you’ve come too far to walk away

(it’s on – superchick)

Y’all, do you ever dissect the truthfulness of songs you’ve loved for decades? Today I was jammin’ to It’s On by Superchic[k]…and they got to the line I used as the title for this post…there are times it might be wisest to stay where you are, but in some situations it doesn’t matter how far you’ve come, it will never be too far to walk away. Perhaps the red flags last spring weren’t enough to make it an obvious decision not having the benefit of hindsight that I now have to walk away when I finally had what I thought was what was going to “fix” my career journey. The longing for the normalcy I thought would boost my confidence overrode that nagging feeling that there were things very wrong…and there were so many things I was excited about that I was totally willing to overlook things, because I am very realistic that no job is perfect and if it really was ‘that bad’ I only had to stay for a year and realistically with the type of position I was interested in staying AND having a position I was happy with might not have been possible anyway…there are a limited number of nicu or even critical care pharmacists in general that any one institution needs regardless of how qualified you may be or how much you want the job…but the point at which I realized the way I was being treated was taking me further from rather than stagnating or getting closer to my goals should have been a moment it didn’t matter how far I’d come – it was time to move on…part of what kept me was the social stigma of quitting and part of it was how deeply invested I become in caring for my patients…I didn’t want caring for my professional future to negatively impact the current and future reality for my patients.

Once I started and it just went from bad to worse, I felt like I’d come too far to just quit. I mean, I’d moved across the country…and I didn’t want to be a quitter…so at the end of the first day I decided on a 6-week trial period…which ended in mid-to-late August which is obviously not a good time for me to make a decision…and a couple weeks later it really seemed like things were starting to stabilize and I’d made it far enough that I felt ready to tackle the rest of the year…and okay, to be honest when people tell me I probably can’t do something it lights a fire in me to prove that I can…so just like when someone told me in high school I was too quiet to successfully be a greeter and while before that moment I’d have been happy to switch serving teams if there were a different need, approaching the conversation that way made me absolutely certain that the only team I was going to be on was the greeting team, and I did fine…so my RPD telling me I wasn’t going to be a good resident because I had experienced grief in the past made it important to me to prove that I could be the best resident they’d ever seen. I stood up for myself when it really mattered, but I didn’t complain when I wasn’t given the breaks I was legally entitled to. I didn’t complain when my preceptor took two months to return my email that I’d continued to follow up on. I didn’t complain when the response to over 40 hours of my work over a holiday weekend was met with no gratitude whatsoever and simply a comment that maybe someone else should have done the work in case I messed it up…y’all, I had taken so long to complete the project because it was important to me that it be 100% complete and accurate…I can absolutely guarantee that it was correct…and in fact in working through it I’d discovered multiple pharmacy errors that had likely been incorrect for a long time including a supplement we had been labeling with the name of a similar but different supplement…but as I learned, people there don’t want to know if there are safety issues and definitely do not want to hear if anyone made a mistake – admitting or drawing attention to that is basically suicide if you’d like to remain employed there…oops…

So yeah, all that to say I should have walked away if not day 1 then at the end of July when I experienced just how awful my manager could be. No one should fear for their physical or emotional safety walking in the door at work. There were so many things that should have been my last straw…and yet I stayed…way too long…I can’t help but wonder if I’d left of my own volition if that would have made things better or worse…I really don’t know…it at least would have given me a head start on finding something better. In retrospect I am so proud of myself for my strength in dealing with that for so long while continuing to treat those making my life miserable with just as much respect as the people I love, but I also am shocked and confused as to why I allowed myself to be treated like that for so long.

Totally switching gears, but I watched this video on youtube today Endo Monday: The Musical (“Manic Monday” Parody) with @David Wesley – YouTube . It is great…

And it reminded me that it wasn’t that long ago I was sitting in a PICU workspace watching doc Schmidt videos with a PICU resident…don’t get me wrong, 90% of my time at least in that office was focused on educating the residents and/or consulting on patients, but I’d be lying if I claimed I was always doing that…but to be fair, I think even just hanging out with friends and/or making friends on the unit is valuable for anyone, but even more so for me. Relationship building is important because when you care about your coworkers on a personal level, especially those in different disciplines, it also enables you to have deeper professional collaboration. And for me it is even more important…if we’re being honest, 99.9% of my goals through residency were communication-related…and the one or two that weren’t were really only there because I was supposed to have goals and didn’t know what those goals should be…so any opportunity for me to talk was really a win…also, I have been realizing that while communication is really hard for me that relationship building is one of my strengths. I was looking at the poster my former coworkers gave me in 2020. It was a goodbye poster…but one of the technicians wrote “happy birthday!!!!!” It was one of the newer technicians at the time, and one who wasn’t chemo trained so not one I spent a lot of one on one time with, and yet I had that relationship where those words that might not mean much to anyone else could express exactly the sentiment intended.

Changing gears again, you know what feels really defeating? Receiving mail that you think is going to be a check for $900-$1000…but instead it is a bill for about $1500…I’m hanging on and I’m going to get back on my feet, but when you’ve transferred most of your money out of long term savings (goodbye house fund) and your checking account is still pretty darn close to zero as in you are really hoping your paycheck comes before your credit card payment is due, every bill seems daunting and the hope of relief being dashed just feels like a lot to take in. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me – there are people out there who have it way worse than me, but it is kind of like the kids in Africa principle…just ’cause the kids in Africa don’t have any food doesn’t improve the amount or type of food in front of me. I know how fortunate I am to be the person I am who was ‘saving for college’ by kindergarten, and therefore had some savings to rely on, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating to be unable to use my money for what I want to have it for…it’s kind of like how upset I was with myself when I realized I would have qualified in my former apartment for at least 75% off my internet bill and probably for utility assistance if I’d asked, but you can’t get that help retroactively and by the time I figured this stuff out it was too late to apply…

Wanna know one other random thing? So my current conditioner bottle says up to two times more moisturizing…and then there is an asterisk…that asterisk says ‘than shampoo.’ Well, I sure should hope that conditioner is more moisturizing than shampoo…I mean that is basically its job…shampoo helps get the germs out of your hair by emulsifying the water with your hair oils then conditioner helps get the tangles out by moisturizing and smoothing the hair…so like why advertise that?! Lol. The end.

I’m not superhuman

(hero – skillet)

I’m going to keep this post vague and brief because it feels like after last week’s mistake on Facebook that anything I write could be a hint at where I am and stuff…

We are better together

Don’t be afraid to fail. Fail fast, then get up and try again. No one hits a home run every time.

I heard that yesterday and it felt really encouraging. Have most or maybe even any of the really hard things in the past few months been anything that were objectively my fault – no, but do they still really hurt – yes. And because they are challenging regardless of who is to blame, it is really helpful to have that reminder that no one is perfect…and it isn’t an impossible to overcome obstacle to have an uncommon path documented on your CV. It just proves you are willing to keep figuring out how to handle the unexpected. It isn’t easy, but it is not a stop sign.

