misadventures in adulthood

30s + crafts + social work. midwest is best.

[1-800-horrorfilms]

i think "it takes a village" shouldn't be just "to raise a child". we should understand it takes a village to do literally everything we do. all day every day. without our communities we would not have drinking water or electricity or clean streets or food or shelter or anything. we cannot do any thing alone. we just can't. and with that comes the fact that you are not alone. you already have a community, seek to be an active part of it, you will feel better. reach out and thank them, they're happy to have you too. i promise. it takes a village to live.

[catnippackets]

truly the end goal is not "my close friends aren't annoyed by me and it's all in my head, they're my friends and they love me", it's "sometimes I do annoy my close friends, just as the people I love most will also annoy me sometimes, because this is normal, and we will continue to stay friends, and they're not going to want to immediately cut me out of their life if I do something annoying once in a while"

[goth-queen]

[the-youthclub]

[nervousbanter]

I feel overwhelmed by work and parenting in a new way lately. I don’t think I anticipated the physical toll it would take to have regularly disrupted sleep for over a year, to not have dedicated time for exercise. At some point in the last few months I did something to my big toe that makes it hurt sometimes (though increasingly all the time) and I know I should probably go to the doctor about it but it feels impossible to make the arrangements to get there. Ironic, since I work in a hospital and spend a good percentage of my time analyzing whether other people have done due diligence to seek timely medical care. Also ironic is that my kid is overdue to get blood taken for labs for low hemoglobin because the place we need to go to do that is way out in the burbs (insurance!! why) and the logistics (travel, finding coverage, etc) feel insurmountable. And then I wonder how her providers are thinking of me on the back end, assuming they’re judging me for delaying this. Maybe this is what I get for my only frame of reference for the intersection of parenting and medicine being the ICU.

I’m sure that I will become nostalgic for my child’s early toddler years but right now it feels like my husband and I are slowly drowning in a pile of silicone plates and toys and dirty laundry that never seems to end. The need to work full time in a place with stability and comprehensive benefits (rather than in private practice, which would be more flexible and calm but have basically none of that) sometimes makes me feel like I’m working with a gun to my head. It’s also amazing how much I have to spend to exist at Hospital- between parking, occasionally needing to buy lunch, all the random incidental things, it probably costs $15-30 a day for me to be at work. Maybe that’s always been true and I’m just counting it more precisely now? Maybe before essentially having twin mortgages (daycare) that didn’t feel like a lot

I do like my job, I think keeping it will be beneficial to my career and finances in the long term, and I’m sure this all is feeling extra dramatic because it’s Friday and it’s trauma season and my kid has decided she hates sleeping again, but idk I’m just really feeling the relentlessness today. Maybe I’ll make a plan to leave early and go to urgent care for my toe, at the very least.

[warcrimesimulator]

no actually i don't think antivaxxers' kids should die from a disease. i don't think gun advocates' kids should die in school shooting. children dying is bad actually, even if they're children of people you don't like.

[hyperlexichypatia]

Part of "Children are not the property of their parents" is "Children should not suffer for their parents' decisions."

[nervousbanter]

I found out that the Medicaid destroyer bill passed again in the house on a red line train packed with white Cubs fans who never ride the train and don’t know how to behave and are generally just… exactly the byproducts of 200 years of colonialism and white supremacy you’d expect them to be. I came from my job, where I regularly have to tell people who are barely scraping by (and for whom Medicaid is a true lifesaver) that I don’t have the resources to help them make their lives more stable.

A large component of social work is connecting people to other people and to resources that can help them find stability or otherwise meet their goals. It becomes harder and harder to be an effective social worker when our pool of resources keeps shrinking.

I have already been worried since January that my patients or their families will be deported, or abandoned by other relatives who were deported. At least they qualify for state benefits that keep them afloat!

It is these families I worry about the most because they’re the most likely ones I will have to watch die in my hospital or be absorbed into the child welfare system and probably be left to die in a shitty long term residential facility.

I have hope somewhere in me (repressive regimes always end eventually), but right now I am full of rage and sadness and hopelessness.

[lakevida]

i always convince myself i dont sound that weird and then i go out in the world and get involved in anything longer than transactional small talk and its like ohhh thats right ive only been hanging out with gay people who speak in riddles

[nervousbanter]

All I can say about work right now is that The Pitt is a documentary.

[libraford]

I kinda wanna be like "If you don't allow your children to experiment with gender, they will experiment with DRUGS" as a match-energy hyperbole, but

Its somewhat true because of the number of closeted trans people who use drugs to cope with depression and anxiety of being in the closet.

we should also be advocating safe use of recreational drugs with clean needle exchanges, safe places to use them, narcan education, ect.

[nervousbanter]

It’s been one week.

It’s still January

I can feel my hair turning grey

Can you imagine telling yourself in 2005 that in 20 years the guy from the apprentice would be bringing America into a new level of fascist hell and that guy Oprah sometimes has on her show would be live casting the deportations of hundreds of people in the city where you live?? and that the train and the grocery store would be empty because your neighbors are afraid to go outside??

