Kid Kazuichi! I like to think she's never totally looked "normal," that the teeth were always sharp and her hair was usually a curly mess in between those times where her dad or grandma got some clippers and gave her a homemade buzzcut, but her hair grows back fast. When she was really little, with her long hair and her running around pretending to be a magical princess when she was away from home, a lot of people thought she was a girl...heh.

Judging from her conversations with Hajime, I got the sense that apart from comic books she was mostly into nonfiction like guides on building things or cars or history.

I have a lot of feels about Kazuichi's relationship with reading. When she was a kid, the library was a safe haven: mentally and physically, she could get away from her dad, teachers, mean kids, and just escape -and she is an escapist with a big imagination. But as she got older, it was hard to keep up with the other nerds in her class, who had an easier time focusing and understanding, and reading felt more brutal and insulting. There was a false dichotomy of being an advanced reader or being "stupid." At her breaking point, she couldn't keep up her grades any more and was burning out, and if it wasn't for Hope's Peak giving her a new chance she may have considered dropping out altogether.

Every time she tried to return to books, it would remind her of the stress of school. It also felt like she was leagues behind everyone else, that she was "stupid", and the shame would drive her away. But there is no rule that you have to only read books at a "high level" - when you're not in school, this doesn't matter at all. It's okay to admit that you have a disability and it makes it harder to read some books.

I hate that there's some discourse right now that makes people think it's wrong or somehow damaging to yourself only/mostly like media for children and teenagers, so I need to internalize more positive messages for myself. Anyway, media is supposed to be enjoyable, something you want to do, not something to keep up with social trends or to impress a former gifted kid with a superiority complex who misses the days when they could compete with you and feel like a big shot. You do not have to compete with them.

Where is My Mind?

Stress can make you feel like you're going crazy.

I cannot emphasize this enough. Long-term, persistent and intense stress well above your baseline levels can make you feel like you're losing your mind.

Life is stressful and when I think back to when the intense periods of stress started in mine it gets a bit ridiculous because I grew up in a domestically violent household with severely mentally ill parents in a country on the brink of civil war with one of the highest crime rates in the world. So I have been kinda stressed for a very long time. However, in more recent months, the level of acute stress I've been experiencing has made me feel disconnected from reality. I've experienced derealisation a number of times due to Lyrica withdrawal and accidental cannabis highs. But this one is different. The depersonalisation I’ve been experiencing is from pure, unrelenting stress. I really did question my sanity more than once.

 In July, I saw my psychologist to describe this feeling to her. She very helpfully drew a diagram which explained the neuroscience of why we feel this way when we've experienced high levels of stress for a long time. It was really helpful to see that because it reassured me that what I was feeling was, as much as this can be said, "normal", given the amount of strain I was under. But the stress hasn’t let up since then and I have been well above my baseline for much too long.

 Long story short, I haven't really recovered since my family visited me last year. 2018 was a year from hell. 2019 hasn’t been much better but for different reasons. Basically, the hardships I’ve endured being the leader of a non-profit all these years reached critical mass and finally, at long last, broke me. After 8 years of pouring all my heart, soul and every last spoon I had into it, I quit last month…and to very little fanfare at that. 3 people turned up for our final meeting, and only because we needed to hand them the organization’s physical assets. We had a little unplanned dinner out and that was that.

I'm grateful to the handful of people who have reassured me they will continue its legacy beyond my departure, genuinely I am, but overall I think I stayed in that position at least a year longer than I should have. I feel incredibly jaded and cynical about the whole thing.

 And I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but screw Sydney’s activists. The vast majority of them can barely call themselves that. I have never been in such an apathetic, vain, self-centered and lazy city when it comes to political activism. This migrant has had enough of trying to get Australians to care about their own issues. (And yeah, the people I handed the non-profit over to? Also migrants).

