Flying

Let’s start at the top, shall we?

The last time I wrote, I had left school to stay with my parents and hopefully get on disability as a result of my chronic pain condition.

Well, that was a no-go. I was denied, of course, on the grounds that they had no idea what the hell I was talking about. So while I was re-submitting my application I had to get a little creative and see if there were not some other way I could try to get my life together.

Insert montage of the last 6 to 8 months of my life. It was probably the worst I’ve felt, emotionally, in my entire life. Nothing makes you feel like a failure like dropping out of school, living with your parents and having no job or future, and that’s hard on someone who lives with chronic depression. It was a strain on my relationship, too, to have to go back to long-distance living when we were used to being on the same campus at college and seeing each other every day.

After some time my partner convinced his parents to let me stay with them. They live in an urban area where there’s more work opportunities than the pastoral countryside I grew up in. So, with a medication adjustment to hopefully manage the pain better, I hopped ship.

That was difficult too. His parents were kind to me for the first two weeks I lived there – perhaps it felt like a vacation or a visit to them during that time period – but after that, it was a living hell. They started badgering me daily, wondering why I didn’t have a job less than a month in (recession? bah!), threatening to throw me out at least once a week. Never mind that I stayed out of their way and hair, and when I wasn’t job hunting I was cleaning their house or quietly reading a book – it wasn’t good enough.  I had miniature breakdowns and crying jags because I couldn’t handle their passive aggressive mistreatment.

At the start of the summer I managed to catch a sales position with an electronics company. My boyfriend and I pooled our meager resources, and snapped up a small two-bedroom in a nearby city, where we are currently living with our two cats.

So there we are. New apartment. New job. New life.

Our budget is so tight it squeaks, of course, and I’m working too many hours for hardly any pay, but looking over the past year I have hardly any room to complain.

And I can finally stretch these writing fingers and really start to fly.