 pills, so it wasn’t 66 supplements.)
It cost thousands of dollars to repair my innards to the point where I could at least eat oatmeal again. Man, did that feel good. I got back into a rut though because I wasn’t eating enough variety to support my system. Some days, I didn’t drink enough water and my urine was a scary color. Renal failure, I know that much without Dr. Death’s help. I was still seeing her monthly, by the way, telling her I was in pain. She never fucking wrote it down. If I was a judge, I’d take her fucking license to practice in a heartbeat. Good thing for her, I’m not.
But we might be visiting one very soon.
March 2021 was the last time I saw that farce of a healer. She kept telling me all about the importance of the hippocratic oath. More like hypocritic oath. What really gets me about that woman is that she’s an ultra Catholic. I thought those people valued life above all else. I’m non-religious. I have absolutely zero religious affiliation. I tolerated her being a religious zealot because she had a good review history on the web site that allowed me to find my new primary care physician. Maybe if she wrote down what I said instead of trying to get me to go to anti-abortion films with her church, I wouldn’t be in this pickle.
I even remember when, on my very first visit (which I came away from with Phentermine, by the way… a controlled substance prescribed & she filled for me herself), I asked her if she was alright being my P.C.P. even though she was most known for weight loss. She said something like ‘Absolutely!’ By March 2021, I felt like cattle in her office. Get on the scale. Lost weight? Good girl, pat on the head. Gained weight? Bad girl, do better. Pay $25. Pass Go, we’re done.
Now if that wasn’t all a crock of shit that was hard to swallow, this’ll take the cake. The very last time I saw her, I told her I’d proposed to someone. She asked me who, so I told her his name. She gawked at me, taking a moment or two, and then exclaimed, ‘I thought you were gay!’
…
I didn’t know my sexual orientation mattered to my medical treatment.
…
I stopped seeing her altogether. She obviously wasn’t going to help me get better. I’d already saved myself without her, basically. Things were still very difficult. It was very hard to work and make food and eat food and concentrate on work while food ate me, basically. It still hurt, even when it wasn’t sandpaper. Of course, by this time, I’d realized I was going to lose my job if I couldn’t produce. I hadn’t been producing up to my own standards for months. I felt bad. It was ethically wrong to continue to collect a paycheck I didn’t think I was earning.
And I know one of my coworkers thought the same thing. He just watched me struggle, getting angrier and angrier at me, throwing monkey wrenches in my fucking architectural program’s design, and screwing the whole thing up, leading to whatever shit show they’re dealing with today, right now. I know it’s gotta be bad… the man wanted to use Excel as a database. That is not what you use Excel for, my friends. You use a database! Or even JSON, a flat text file format that you can read and write to as needed without fear of write privilege collisions. By the time I’d resigned, early July of 2021, he’d already programmed in at least one work-around for this flawed approach. I sincerely regret allowing him to make me doubt myself in November of 2020 and override my decision as the architect to use a different approach to store and fetch data.
He’s the real reason I never wanted to take my job back. God bless my boss, Priya. She put in for FMLA and all kinds of things trying to keep me on payroll while I fought for my life. I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. I couldn’t deal with talking to people, telling them what’s wrong. I’d been ignored so many times already. I even felt ignored when I did try to call The Hartford. Like, ‘yeah, mmhm, sure, you’re real sick!’ It’s their job to act that way, by the way, and I told them, essentially — pardon my French — Fuck you, I need to eat to live and I’m going to live, dammit. I would not jump through their fucking hoops, endless fucking HOOPS, to claim I have a right to LIVE!
Go die in a fire, you motherfucking HEALTH INSURANCE SCAM COMPANIES. FUCK YOU ALL. EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU UNETHICAL SONS OF BITCHES TRAINED TO FUCK OVER SICK PEOPLE AND LET THEM DIE. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, AND FUCK YOU, TOO!
I was so fucking sick, I got my own cannabis license. It was what allowed me to eat, at the end there. Instead of pretending to give a fuck about working anymore, since dead girl can’t code no more, I just did me. Whatever it took to get better. And I’m still not even there yet. I probably won’t be for another year. I cannot eat whatever I want to. I open the refrigerator door and go, ‘Oh that’ll make me break out in hives, that one will make me want to vomit, that one will make me have loose stools, that one will bind up my insides for three days.’
What part of that looks like LIVING to YOU?