It is telling that the final meeting was also the night before we moved house (because we always had to wrap our own lives around the goings on of that organisation, not the other way around, which is another major reason we quit). So after an hour and a half’s drive into the city, we had to get home late to get up early the next day to start that fun process.

 But I am getting ahead of myself. Before we ever got to moving day, we first had to find a house. If you haven’t done it before, let me tell you, the process of house hunting on a tight budget in a hostile market is disgustingly stressful.

We were looking from June. The property market in Sydney is unbelievably expensive and even though it experienced a so-called "correction" for a year, (meaning that house prices stabilized instead of continuing to rise), that ended just as we entered into the property hunt. I am extremely grateful that we got the house we did at the price we did, but my God, getting to that point nearly killed me. I keep explaining to people that it felt as if my partner and I ran full blast over broken glass to the edge of a dock, leapt several metres and grabbed onto the barnacles of a departing ship by our fingernails. I really do think we may have been among the last millennials that got on that “property” ship, and it was only because, at long last, we had help from my partner's extremely wealthy parents. After shaming us for a decade for not being able to afford impossible house prices (“ok boomer…”), he finally relented and helped us out. Again, I'm grateful, but also disgusted that this is the world we live in. Housing should be a human right and we shouldn't have this intergenerational greed and infighting over something so basic. Forgive my inner socialist. 

Finding the house was only the first part of the equation; moving into it was the next step.

 The moving process was incredibly arduous. At the time we should have been packing up the house, my partner's work decided to send him interstate for business on multiple occasions. By the time moving day came round, we were not ready and we couldn't afford to pay removalists. We enlisted the help of two amazing friends and Joe's brother-in-law. Again, super grateful that I had their help, but my God, was it intense. It took the better part of four days to move everything. We had to pay off the mortgage and the rent for the previous place for a two-week period, putting considerable strain on our savings. At the same time, we needed to get some work done in the new house so that was being done while we were trying to sort out the old house. The rental laws in this country are a joke and are widely considered to be abusive to renters, including by many of my American friends who now live here. I doubt we will ever see our bond returned, even though we were treated like crap living there for three years in a house that was not sealed, had no insulation or air conditioning, leaked and was draughty, didn't have proper doors et cetera et cetera. I mean, we had maggots falling from the ceiling… twice. The place was rotting and rotten but because my partner couldn't completely colour match the paint when he tried to cover up what was absolutely reasonable wear and tear on one of the walls, I'm sure we will lose all that. As usual, the landlord will claim it costs our entire $1800 bond to get a $50 an hour painter in to patch up one wall.  They always do this. In your contract it says reasonable wear and tear are a few knocks and dings on the wall and that the tenant is not expected to pay for that. In reality, in every rental we have ever lived in,  the landlord has refused to refund the bond when there’s been even the slightest bit of damage, even if we had a record of being model tenants. It was almost comical how hard my partner was trying in the middle of the move to cover up a few scrapes on the walls from moving furniture in and out. It all came to nothing because for love nor money he couldn't find the correct match of paint. And then of course he had to mow the entire grounds of the last rental when he really wanted to be using his weekends to sort out and unpack the new house. Good God, it was awful.

 My partner and I barely spent any quality time together during this period and he was extremely stressed out and distant from me. I totally understand why but the whole thing flared every single one of my conditions and I needed him as my carer. But he couldn’t really do that, as he was trying to do literally everything else. Moving house is hard on a healthy body, never mind one with two chronic pain disorders, irritable bowel and generalised anxiety disorder. And then (because of course), a family member of mine (one of the abusers) picked that moment in time to start harassing me, thereby triggering my PTSD which led to a nervous breakdown which led to intense depersonalisation, insomnia and nausea. Everyone and everything seemed unfamiliar to me, even my partner. I started to doubt whether or not I loved myself or anyone else anymore. I just felt so completely and utterly disconnected from the world. I began to lie awake at night terrified that I was fading away, that I could no longer feel anything other than fear. All the time, people kept saying, “congratulations on the new house! You must be so excited!” But all I could feel was sickness and dread.

