The other day I posted ~7,000 words about my experiences between 2020 and 2026 that lead to me being admitted to a mental hospital. I'll follow up sometime soon with more.
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Here's the first bit of the post. Click the link to read the rest.
2026 has been an INTERESTING year so far. I’ve made a few small, general updates about my situation elsewhere, but I wanted to finally get back to using my blog, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to go into more detail about what’s been going on.
Way back in 2020, there was this thing called “The Novel Coronavirus”, aka Covid-19. I was starting my third year at my first full-time animation job. In March, we switched to work-from-home, and I stopped going outside altogether. Part of it was me being a big lazy fatso homebody, but I also was incredibly worried about getting sick. There was so much talk about how many people were dying. I had distanced myself from my family back in Mississippi at that point, but suddenly they were trying to contact me. I ended up getting an email from a doctor saying that my grandmother had gotten covid and was dying. I was too ashamed to reach out by that point. But even ignoring the massive death count, there was also so much information coming out about long covid, and how even if you got a relatively minor case, this could lead to all sorts of awful health problems like early onset dementia.
So I never went outside. Garbage piled up in my apartment. I wasn’t getting any exercise whatsoever, and so I started getting fatigued more and more easily, to the point where even walking down two flights of stairs to check the mail felt daunting, so I stopped checking the mail. I was ashamed of the way I was living, and I didn’t want anyone to know. Everyone else continued to live relatively normal lives, but somehow I was devolving. I constantly made up excuses. If someone wanted to send me mail, I told them that mail in our building got stolen a lot. Which was technically true, but I would have said it even if it weren’t. Sometimes friends would mention that they were going to be in the bay area and that we should try to hang out. I would find excuses. I was completely isolated and never saw another human face in person for years, save for one brief journey outside that I’ll get to in a bit.
In March 2021 I was laid off. Netflix hadn’t picked up the show I had been helping develop and our little studio had to trim the fat. I was the least talented person on payroll, so I should have seen it coming. But instead it was the emotional equivalent of getting t-boned. I did a lot of crying for a while, mourning the loss of what felt like the only good thing in my life. So much of my self-worth was tied up in being someone lucky enough to have their dream job.
This lead to my depression getting worse, and my physical health was still declining.
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