SUPPORT

Humans make a mistake about 1/1000 times for routine tasks. This increases to 1/100 for rule-based tasks, and to 30-60/100 for knowledge-based tasks with which we are unfamiliar.

Thinking about that feels defeating – even for normal easy tasks I can only do the right thing 999 times on average before I screw it up once. That is a lot of mistakes and feels like not good enough…but it goes back to better together and we need each other. It’s a lot less likely my mistakes will fall into the same cracks your mistakes fell in and vice versa, so together we can be a lot more likely to get things right.

…what if…

catch people doing the right thing 🙂

What you permit you promote.

…so true and something that really makes me think…When you let people get away with doing the wrong thing, you make that okay which makes people do that thing even more…and the longer you let it go on, the harder it is to draw a boundary that makes it not okay anymore.

A Fairytale that isn’t Coming True

(wishes – superchick)

So I had this post mostly written…then I did something dumb…so now you get the partially written post below and my story about internet safety.

So I had a friend request on Facebook. It was a name I knew and a profile picture I recognized. I clicked accept. And this person messaged me. And I replied including my actual/semi-permanent location…and then nearly immediately I realized what I had done.

Sure enough, there were two profiles for this person, both with the same profile pic and one of them with me as the only friend.

So…umm…step two: Panic.

Now I am concerned that this was the person/people I am trying to keep my location private from, two of whom were already tracking me and an overlapping but different subset of two of whom knew my previous address, my mom’s address, and the address I’d had the previous year…I was feeling so relieved to have an address far enough from any of my previous known addresses to feel like I was finally really and truly safe and could let down my guard just a little. And now that feels compromised. My fairytale of relative safety is not coming true. My consolation prize right now is a next door neighbor who is a retired police officer with close ties to the local police department, so I feel like I can have reasonable assurance of physical safety, but I’m worried now about other aspects of my safety and security.

I looked up if there was any way to unsend a message (and hope that it hadn’t been read prior to unsending)…and there is, but only on certain messenger platforms and only within 10 minutes…by the time I figured all the things out it had been 11 minutes…and my only option was to report the conversation for impersonation…which I doubt will unsend the message at all, much less prior to being read…

…and so now I am actually hoping it was a would-be hacker trying to get me comfortable to provide information or click on a link, because that would be far preferable over it being someone trying to hurt me in a more material way.

Speaking of scammers…did I ever tell y’all the story of coming pretty close to getting scammed in November? So I was trying to sell a bunch of furniture on Craigslist. Within like a day someone said they were interested, they just wanted me to help pay their movers…fair enough I suppose. Well things are going okay until I’m about to go somewhere and the person who has made no attempt to schedule things with me decides they absolutely must have it this weekend…and also that their movers want to be paid in advance on some weird phone app. I am dumb enough (or maybe desperate enough for cash) to spend hours on the phone trying to send my own money on the premise that I will be reimbursed. Luckily, for some unknown reason, none of the apps work. At this point or sooner I definitely should have asked to speak directly to the movers…I didn’t…I Western Union’ed around $1500 to someone…and I got incredibly lucky again that I was able to cancel that before it went through…so long story short, no matter how desperate you are for cash, Craigslist is for the free page or for entertainment only, not for selling things…I ended up giving away the furniture for free to a family in my buy nothing group. I kinda miss the furniture, but I’m glad to have significantly fewer heavy and bulky items. There is definitely something to be said for owning only things you can move yourself. Eventually I do plan on owning more furniture again, but I am perfectly happy for that to wait until I am a home owner someday rather than a renter.

But anyway, I am frustrated that I messed up my opportunity for safety this morning and frustrated that I ever ended up in a situation in which this would ever become a problem. I mean, it is definitely easier to say in retrospect seeing how it played out that in the months after the match when I saw things that concerned me I should have cut off the engagement prior to ever moving and ending up in a toxic environment, or that I should have quit when I came home day 1 upset because I could already see what a mess this was, or that I should have quit so many other times…but I was afraid of the stigma of leaving, and I was afraid of the unknown of when or where I’d find something better. I was willing to give second chances, and I was willing to make compromises that were mostly just me giving everyone else what they wanted while letting them disregard my perspective and letting them dishonor their commitments to me because I felt trapped and I felt like if I just held on I could get through it.

Considering this morning I’ve been crying just thinking about the possibility of being found and remembering the day in July at work I was hiding in the restroom as long as I felt like I could get away with trying to figure out what I was going to do next because my workplace was not safe…it feels really powerless…lol, but I did learn that day when I was found by someone I mistakenly thought was a safe person after leaving the restroom how to get outside the hospital without weaving through the very narrow path of the parking garage which was very definitely unsafe, and that escape route was a little bit helpful later when I just needed a walk and some mask-free time to make it through my day.

Totally unrelated, but I need to write about something to distract me from the fear that feels right now like it will consume me…last night I had an incredibly vivid nightmare that woke me up at midnight. In my dream, someone stole almost everything from me except they left behind some beautiful furniture similar to both what I gave away and the furniture I had when I was a baby. So, I mean besides having almost no food, toiletries, dishes, or belongings in general and only the clothing I was wearing, I probably had more value than I started with, but I was devastated. They broke but left behind the lock I got from my dad and all the other things from or in memory of my dad were gone. I have emotional attachment to a lot of things, so the loss was huge, but the loss of the daddy things was unbearable…and then the rest of the night I was awake every hour or so putting on my glasses to reassure myself that my stuff was still around me, because the dream was so vivid it felt so incredibly real…even though what kind of idiot burglar would bring a moving truck of furniture to leave behind?! I mean, perhaps it would make it less suspicious if things were going in rather than just out, but it doesn’t really make sense to leave behind things of known reasonably high value for a bunch of items of unknown value unless you are going to repeat the process with the stuff you don’t want…and considering that I am not a heavy sleeper, it is also pretty unrealistic to think that could happen without me waking up until the thieves were on their way out…but when you’re still in that half awake but still in bedtime mode headspace, you can see that it wasn’t real, but it is harder to shake the feeling that it could have been real…

So there was an incredibly well done CE I completed recently on inclusive conversations. One of the activities was to come up with 8 of your identities and decide how much each one contributes to your overall definition of yourself. My first attempt made me 117% of a person, so once I modified to get to 100% this is what I ended up with…

Christ follower – 29%

Caring friend – 28%

Pediatric/neonatal critical care pharmacist – 4%

Female – 1%

Child lover – 23%

Grief adjacent – 11%

Frugal foodie – 2%

Bike/skate enthusiast – 2%

…it was really interesting to see where I really am and to see how that compared to the people who were sharing…sexual orientation didn’t show up for me at all was one of the first things I noticed in comparison. I also have an incredibly negligible level of gender identity and lower level of professional identity…

So that didn’t fit super well into their lesson because areas in which your identities are different from community at large are supposedly often things that you hold tighter…not the first time I haven’t fit into someone’s box…I haven’t written about this much, but even though I check the box heterosexual on forms because it is expected, in reality I have little to no interest at the moment in marriage to anyone…I like the idea of having a family, but the part where you get married just doesn’t sound great to me…but I also am not ready to throw out there any other identity…and it isn’t totally a lie because if I were going to get married it would be to someone of the opposite gender, I just don’t know if I actually plan to ever get married at all.