Then, to top it all off, I started hearing voices in March of 2021. Not auditory hallucination type voices, which I was scared of because I was convinced my father has/had schizophrenia paranoia. (Since he accused me of trying to poison him for feeding him veggies, it might still stand.) And I was really scared of that…
But this voice inside my mind, more like a conscience — except not a conscience, I assure you, this is a separate entity outside myself and I can prove that. In fact, I will prove that. It feels like I’m in The Matrix or in The Sims sometimes, by the way. It’s surreal and mostly just really annoying, especially when God and I fight. I don’t know what else to call an entity that is awake 24/7, primarily kind to me, and never leaves me alone no matter what I’m doing. Must be God, right?
I don’t believe in God. That’s my primary issue with this hypothesis. I do believe in spacelings (my made-up word to replace aliens since that word has hostile implications, especially considering the movie with that name.) Maybe entities in outerspace are beaming thoughts into my brain! Maybe telepathy! Maybe… I don’t know anymore. He knows shit I don’t and I’ve come to terms with that.
Maybe it’s just multiple personality disorder. I might know, if BetterHelp.com didn’t fucking reject me based on the legal issues I’m experiencing. But whatevs. Here we are!
He’s still here with me today. He laughs all the time at my jokes, too. Even if I’m serious, he is quite mirthful. Not to mention I make him cry when I hit him in the feels, too. I know he cries because my eyes leak and sometimes I sob and I don’t feel like crying or sobbing. I used to have uncontrollable depression while I was on the death diet, but now that I understand that dairy is my enemy — at least until I get this stupid illness that’s threatening my life under control — it’s a lot easier to feel sane, at least. If you can call me sane. I don’t. But I bet someone, somewhere, is going to try to prove that I’m completely lucid and can hold down a job somewhere.
Ha. ha. ha.
My coworkers might remember me making non-contextual comments and/or laughing in meetings when I was not on mute. My coworkers might remember me being highly erratic right before I resigned, which was, in fact, due to these voices. I tried to do the right thing. It’d been ages since I delivered what I’d call my best. I kept feeling Rao’s disappointment, I kept feeling the pressure to get anything done. Absolutely anything. Between all the meetings, which every time I was in a meeting, it knocked me off course, trying to eat meat twice a day, trying to do chores while I was literally logging 60 hours and doing what I felt should have taken 4 hours, I knew the end was here. I resigned.
Priya, thank you for believing in me. You are one of the few reasons I am alive today. I love you more than I love my own mother. You are the only way I’ve ever felt like I had a real mother at all. Thank you so very much for everything you did for me. I wish I could have come back and taken that project to the moon and back in a week or two, turned the ship around and set sail for a new horizon. My brain doesn’t work like it used to right now so I can’t do that. I am, compared to my former self, just a pathetic shadow. The only things I can do are write and draw and eat, basically. I wake up in pain, I go to bed in pain. On the bright side, I weaned myself off the pain medications, so maybe I could take a job.
That is, if my other self lets me do so. I highly doubt that. Also I should note that little story about Angels? That was him. God. Jerome. Someone. The part of me I can no longer control and just does things at random.
I have been suicidal but I will never kill myself because I am convinced I have a light of some kind inside of me. I think most people have a light inside of them. This is the meditation I listen to in order to stave those thoughts off. I’ve listened to this meditation over 2,500 times since I stumbled upon it. Thanks to Mr. Romano, who pointed me toward affirmations when Psycho Boy Ben was crushing my soul. (Hi.)
I love you all at U.S. Bank. I loved that role. I loved that you had/have faith in me. Thank you so much. I miss you dearly, you have no idea. I keep trying to start something, anything, to get back on my feet and mostly it’s just the laundry machine. Again, because I never got around to putting it in the dryer within a reasonable amount of time. You know this is not the woman who makes lists and knocks things out of the ball park weekly to wow the whole team endlessly. That is the woman you need and I fear she is dead.
I’m pretty sure Crystal Scordias is dead and this impostor I am, I live on in her body. I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you. I’m so sorry I didn’t resign sooner or go on disability/FMLA in mid to late 2020 when it was at its worst. Jerome did that. He threw the fucking job away to save our life. I wasn’t eating regularly enough to sustain myself, so he made me throw literally everything away to try to get better. He got me the cannabis license to try to get me through the worst of it, he helped me force feed myself, he came up with recipes to help me. He took care of me.
That’s what I begged that stupid asshole in England to do for me. I begged him to come save my life and career. He ghosted me. He left me to die without a word. Not one word. Not even ‘no.’
Goodbye, my friends. I don’t expect that I’ll ever be welcomed back. I especially miss Mohammed and Anirban and Priya and Padmajah. I miss everyone, but I especially miss you four. I mourn the loss of the best job I’ve ever had, the best teams I’ve ever worked with and the best place I’ve ever worked for.
❤ ❤ ❤ Much love. ❤ ❤ ❤
Angel-Sansara 