 Two weeks after moving in, I had to drop my Lyrica one more time. This drop has been very difficult. All of the stress has led to some dark thoughts in the back of my mind which of course Lyrica then co-opts and exaggerates. I have had a more than a few moments of suicidal ideation. Everything in my life on paper has improved. We are now homeowners, we live in a beautiful part of the world, we've made some new friends lately, things are settling down et cetera et cetera. But I feel like I'm in shell shock after this year and last year. I haven't even had time to process that I am no longer the president of the not-for-profit I founded and formulated an identity around. I just haven't had the time to process literally anything. I've been more exhausted that I have ever felt. Oh, I'm sure everyone will say, “this too shall pass”. But I do not believe that bullshit. Yes, this individual stressor will pass but more horror will come and I know that makes me sound super negative but I just cannot remember a period of time when things were calm for… I can't remember. I just feel like I've been in a hurricane forever.

 So yeah, I'm writing this post while experiencing Lyrica withdrawal which makes me depressed and anxious. It's probably colouring my vision on everything. Fine. But I have been going through Lyrica withdrawal for two years, so it’s kinda become my normal. My final drop is on 26 December after which I will experience two more months of withdrawal and hopefully, after that, some semblance of sanity again. In the midst of all this I have to study for my citizenship test which is at the end of this month. I don't get any government support for my disability until I have been a citizen of this country for eight years, and as I’d like to survive my 40s, I need to get citizenship now. But yeah… studying an eighty-page textbook with an addled brain is just so much fun.

 Of course, during this time we haven’t have Internet because we had to disconnect the old place and it takes an age for it to get reconnected at the new place. We only recently acquired it at the new house. So there are piles of emails waiting for me. Many of them are from friends and I'm glad for that. But there is also a lot of life admin I now need to do. I have to change my address on every account I hold, which is really tedious. We have also had to organise time with family. Because my partner's family helped us get this house, we feel especially obliged to go to every single one of the family events, of which there are many. He comes from a big Catholic family so every relative who comes to visit, every party that's being held, every birthday, wedding, funeral and religious holiday, we’re now expect to attend. We have several in the next few weekends, taking up most of the time we *needed* to be unpacking the house. We’re obligated now.

 In all this negativity, though, I want to say that I am genuinely grateful to be one of the lucky ones to have a house. I know it sounds like I am whining about a good thing. It's not that I'm not glad for this (I know how ridiculously privileged we are). I just haven't been able to really feel it yet. I think that regardless of what happened this year, I’d be feeling this way. Something broke in me last year and just hasn't really come back. I feel shattered.

 And all my chronic pain conditions have been wearing me down too. I found out this year that the operation that cost me and my friends so much money (to remove that nerve in my foot) had failed. Or rather, the surgeon had completely botched it up. I have PTSD from that surgery. Just the thought of going back to have it done again fills me with heart racing terror and cold sweats. I’ve had numerous surgeries before that one and been fine, but the reaction I had from the anesthetic last time was so severe, and the recovery so long, that I genuinely fear it more than almost anything else. And yet I need to go in for that nightmare all over again in 2020. I'm going to be asked to trust a different surgeon to do the same so-called “simple operation” to restore some functionality to my left foot. My right knee is probably also going to need surgery since it has been resistant to any physiotherapy rehabilitation. And on top of all this, my poor partner's health has also taken a hit this year from the stress which is worrying me. Because I can always do with some more worry…

 But hey! This too shall pass! You should be happy! Life is great now! Yay yay yay!

Fuck, sometimes it just want to be allowed to feel shit and to have other people say “okay you can feel shit now. Yes, some good things have happened but right now you need to process the bad and that's okay too”. My lord, if people could just do that for me. If they could just let me feel what the fuck I need to feel.

 What I feel is exhausted, scared, freaked out, traumatized, weird, sick, angry, overwhelmed and fed up. And I need to feel those things before I can feel anything else.