I think gender identity would have ranked higher at a different time of the month, but I identify more as being human than being female…in some ways I am stereotypically female – I love kids, I’m in a traditionally female field, I am a compassionate and caring person who builds strong connections with people…but I’m also kinda a tomboy – moderately athletic, little concern for appearance, always in pants (even if a skirt is over the top of the pants)…

And I think not working for so long probably impacted how much I identified as a pharmacist…which I am actually pretty happy with. I think it had become too much of my identity in the past couple years which probably contributed to staying so long in such a bad environment, so let’s see if we can keep it that way…I’m okay with it bumping up to maybe 10%, but it is important to me that it not grow too far because I want my identity to be less about my activities and more about my personality. I’m happy to be people’s healthcare resource, but I want that to be me as the friend rather than me as the pharmacist…and I definitely never again want to be in a situation where I value my professional identity over my actual self. The fact that people who barely met me prior to that experience could see me lose my passion and energy over the course of a few months speaks volumes to the effect the environment was having on me, because changes like that I can’t hide is a big deal.

The other part of this CE I found really illustrative in how everyone processes situations differently was when they presented the case of Clark, a man who in this scenario is one of your coworkers. In this scenario one day someone who looks very feminine is sitting where Clark usually sits and it takes you a moment to realize as you walk past that it is Clark. The task was to think about what you’d be thinking and how you would respond. My thought process was worry about what the right response is because no one wants to be totally ignored, but it is a bit anxiety-provoking to show up to work appearing different than usual, so I obviously would also not want to make a big deal about the different appearance, so I’d have to figure out how to walk the line of not pretending I don’t notice, but also not drawing attention to it…which made me think I really needed more detail on my past interactions with Clark to know what and how we’ve talked to know what I should say, and that is where I got stuck…and then when someone shared their thoughts, I realized my path and theirs were on utterly different sides of the spectrum…which was not the most focused on part of the exercise, but was very illustrative. It is a good reminder that we can’t assume we know what other people are thinking or that they’ll understand what we need – we have to listen and ask questions. Asking questions is a powerful tool that opens doors. Never stay in an environment that forces you to act without first considering your perspective and without valuing your questions.

angels show up in the strangest of places

(Looking for angels – skillet)

I think this lyric is incredibly true…

The example that most exemplifies this lyric is someone whose name I am not sure if I ever heard in the first place…someone whom I have only ever spoke with on the phone…

It was a little over a month ago and I was terrified. About 12 hours prior to this moment I had found out someone I had wanted to avoid had been tracking me, and unbeknownst to me had had people following me around taking videos and pictures of me. That most likely wasn’t legal because I think even in one-party consent areas you can’t just take pictures and videos of strangers who have in no way interacted with you…but regardless of legality, it had happened and I was afraid…and I don’t know exactly what my plan was, I just knew my brain said call the police, so I did. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that I would do that because my most recent police contact maybe 8-10 hour prior had consisted of the guy repeating the same useless piece of information I didn’t ask for while I was trying to carry boxes until I finally snapped and more aggressively than I meant to told him that I didn’t care what he was saying and just wanted him to answer my questions which he refused to do. I felt bad about my reaction, but my friend who witnessed my side of the conversation reassured me that I wasn’t rude and it probably felt uncomfortable because it was so far outside my peace-keeping nature…and they’re probably right and I’m sure the police have heard a lot worse than someone taking a strident tone with them, but I still feel like I owe that dude an apology…I don’t know if I was terrified enough that I was willing to give the police another chance or if it was more like that I remembered that all my police interaction prior to that point had been people who seemed to care and that overrode the one big negative…but regardless of reason, I called.

And the person who answered transferred me to someone else and that person really was an angel. I don’t think I ever actually told him what was going on or why I was scared, but he remained calm. Without knowing my story or pressing for my story he offered that if I wanted to come in I could (and I realized at that point that it was around midnight and probably not wise for me to drive anywhere at the moment). I think just the offer that a safe place was there waiting for me was a huge blessing. And when I said I wasn’t ready to drive out there, this kind person asked whether this could wait until morning since most of the night crew was out on some other business, and when I agreed, because at that point I was feeling better, he let me choose what time I wanted them to arrive. And he had the foresight to let me know that if something more urgent came up he couldn’t guarantee that time unless I called and needed someone right away…

And that is the story of how I gave a couple police officers a tour of my apartment complex the next day because they did come and I still wasn’t ready to tell them what was going on, but I didn’t want them to leave because I felt safe and protected with them around. I wanted to ask them to stay and protect me and my social skills kept that from becoming a reality, but touring them around prolonged my contact with them…It didn’t fix anything per se, but it made me feel like I mattered, and it showed me that if I ask for help, someone will come help me…there are a lot of things the police couldn’t do, and they and I both were aware of that, but being there and being willing to do the things they could do was incredibly meaningful. I wish I had gotten everyone’s names, because I would love to send everyone a thank you for their kindness, patience, and for making me feel like there were people who would watch out for me and had my best interest at heart. And I mean, God bless them for not commenting on the cardboard boxes serving as my only piece of furniture and the roll of sheets/pillow/pajamas in the hall that I hadn’t folded up after getting dressed in the morning…it probably wasn’t the most normal-looking place they had seen…hashtag doesn’t everyone have to move a couple boxes of canned goods to un-barricade the door before answering it? And then become unable to find her shoes because the boxes are now on top of the shoes? (yep, I located my shoes after they left and I was feeling safe enough to not need to re-barricade the door and instead wanting to get stuff out of the entry and kitchen to allow for vacuuming and other required cleaning that hadn’t been done in the past week when the kitchen had become the dumping zone for anything that I might need in the next month or so…because sorting things is important, but so is cleaning)

The guy might be thinking he was just doing his job, but to me, he was doing so much more than that, and I wish I could tell him and the team that I spoke with in person how much their compassion and taking a few extra minutes to assist me rather than just taking a not my problem stance meant to me…so I guess if the police officers responding to a young-ish woman who called late at night and proceeded to show them around her apartment complex are reading this (which is highly doubtful) please pass along my thanks to you and your colleagues.

