2025 Was Terrible And I'm On Sabbatical

So you wake up on January 1, 2025 with bed bugs. What do you do? You inform your apartment building and get billed over $1,000 for an exterminator. You inform your employer and lose your job. You read every reddit thread there in on bedbugs until you're in an OCD spiral so bad you rip off your entire thumbnail and start having frequent panic attacks and a level of anxiety-induced nausea you haven't experienced since high school. In unrelated news, you have a heart palpitation of 215 bpm and lose consciousness. You blow a tire and your car has all wheel drive so you need to pay for a whole new set of those. Where are we now? Like January 15th?

The world keeps spinning, and you lean on your community, the same community that you will turn its back on you in a months time. The bug beds will start a 3 month dispute between you and your apartment building that will end in you breaking your lease. Now it's May and you've lost everything. Your job, your home, your community, your financial stability, your health, your sanity. So what do you do now? I don't know. I know what I did. I decided to sell all my things and buy a van to fix up and travel around the United States with my best friend, which probably wasn't the right answer. I don't think instability is often solved by doing something even more unstable, and the thing about running away from your problems is that they can't be outrun and when they catch up to you, you will be so much further away from a solution.

The stress of the year grew like a snowball. I became very depressed. I looked around at my life and it was unrecognizable, and so was I. I was full of bitterness and resentment and anger. I was desperate for a way out of my own head and in October the snowball rolled right over me. I was buried. I'll never forget the people that saw me underneath that snowball and dug me out of it. When they found me, I was cold to the touch and they wrapped their arms around me anyway. I know they were cold too. Unfortunately the best friend I was fixing up the van with, I lost to frostbite (metaphorically). The final and most devastating loss of 2025.

With so much grief, I decided to go on bereavement. A sabbatical, as I'm sure my friends and family are sick of hearing me call it. I moved in with my mom is Santa Rosa, California. The move was easy since I sold all my things. What have I been doing now? Upping my Zoloft, writing, starting ERP therapy, building an army of 40+ beaded dragons, posting on TikTok (a lot) (too much?), giving my website a glow-up, exploring San Francisco, going to open mics, FaceTiming my friends in Portland, laying in the sunshine like a goddamn lizard. They say a new life will cost you the old one, but truthfully, I was pretty fond of the old one. What is there to do now but build a life that doesn't leave me with buyers remorse.