Or telling 2012 you that the girl whose diy album you like to dance to would go on to have two kids with a South African guy who would Heil on the stage at inauguration and bankroll the German Nazi comeback??

I feel like my brain is melting all the time, maybe that’s adaptive in some way, idk

Even if nothing else happens after this, there is no going back to old times.

(Sorry to be dark but also like, it’s bad out there)

[nervousbanter]

I feel like my brain is melting today. I like a lot of things about my job but I also am so busy and trying to put a drop in the bucket against all the systemic failure people are dealing with and it feels like a crazy high stakes race against the clock that I’m probably losing.

Had a meeting about all the scary new things that can happen in a hospital now (being intentionally vague) and was shocked by how much less of a plan there is than there easily could have been. The chaos whack a mole has begun, I guess.

AGH. Also I lost my deodorant somewhere in my house and I really hope I find it soon

[dragon-in-a-fez]

with all due modesty this was a fucking banger of a text message for me to compose after 10 hours in the emergency room and 30 hours without sleep

[nervousbanter]

Yes.

[nervousbanter]

Thoughts this morning:

I knew but am re-remembering because of work and *gestures around* that many people with disabled children are republicans and voted for Tr*mp and I just wonder if they really understand how much it will fuck up all their shit if he’s successful in getting rid of Medicaid and the department of education.

Ditto other social workers and nurses who voted for him; do they realize how much of our pay is reliant on Medicaid? There aren’t just going to magically be new, richer patients to take the beds and appointment slots of people on Medicaid?? We’ll just be fighting over the lucky people with good insurance (which is what all the therapy Facebook groups are already doing) while a bunch of people get sicker and sicker around us with no help??

On the plus side: I got the bus early enough that I should have time to get coffee this morning, so that’s a small comfort. Trader Joe’s also has all their Christmas stuff out and I was able to snag a pound of the salted pretzel chocolate (!!) (good for snacking and for cookies). I’ve been slowly hoarding butter whenever I see it under $5/pound and am pumped to do a ton of baking soon

[nervousbanter]

I was getting ahead of myself; nobody is talking about completely getting rid of Medicaid, my brain just got away from me after reading a badly worded headline. But like, that would be really bad! And there’s so much other bananas stuff happening in the news it’s much easier to believe my misreading of the news.

[nervousbanter]

Thoughts this morning:

I knew but am re-remembering because of work and *gestures around* that many people with disabled children are republicans and voted for Tr*mp and I just wonder if they really understand how much it will fuck up all their shit if he’s successful in getting rid of Medicaid and the department of education.

Ditto other social workers and nurses who voted for him; do they realize how much of our pay is reliant on Medicaid? There aren’t just going to magically be new, richer patients to take the beds and appointment slots of people on Medicaid?? We’ll just be fighting over the lucky people with good insurance (which is what all the therapy Facebook groups are already doing) while a bunch of people get sicker and sicker around us with no help??

On the plus side: I got the bus early enough that I should have time to get coffee this morning, so that’s a small comfort. Trader Joe’s also has all their Christmas stuff out and I was able to snag a pound of the salted pretzel chocolate (!!) (good for snacking and for cookies). I’ve been slowly hoarding butter whenever I see it under $5/pound and am pumped to do a ton of baking soon

[nervousbanter]

I am running myself into the ground. I know this, and yet I can’t stop. I have a 1 year old who I desperately want to spend time with (even though parenting is relentless and exhausting), but I also have a mortgage and student loans and credit card debt. I was laid off earlier this year and my response has been to collect jobs and professional development opportunities and hoard them lest some other unstable force come in (and maybe rightfully so; my husbands workplace now has murmurs about downsizing). I work in a hospital and I work in private practice and I work at home being mom and I am constantly running from thing to thing and while I sometimes can sleep enough, there’s never rest. I have taken such a sharp turn into work that I’m not sure who I am anymore. Hobbies? No time, they don’t pay. Friends? Maybe someday! We all have kids now and they’re all always sick so planning is impossible. My husband and I are going to a play tomorrow and I’m hoping that helps. We’re very much in the divide and conquer stage of parenting (“I’ll put the baby to bed, can you do the dishes?”) except I keep getting sick and flaking on my chores and he continues to have ADHD and forget to do his half the time. I know it won’t be forever. It’s already better than it was a month ago. It’s just dark and cold and it feels like the world is ending in newer and more omnipresent ways and I dont do well with instability or uncertainty). Writing this has been helpful. But I am so so tired in my bones.

I’m laughing at myself a little— I had the thought, “why did nobody tell me it would be like this”? But they did! It’s just impossible to convey how this feeling really feels, I think, without experiencing it yourself.

[nervousbanter]

parents of toddlers: when do you stop getting sick constantly??