I was going to write about some other angels in my life over the past few months, but I feel like I’ve written about enough other amazing people over the past few months…and I really need to get things done because I haven’t gotten much done at all this week…

But one more thing that I promise is totally at least 3% related if I gave you more details about both this and the previous thing I wrote about…

Ever have those moments when you go, umm, and exactly how was this going to work again?!

So the setting is early August. The background is your girl really wants to have adequate food in her apartment even though she isn’t sure she is going to actually need it. This is basically a continuation of the wiggle worm is not going to be defeated by the grocery store story that I wrote back in August.

So I think in August we got as far as I was buying a watermelon and a few other things…

The problem comes in that even though the store I was at *looked* like a traditional grocery store and had prices like a fancy grocery store, it operated like an Aldi…and I definitely wasn’t about to spend money on something that should be free so I refused a bag…I mean, I did bring my reusable bags just in case I needed them…and except for my backpacks etc which I suppose are technically reusable bags, my reusable bags are super cute, so I’m not overly opposed to using them as needed (two of them are little fishies when folded up, and when in use have an ocean scene, and my other one has a picture of a target store on it which I know doesn’t sound cute, but it totally is). But anyway, I didn’t want to bring the cart all the way home and back because as usual I had a ton of stuff to get done. So my plan was to carry everything. And I quickly realized that while I lived less than a mile from the grocery store, it was a lot longer walk in the heat while carrying a watermelon in addition to other groceries…Plan B was quickly attempted – use the bags to carry the groceries…and Plan B was pretty close to a fail…as it turns out, it was rather difficult to get the watermelon into a bag because the bags are not stretchy like real grocery bags but are sized like regular grocery bags. I finally got the watermelon in and realize that the bag was most definitely not designed to hold the weight of a watermelon so I still had to carry it. The bag did kinda sorta make it an easier surface to hold on to…but yeah, when you are a walker you probably shouldn’t buy watermelon unless you have a well-thought-out plan on how to get it home. And let’s be real, at that point I didn’t have a lot of thought left for my personal life because work was taking so much of my thought.

Hashtag life lessons from wiggle worm…

…totally unrelated, but the leggings I’ve wanted from target since I bought my first pair of leggings years ago, someone was giving away a few pairs of them and it was an hour and a half to get there so probably I should have kept waiting until I could both find and afford them at target, but I wanted them and I’m very determined to make my dreams reality, so now I have two pairs of black fleece lined leggings, two pairs of black and glittery fleece lined leggings (not on my wish list, but I’ve only had glittery clothing one other time in my life, so I figured why not especially since it didn’t seem like the glitter would come off), one pair of navy blue fleece lined leggings, and two pairs I didn’t care as much about – grey and grey with pandas, but they were both fleece lined which will be warm and cozy…I was not a leggings count as pants person until recently, but now I don’t care that I still feel inappropriately dressed, because I’ve discovered how comfortable they are and it is my opinion that if you are going to judge me on looks then I don’t need your opinion…I mean, I’m not going to go outside showing off my bra like some girls do, because I do still have standards (plus, modest really is hottest), but I’m becoming okay with leggings without anything else covering my bottom once in a while…

…and I had one more completely random unrelated thought, but I’m worried it may provide too much information on my whereabouts for a public blog so that though it just going to need to stay in my head…

so much more than their words

(mean girls – leanna Crawford)

Sometimes call center employees clearly do not understand what you are requesting, but other times they definitely get it…

Today I called in for something and at first the person started telling me that mail may be delayed due to the holidays and then you could hear in her voice as she got to the date it had been sent that oh, no this is not just a mail delay…it was sent December 9, and now it is January 12…

So I guess I’m glad I called…and that I got an agent who had a useable amount of brainpower :). If not, I was ready to point out that based on Google’s estimate, I could walk from their central office to the address that was on the envelope in about 350 hours which translates to about 2 weeks, so I kinda doubt the mail couldn’t reach that point in a similar or lower period of time…

If I were going to be a responsible adult I’d have two more calls to make today, but adulting is exhausting sometimes, so we’re gonna keep putting that off…

This is only related because it also concerns communication, but I watched a video on situational mutism today. To be honest, I’m not totally certain it is a legitimate DSM diagnosis, but I was like I think that is where I am at…

When I was in college I think I legitimately could fall into the category of selective mutism – I didn’t really talk outside of the classroom. In class I could converse with my teachers and classmates, but even teachers noticed that outside of the classroom I pretty much only communicated with my peers via writing until I found a really close friend, and even then I’d talk to that person in small group situations and that person would communicate for me in other situations. As I grew and especially as I got into the big world I gradually became more able to do some communicating myself, but even now, in some situations I physically cannot talk, but now it is more about the emotional environment than my physical location, though location does matter to some extent. People think I am being obstinate or just don’t know how to act appropriately, and it really hurts when they treat me like I don’t know things just because I can’t verbalize it, and it is frustrating when they act like I am doing it on purpose, because that just makes it even harder to access my voice. I know enough about myself to know what makes me better or less able to communicate and I will happily share that information when relevant, but some people use that information to intentionally set me up for failure by giving me the opposite of what I need.

Watching the video made me feel so validated…it mentioned an adult who carried cards that said things like ‘my name is ____’ and stuff. This person acknowledged that they almost never use them because of fear that people wouldn’t understand, but I was like yes, I absolutely understand…in fact I have many times considered doing the same thing. I think at one point in life I even had a small notebook with a few phrases, but like that person, I never actually used it because of fear of what people would think. More recently, my thoughts have been more along the lines of using cards like that for safety. I really did almost make myself a set of cards this fall that were going to say things like among other things, could I have some water please, and do you have a bandaid please, but I realized that it is already weird for a stranger to show up on your doorstep, so probably if I was going to need help I was going to need to be able to use my words…especially the more out there requests like please pretend you know me because I am afraid and want to come inside, and would you mind if I stood on your porch to wait for this storm to pass. I never got to a point where I was desperate enough for anything to need to approach anyone, so the cards would have mostly been for better peace of mind…but communication strategies are things I think about, because I know that when I feel threatened or unexpectedly intimidated my ability to speak can be drastically reduced which limits my ability to react to dangerous situations…which is why in college I wore a whistle around my neck to and from school because I knew at that point in life I didn’t even have the ability to make my presence known, so if I was unable to speak, the whistle provided my visibility both for traffic-related reasons as well as in case of any physical threat since I was aware my apartment and school were in a high crime area…I no longer need the whistle – in fact I was able not that long ago to tell someone off who was spouting unsafe information as safety tips…which probably talking at a stranger as you bike past is not the most effective teaching strategy, but I was proud of myself for making the attempt.

And yes, you’ve guessed correctly that my increase in posts is in response to having things I really want to write about but that I’m not yet ready to share…I’m gonna try to stop writing these filler posts and either tackle what I want to write head on or take a break, but no guarantees how that will go…

the microwave is fast when it cooks food…and Nikes

(GoFish – Phones, Planes, and Microwaves)

I did not learn much about phones, planes, and microwaves today…but I did learn some other types of physics. There are a lot of things I know about syringe pumps, but one thing anyone who really knows me knows is that while once in a while I am happy to just admit it is what it is, more often I want to know why, so when I saw a presentation on the physics behind why syringe pumps work the way they do, I was like sign me up! I got like 30 minutes in and lost interest because it started getting repetitive and I was like yep, I get it you can stop repeating yourself, but those first 30 minutes I was like y’know if you made me sit in a room and think about it until I figured it out I would most likely come to the same conclusion in not that much time, but sometimes it is nice to let someone else do the thinking for you…so that was an interesting presentation to watch for the first few minutes. It just could have presented all the information in definitely under 10 minutes and maybe under 5 minutes…

I also watched a ton of other videos because distraction is my super power. One of them said that in the medical profession, sometimes you can’t make it better, so you make it not worse. I thought that was a really insightful way to put it. There are times both in healthcare as well as in life as a whole that you can’t take away the hurt, but there are things you can do to prevent worsening it (although to be fair I think there are times you can’t make it not worse either…humans are not all-powerful nor all-knowing). There are some people this year who have definitely done that for me – striving to make it better if possible but not worse if not possible, and that meant the world to me.

Also, this morning I was in a meeting so I had to get my lazy butt out of bed (okay fine, not lazy, just probably anemic), find somewhere that I both had good internet and phone access AND was somewhere that my location would remain unknown if I had to turn on my camera, and I chose to change out of pajamas…and when it was over I was like why did I do that when I never turned on my camera?? And…ummm…lol…probably because first I didn’t know no one was gonna make me turn on my camera, second because that way when I knocked over a container of Gerber Puffs it meant my pajamas weren’t covered in puff-residue, third because I wasn’t sitting in bed or on clean sheets so my pajamas would have gotten contaminated, and fourth because I needed the pocket on my cargo scrubs for a clean pair of underwear in case of my cup overflowing without time to go look for clean clothes but enough time for a quick bathroom run…

Speaking of anemia, for probably the first time in my life I got blood work that said my hemoglobin was above 13g/dL instead of in the 11-12 range…to be fair, it may have been higher than usual since I’ve both consistently taken high doses of iron supplements daily for the past couple years AND have had a lot more red meat lately AND was about a week pre-menstrual AND hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in the past 19 to 20 hours or so and was therefore also dehydrated…but usually it is low, so go me! On the other hand my platelets were low-ish and I don’t have an explanation for that…a responsible person would probably go get that evaluated, but I’m someone who is afraid of finding something Medicaid won’t cover, so I’m perfectly happy to consider that for one of my babies it wouldn’t be low enough for me to be concerned, so I’m going to just ride with that thought, ‘cause all I know is the normal range I learned in school for adults and not where the point of concern comes in and since I know my blood clots without issue 98% of the time, I’m gonna go with everything is cool and move on…probably not the brightest move from a chica who has spent significant time traveling lately and therefore is at risk of a VTE which could be consuming platelets, but yo’girl may have lost her insurance plan description and therefore doesn’t know whether screening for that would be covered and if there would be any copays or coinsurance associated with it…I’m sure there would be ways to find out, but I’m also semi-sure that a DVT would be significantly painful, and the only debilitating pain I’ve had recently was the blisters on my feet…even my period pain hasn’t completely incapacitated me in the past couple months…which I am very pleased with. Sure, there’s been some painsomnia and some intense pain, but considering I have days not all that irregularly that I physically cannot stand up, am short of breath, nauseous and or vomiting, and close to passing out, I am happy with any time the pain allows me to continue living life as planned…which is probably why the platelet number doesn’t bother me…I know my blood clots because I see the clots, plus when I get cuts, except when they are super deep, they usually stop easily…and I’ve got bigger fish to fry if I was going to have concern for a blood-related topic, like now that I think of it, could it be the fact that before I was primarily a cup-user it was not uncommon for me to need both a super tampon and a super pad to make it break to break in college if I had a class that hit at a heavy point in my cycle that causes my hemoglobin to usually be low?! (of note, our classes traditionally were 50 minutes on then a 10 minute restroom break)…and yes, I am one of the women who has missed work 2/2 female issues, but I have not missed any of my classes…I might have been barely alive, sockless because I was in too much pain to get the socks on  and struggling to get to my seat, but I never missed a day of class…and I am proud of that.

And speaking of Gerber Puffs, the fig berry flavor is way better than the cherry orange flavor…also, the containers are a perfect fit for my car’s cup holder for travel, but are not designed well for shoving my hand inside after the first like fourth or third have been consumed…but they are like the perfect texture. I love them.

Sometimes in life, especially as a Christian, you have to be the bigger person…but sometimes you get tired of being like Wiggle Worm, don’t fight this, just be quiet and be the bigger person, ‘cause being the bigger person often feels a lot like slipping into being a doormat, and that is not a good feeling…so in those times I remember the end of the larry-boy songs instead…”I am that HERO!” It might mean the exact same thing, but sometimes the empowerment of doing the right thing being heroic just feels a lot better when I’m feeling powerless in a situation in which someone has been taking advantage of me.

Also, I should prob go to bed soon-ish, but I’ll leave you with this Wiggle Worm-ism…

Because people are moveable objects.

Wiggle Worm – to her community group – describing why she thinks people should be required to have their name tattooed on their face

I could explain that quote further, but I am not sure I could do so without expressing negative opinions of someone I’ve never met, and besides that it isn’t fair to judge people without actually getting to know them and their story, I don’t want to be rude even if I don’t have positive opinions of someone, so we’ll just leave it at this is my idea and the more I think about it, the more I think it might not be a bad idea…I also have a great idea for a new phone app that I would totally download if it existed…but I’m thinking it may be an unlikely app since while it could be really helpful for people like me, in the wrong hands I could see it turning into a tool for bad people, and I’m not quite sure how one would identify who gets the fully featured app and who is not allowed to have the full version…but if that issue could be overcome I think we probably have all of the necessary technology to make it work if someone designed it…or at least based on how I think technology works based on TV shows and other apps I think we have the needed tech…I can’t say I actually have personal knowledge on the subject…

Are you ready? People get ready!

(Jesus is coming back – Jordan Feliz)

Am I ready is a hard question. It has been about 5 and a half months since I walked through a door Monday morning to a team excited to see me. Yes, my coresidents and coworkers were happy to see me for a few months of that gap, but y’all a manager who didn’t want you and isn’t afraid to tell you that is not a good place to walk into. So from that perspective I am ready to start 5 and a half months ago. It’s like the Crowder song ‘in the house.’ “Somebody who loves you is waiting at the door; it’s home sweet home here.” That is what is most important to me in a job. Having a supportive team around me that is happy to see me and wants me to be present.

It is hard to be not wanted, but it is also hard in a different way to be very wanted. I wish I had a bunch of body doubles so I could try out all the jobs and decide which one was really the best…preferably a bunch of body doubles that do not require housing, because I can’t afford to house multiple people. Just housing myself is more than enough. I am so thankful that I am wanted though…and it is incredible how I can meet someone for only a 30 minute conversation and have that person emailing me a month later that someone she knows is hiring for a position that she thinks I’d like and she passed on my information and the manager for that position would really like to chat with me and most likely would offer the position…and what makes that even better is that this person clearly wasn’t just pawning off this stranger who was in the market for a new job onto the first opening she came across, but had truly considered whether that position would be a good fit for me…I would have accepted if I didn’t already have enough other places interested in me that it was time to stop adding more potential positions to the mix…pharmacy really is a small world, and that just goes to show you how definitely not all, but a lot of us really care about each other. My happy place is caring for neonates and teaching, so your perfect fit might not be right next to mine if your niche is different, but even if we can’t be coworkers, I still want to help the people I come across find something good for them…and I found last year that because my path had some off-road adventures, I’ve got a lot of good perspective to share with students as they begin thinking about what is important to them in their career. Someday I would love to harness that in one of the motivational talks at midyear, because hearing from someone whose path wasn’t exactly as planned and as expected is something that would have really benefitted me as a student and a new practitioner…unfortunately, my fear of speaking in large groups makes that dream something that might not be a good reality for me…plus if midyear doesn’t stay virtual there is the whole is the awesome opportunities to mentor students worth the stress of traveling to midyear thing…non-in-person midyear is awful because you don’t get those mentoring opportunities, but it is also awesome because you can do the conference without leaving home. If we could figure out how to merge those two worlds, like bringing the conference to a city near me, for example, I would be absolutely thrilled to attend!! I think ASHP should work on better mobility for their conference so that everyone gets a turn having it in their part of the country.

That housing question is also an interesting are you ready…Recently I found another place that looks like my dream new apartment…this time based on what it looks like balanced with the price, not *just* based on the title of the building. This time instead of the problem being that the complex is incredibly rundown, the problem is that the next expected availability isn’t until mid-to-late 2023. I don’t necessarily need to move anywhere immediately, but I do need to move before 2023…plus this newest dream new apartment is actually located in a state I would like to live in, which is a significant improvement over the other dream apartment I found…lol…but I mean, I kind of am ready…I have a few Airbnb wish lists…and there are always hotels…and if it were less cold than it is today I am not opposed to sleeping in my car if I found a safe and legal place to do so and also knew of a place to shower…so I guess like a campground with good security…I mean, last Monday I was in my car a good 18 hours or so and having to be in position to drive that long feels like forever, but laying down to sleep would be much better…just not if my toes and fingers were going to freeze without the heat on…

Part of getting ready last night I decided was pealing the dead skin off my feet from when they blistered on December 2…so most of the layers of skin and dried blood from the bottoms of my feet are gone…except eventually I was smart enough to realize that some of the skin was not ready to come off, and also that I wasn’t quite sure why getting ready to possibly stay in an Airbnb required my blisters to be picked off…

Also, on a totally different note, if you want to be ready for anything, making sure your favorite clothes make it into the wash is important…my laundry has been done twice in the past two-ish weeks which should be more than enough except both times a few preferred clothing items failed to make it to the wash…also, I don’t know why I bother owning more than one pair each of leggings, jeans, scrub bottoms, and dress pants…I tend to wash and wear and wash and wear the same ones over and over…(I do actually know why though – fear of not having enough when I need something)…and I thought I needed lots of tops, but after like 3.5 months of wearing the same handful of t-shirts every day, and living the past month with only two interview dresses, one interview tank top, one non-interview tank top, one sweater, and two jackets for dress and church clothes makes me feel like even when I go back to work I could be totally fine with significantly fewer clothes…I don’t actually need to own enough clothes to go two months without doing any laundry…hashtag I wouldn’t be surprised if I could go 3-4 months without doing laundry except that I would probably run out of bras and possibly socks too soon…

Wanna know someone else who wasn’t ready? The lady who gave birth to a 29-weeker in an airplane bathroom back in like May without knowing she was pregnant until suddenly there was a baby…I was curious today how they kept the baby alive to get to the hospital and I couldn’t find all the details I was hoping for even after spending way too many hours “researching” it by reading every story I could get my hands on, but a lot of it was really creative ideas – microwaved waterbottles for heat, a sock for a hat, modifying an oxygen mask…so yeah…that would have been an eventful flight and that baby is so lucky to be alive! The human body is incredible.

can you make something

(Tasha Layton – into the sea)

I’m a problem-solver by nature…but once in a while I have to admit I cannot do everything myself. And I started learning last year how to ask for help…which is how I got a new oven in early December when the smoke alarm wouldn’t stop going off because smoke was pouring out of the oven and the oven wouldn’t turn off and I didn’t know what to do because fanning the alarm was decidedly not working and I was starting to feel like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen…probably I should have run for help as soon as the alarm started going off, but it was so sensitive that just cooking a pizza a minute or two too long set it off if I left the oven open longer than the time it takes to remove the pizza, so the first few minutes were just me being annoyed and it wasn’t until I couldn’t see across my apartment that I realized this was a bigger problem than I could handle on my own…so it was kind of like the boy that cried wolf…although the first time the smoke alarm went off I also didn’t immediately leave either, it took me a couple minutes of grabbing my laptop, notebook, phone, keys, and putting on shoes, and by that time the alarm was already off again…so I can’t claim I am the most responsive person to smoke alarms…I blame middle school when no one cared if I went outside for fire drills so the majority of the time I didn’t, the exception being if I’d been on my way to or from the restroom or otherwise was wandering and caught in an area in which I was locked out of the area containing my notebook and pencil etc until the drill was over in which case I’d go outside since I didn’t have anything better to do…then I got to high school where they would select only one or two classrooms to participate in a fire drill…so all that to say my brain and body have been taught to tune out fire alarms…although I still don’t understand why if a classroom on the second floor was on fire why the classrooms directly above and below it wouldn’t also need to be evacuated, but not my circus, not my monkeys…

So yeah, there are a lot of things I can DIY, but there are also a lot of things I am unable to do it myself…

But I am now armed with the knowledge that the lowest cost fork-lift rental near me is about $250…which is more than I really would like to spend…but the bigger problem is that I realized I had no idea how I would bring the fork lift home because the item I wanted to use it on was currently blocking my car from moving, and I wasn’t really sure what kind of range a fork lift would have to know if I was able to walk to the rental place if I could drive the fork lift all the way home…in the process of trying to ascertain this information I discovered that they usually have three pedals vs the two that cars have…and that was the point at which I realized there may be a bit of a learning curve and perhaps I would need a new one so that I could ensure I had the complete manual (plus then if I owned it I could choose whether to hold onto it for later or sell it to recoup some of the costs)…this was after I determined the ones on Craigslist weren’t going to work for me…as it turns out there are some sites where you can have free delivery…the problem is twofold. First, the reason I want one is because I had an object I would like moved right away, and second, they range in price for things that look nearly identical from about $1000 to tens of thousands of dollars and I don’t want to get one that doesn’t work, but my credit limit isn’t high enough to even think about trying to purchase an expensive one…so I decided I was going to have to hold my horses…and now I have the song patience from Thomas the Tank Engine stuck in my head…which I suppose is better than last week when the rubber ducky song by Kelly Hogan was stuck in my head…

Also, some day I am going to learn not to go outside barefoot when there is snow on the ground…I did very quickly Thursday-ish though figure out that a damp paper towel is not an effective tool for getting millions of footprints off of a porous wooden surface…it probably also wouldn’t have been effective for a singular footprint, but as previously noted, I was barefoot and getting kinda cold so I figured that was another problem it made more sense to give up and throw money at…

It seems like giving up and throwing money at problems is becoming an unwanted super power of mine…I did the same thing with Comcast last week…it took around 5 to 6 hours to finally be connected with a call center employee who repeated the same unhelpful line every time I tried to rephrase the question until I just gave up and was like this isn’t worth my time…

Taking this another direction, sometimes I do not know what the right answer is.

For 2 months I carefully checked the locks as soon as I walked in my door, I was cautious about where I went, I was genuinely worried about what would happen if I was found, so I needed to keep my location secret from anyone who might be likely to share it even inadvertently with the wrong person.

And then I found out someone had been tracking me.

That was initially incredibly terrifying. I had a lot going on that week so I did the best I could to keep working through all the things I needed to do, but that first night I was hiding with the lights off so it would look like I wasn’t home…which was probably excessive, but I was really shaken up. I slept in the living room because those blinds were easier to completely close and since I was furniture-free by that point I could sleep wherever I wanted – I briefly considered the closet before realizing that considering the mouse fiasco and that the mouse had had no fear running past me while I did zoom calls in my closet, it seemed like a bad idea to sleep where I knew the mouse had been since I hadn’t bleached the carpet. Luckily a night to process it and my anxiety significantly decreased – helpful since trying to carry on with life without turning on the lights except when absolutely necessary (aka using the bathroom or trying to prepare for an interview) is kinda challenging. For at least a little while I felt like maybe what I found out meant that for the first time I could feel safe in my own apartment. That was a huge blessing. My safety outside of my apartment when not at friends’ houses may have been compromised, but I felt better about being home.

It’s been up and down a lot since then.

The way I see it there are a few possibilities and I alternate between which one I am most certain is accurate which means my sense of felt safety is all over the place. To be honest, based on the information someone was willing to pass along to me, I knew leaving my apartment at all was probably a risk and had selected a route that seemed like my best and least risky option, and as much as biking helped my body and mind, I now wonder whether it would have been better to just stay home completely. It would have been a much less joyful life, but it would have spared me the terror of finding out I’d been being tracked. I never actually entered the fitness center of my apartment, but perhaps a stationary bike would have been an option in conjunction with my buy nothing escapades that felt a little safer simply because they were so goal-directed and kept me in highly populated areas yet were also fully unpredictable because I checked the group for unsafe faces before participating. I don’t usually let fear limit my life beyond what is needed for a reasonable level of safety, but maybe my calculation of safety was off…but anyway, these are the options as I see it…

1. I had been incident-free because person A did not share my location. (safe-ish)
2. I had been incident-free because person B decided not to risk being caught doing anything to me in public. (safe)
3. I had been incident-free because there isn’t good public transit most of my route (which was part of the selection process on that route) which made it too inconvenient to bother me. (safe mostly)
4. I had been incident-free because I had gotten lucky that nothing had happened yet. (unsafe)
5. I had been incident-free because most if not all of my weekday rides were at times that would have precluded both being where I was and being at work the hours person B worked. (semi-safe)
6. I had been incident-free intentionally in order to eventually catch me off guard and therefore more vulnerable to attack. (very unsafe)

Pretty much 100% unrelated, but as much as I whine about masks, today I kinda wished I’d worn a mask to church…I really only planned on going to church and the library and so I had no reason to bring or wear a mask since if you are in an emergency the hospital I’m sure would provide a mask and obvi I wasn’t planning any scheduled medical visits on a Sunday 🙂 …but one lady who sat adjacent to me smelled like she bathed in perfume and it was really annoying but I didn’t want to be rude and go find somewhere else to sit and it didn’t occur to me to ask at the welcome desk for a mask…that is one thing covid has been great for – people or places smell bad and you can wear a mask which mitigates how uncomfortable it is to be around them, but without the social impoliteness of plugging your nose or pulling your shirt over your face…also if you have misplaced the headband you usually keep sanitized and use in the winter to warm your breathing air and it is really cold outside you can be one of those people who wear a mask when not at the hospital and not even inside and use the mask to warm your air. It is slightly less effective, but I haven’t lost all my masks yet (important as a pharmacist since hospitals are an important part of my world), but I have misplaced my headband.

Speaking of smells, I realized recently that while I’ve claimed for basically ever that I do not like yogurt, actually what I do not like is the smell of yogurt. I do not mind the taste of most yogurts if I don’t have to smell them, but I cannot handle the smell of Greek yogurt, and I do not like the smell of regular yogurt…how did I figure this out? Dark chocolate peppermint yogurt…it looked good. It smelt bad. I plugged my nose and loved the first bite. I then put vaporub in my nose so I couldn’t smell the yogurt and enjoyed the rest of the container. And threw the container in the outside trash to get the smell away from me…it was delicious…So that was a huge paradigm shift…

Also, someday I would really like to actually remember how directionally challenged I am *before* I try to go anywhere…I was like I totally know how to get to the library. I don’t need any directions…umm…what I knew was how to get to Walmart. Walmart is not the library. Luckily, I was 97% sure how to get from Walmart to the library, so after the road I thought would take me to the library brought me face to face with Walmart I made my best guess how to get to the library from there and I was actually right about that…so I just took the very scenic route to the library…someday I will learn that directions are important…today just wasn’t that day.

Also 100% unrelated, but way back whenever daylight savings happened I did not fully participate…unplugging my clock in mid-December was how I dealt with that…and I still haven’t changed my watch…but I decided that it was time to get back on a schedule that correlates with the rest of the world…which is all well and good, but my body was like why stop at one time zone? Why don’t we just shift everything by like 4 or 5 hours…which is how we transitioned from the girl who goes to bed between 8 and 9 depending on what clock you use (when not hanging with friends)  to the girl who goes to bed ‘eventually’ and gets up in time for lunch…also not an ideal schedule…it might be time soon to actually set the alarm on the clock…

Wanna know something? Now there are three songs stuck in my head…ADHD under the sea by the HolderMess, and I’m so pregnant by Iggy Azalea/WhatsUpMoms, and Rested by Royals (and possibly the Murray’s??)…that second one has me wondering where in the world the idea of push presents came from…like dude, isn’t the baby the present at that point?!?! Yesterday I was singing the picky eater anthem all day (are you hungry for some meat spaghetti do I make you feel like eating you say no not really ‘cause oh I got myself a picky eater, she will always refuse what I feed her)…I love music so much. I’m thankful for whomever invented music.

…and I am well aware my posts lately have been all over the place…my brain has felt like a ping pong ball and it has come out in my writing…it doesn’t bother me, and I am secure enough in myself that I really don’t care if I lose followers…I don’t have my blog set up to earn revenue from visits so it really makes no difference…and to be honest, since the point in college when I found out my views had spiked because someone was pouring through my posts trying to find a way to get me in trouble, my stats getting too good makes me feel nervous…I’m glad I had someone at that time who was a good informant letting me know that this person was annoyed at the random string of numbers I’d used as a moniker…I may have been super annoyed but I also knew that keeping the peace was more important than most other things.

Now I Can’t Care Less

(Lord I’m ready now – Plumb)

One of my traits that is both a curse and a blessing is that I can’t hold a grudge very long…it is mostly a blessing, but do you ever have those moments where you look at your life and are like why am I not angry anymore? I mean, I think that is probably what it means to be a Christian, but also it is definitely counter-cultural in today’s world.

I used to be so angry with my college mostly for their response when I disclosed what had been going on during my third year…and now I obviously still remember it and am not happy about it, but there is no anger left…instead I see the incredible people who supported me through that year and the rest of my time at the school. I can also see how the trauma impacted my relationships. I pretty much exclusively had friends outside of school after that because at school it was hard to be real enough to develop relationships because I was always so worried about the next time a certain person was going to try to insert herself into my life, but outside of school I had an incredible community that I loved and that loved me…and that I may have just mostly abandoned when I graduated because even the association with being my friends during that time period and in the same city as my school was too painful to keep up with.

And there are a lot of things I don’t really want to write about because I want to get to the reason I’m writing this…

So I felt really frustrated and angry in September because ASHP really should have had my back…especially after my many years of membership and thousands of dollars in application and match fees over the previous 5 years…and they pretty much told me (and the pharmacists who called on my behalf) that they don’t feel any responsibility in these types of situations – it is all up to the hospitals…and it isn’t fair because there were accreditation standards that were blatantly violated during my time as a pgy-2 resident but because I didn’t have the confidence to draw attention to the areas for improvement until I was gone they couldn’t do anything to change it for the future potential pharmacists/residents…so I decided I was never giving them any more money…

So I ignored the membership renewal notices and forgot about it…until today, December 31, when I was like oh c**p I forgot to renew my membership and it expires today…and then I remembered that it wasn’t exactly originally a failure to remember…and that is where the issue comes in…because I waited so long they took away my resident discount…and the new price was almost high enough that I was like nope, because this year I made very little money but spent more than any other year – even the years I was paying college tuition…and it was over 1.5 times the amount I spent any of the past three years before even getting to the end of December…but then I was like girl you want to work towards BCPPS this year and to do that you will probably still come out ahead by being a member…so I spent the money and prayed I’d be done with unexpected expenses for the year…but who knows, because I can’t remember whether I finished paying the rent penalty I earned myself when I was thinking I was going to move in mid-November and didn’t think about how that much penalty plus the notice I needed to give was so much that even if I had moved immediately the amount I would ‘save’ was actually probably only maybe a few hundred dollars if even that as compared to just keeping the apartment and not living in it if I moved…oops…and obvi continuing to live there just made the cost equation become more unbalanced…so there might be more coming…but as much as I hate asking for help, I do know that if I really couldn’t keep going financially that there are people who would jump in and help me if I admitted I needed help…it is just incredibly difficult to admit that you need help. It is so much easier to offer help than to ask for it…especially financial help…it isn’t so bad to accept food or clothes from friends, but money just feels different.

Lol…hashtag late addition…

So I thought I posted this yesterday, but then I opened up my computer today and what did I see, but this post…still very much in draft status…oops…but now I can add another thought…at what point in society did someone come up with the idea that on the last day of the year we should ensure that we start the next year exhausted? In what universe does that make sense? The only rationale I can think of (which is honestly not that rational in my opinion…) is that it gives you a really good chance of having a better day on day 2 of the year than you had on day 1 so that you can start the year with an upward trajectory…but considering you don’t have a lot of room for upward trajectory after that unless your goal by the end of the year is to hibernate, I’m not sure what good that is…I’d rather just start off on a level playing field and see what happens. I am excited for this year because I saw on Instagram someone posted that 2022 is literally 2020 too. Most of 2020 was pretty incredible, so I have decided that means 2022 is also going to be primarily great! I’m not saying nothing bad happened in 2020, because there definitely were things I wish I could change, but I mean it wasn’t a bad year. I went ice skating with an incredible friend. I went to a superbowl party with nobody I knew and had a lot of fun. I finally matched…in phase 1…with an incredible program. I spent 12 weeks in the nicu. I had a couple really amazing going away parties. I made a lot of incredible friends. To be fair, 2021 also had a lot of awesomeness as well, but right now I am too close to be able to really say let’s do 2021 again, because the memory of the pain is way too real…plus my bank account says let’s try to spend a little less money this year…

Hashtag second late addition…have you ever wondered what someone would think if a stranger was going through all your paperwork? I mean, a stranger would probably have a lot of questions looking at mine…and I’m having trouble giving good examples that don’t reveal more information than I feel safe sharing at the moment…hashtag forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting – you don’t have to let people continue to have access to your heart and opportunities to impact your safety as a prerequisite for forgiving them…but the biggest curiosity is probably why there was only one gas purchase for my Monkey between the last week of September and the first week of December, but like 7 of them plus some flights and busses in December (and if they could see the future, probably at least 4 more gas purchases in the next 2 days…) for someone who hates travel my bottom sure has seen a lot of seat time in the past month…surprisingly that travel is actually a negligible expense for the year. It was the most expensive car year since purchasing a car, but that is mostly because paying for parking from direct deposit doesn’t count in my budget but paying otherwise does, and I’ve never had to pay to park at my own home prior to this year…so yeah I’d love to not see the TSA this year unless it is to go to midyear, and there are also some states that I would be happy to not see again, ‘cause their roads are confusing and/or scary…not saying whether that last one is realistic or not based on my expected trajectory at this point…just saying I have some preferences…

Also, 100% unrelated, but about the first minute or so of this video was hilarious https://youtu.be/YALVhpj2uyc …the second half the jokes got more contrived and less funny, but true dat to the national mall being significantly less interesting than the mall of themerica…