Diary: Own place, new career, declare love.

[oak]

Aaaagh. Gah.

This is me being uncomfortable. To put words here I know I need to express. This post is the most honest I've been on this forum. Not that I've lied elsewhere, but I've not been this honest. Here goes.

tldr: Even if the life I've lived the last six years hasn't been satisfactory, it was still my life.

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I've never felt comfortable, loved, or okay in my own skin since at least before I got sober (ten years next month <3).

While not terrible in every way, constantly, I've not had a lot of joy or connection, basically ever. I am grateful, but not happy.

New Career

Later this summer I intend to make a move to coding/tech. PHP/MySQL in about five months if my current job's annoying-ness stays status quo, or .NET within a few week if they really annoy me (likely!).

More anon.

New Place

This week I move into my own place, for the first time I've been sober. I lived on my own before I got sober, but I am a different person. Starting ten years ago I couch surfed at a friend's place. That ended badly after I got fired from my minimum wage job, and had no options or resources. My parents took me in, in May 2012. I was broke, hopeless, and unemployable for another 18 months.

But I was happy! I hung out with a friend, a beautiful, kind, accepting young woman. I of course fell in love with her, and resolved to do better in my career to position myself to be able to be available later, if she was interested. I effected career improvement by getting hired as a temp at a respected local institution, and later getting hired in an entry level white collar position, with quite a bit of responsibility, at the same institution.

I miss her. I love her. She soon (this is 2012, soon after I moved in with my parents) took up with someone else, and I wish her well.

Meanwhile, for all of four years, 2013-2016, I was wracked with stress, mostly from work.

On August 9, 2016 I was friendzoned by a beauty. Since then I've slowly improved my eating and exercise habits, got my teeth fixed, and have been teaching myself to code since late 2014.

I grieve that friendzoning, and think about her every day.

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Tuesday I move to a smaller town, about twenty minutes further away from both the big suburb I've lived in, and my current workplace.

With your kind indulgence I'll post here as I transition: this forum is a great help to me. This is one of the few places I can be myself. Thank you for listening.

This post has been difficult to write.

[brownblob]

You can always be yourself here Oak.
To quote the ATeam "I love it when a plan comes together."
I hope the new place and your future job change work out for you.

[oak]

Thank you, Brownblob.

Thanks to your encouragement, I am going to post again today.

Greiving

I am grieving intensely. That my experience here, and at work, could have been so much more. Specifically that:

[*]My friend from childhood, who lived across the street, drank himself to death in early 2016. I was down a friend.

[*]I was friendzoned in August 2016. What could have been.

[*]I was frequently tired after a day of work, an hour of coding practice at my desk, fighting traffic. Arriving home at 6:45 or 7 in a big, amorphous suburb I never made any friends.

[*]A beautiful girlfriend didn't fall out of the sky and marry me.

Gratitude

That being said, I have much to be grateful for. In fact, if I could have seen my life today during that awful time exactly six years, that 2012 me would have fallen on his knees, weeping for joy:

[*]My teeth are fixed.

[*]I've successfully held down a responsible position for a respected institution.

[*]I've been contacted for interviews for coding, having started from zero in November 2014.

[*]I am down thirty pounds, and feel great.

[*]My posture is good.

[*]I am still sober.

[*]For the first time in my life I am moving to a city of my choosing.

[*]I have the support of this forum

[*]I have hope. I have options. I have fight. I have vigor. I have a plan for the future, and back up plans.

None of those good things listed above were true in 2012.

I have come a long way, and I know I need a change and to move on. How I greive what wasn't. What I squandered that is most important (love, happiness, nature, connection) for what is immediate but meaningless (getting angry about work).

[oak]

I scared, sad, excited, happy, overwhelmed, and regretful all at once about my experience. I sign the lease tomorrow.

This will be the first time I've been on my own since I've been sober. Drinking isn't a threat, but loneliness is. Hence, inspired by Skyrim, I've created a google doc spreadsheet that has 12 "quests", or social opportunities I've committed to in the coming weeks. For a little continuity, until I can afford to get the internet turned on in two weeks, I have downloaded Skyrim to my laptop Steam, and gotten several books from the library. I am somewhat prepared. ???

I regret, deeply, the opportunities I've squandered the last six years. Though I am grateful to be in better shape than I was then.

One little thing that makes me sad: I'll be dismantling my computer desk. I bought it around Thanksgiving 2014. I had been a file clerk temp for less than a year, and I wanted to teach myself Rails on an XP desktop (!). I soon got a 8.1 Windows laptop that I ruined six months later by spilling water on the keyboard. It is little things that I remember.

I face my anxieties of signing a lease, moving in, and meeting my neighbors starting tomorrow. How will I eat? Sleep? Can I afford this? It is exciting and exhausting to slide down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, knowing that it is up to me, with lots of support, to climb back up. But a climbing up of my own choice, for the first time since I've been sober.

[oak]

I signed the lease, and moved a little bit of my stuff in. It went as well as I could hope. I am just facing a more real future.

Bigger picture, this is a very emotional experience, for reasons I'll use my words about ongoing.

Just to face reality. A scary future, but that I can start to build my own of.

There is much more I'd like to say, but now this is enough. Thank you for listening.

[manuel_moe_g]

You are quite awesome, Oak. An inspiration.

[oak]

Thank you Manuel Moe. Your encouragement means a lot, since yesterday was one of the most shocking days of my life.

(Warning: I sound like a bit of a classist jerk in this post. I like people of all social classes, but I have had enough of working poverty and especially underearning. So my problem is with the ratio of my effort to results, not with anyone else or how they live their lives. How someone else lives is of zero interest to me. I wish them well, and only care about doing better for myself.)

1. The lease signing, and moving a little bit of my stuff in, was actually fine. A big change in life, but I handled that anxiety okay.

2. I have a masters degree, work in an entry level white collar position for a reputable institution, and have been teaching myself to code for 3.5 years. And I end up in a run down apartment complex.

What specifically astonishes me is that I can spiral down (this spiral mostly being related to shock #3) so quickly and no one cares.

I realize that if I don't do better in my career and housing choices, I face a future that is doubly bad: putting too much unrewarded effort into a corporate America that will endlessly take the best years of my (that is, right now), and while my coworkers have nice suburban homes, and my college friends who got into coding as recently as ten years ago are upper middle class, the actual reality of my life right now is loneliness and run down housing*.

3. I lived with parents for six years, and while generally it was an unhappy and lonely experience, at least I had people who know me and generally/usually glad to see me. Suddenly that is all gone, just like that.

*This is true, horrifyingly true. I also have several, well many, things going for me.

I have a job, I have my health, and I have my mind. I have a friend who says that if I can build a simple website in Visual Studio he can get me coding contractor interviews for positions that pay enough so I could break the lease (I discussed this with the apartment manager before signing) and pretty quickly scoot up the socio-economic ladder.

I am meeting this friend for breakfast this weekend, and have been working on such a Visual Studio project. There are another two hours left in the online tutorial, which translates to about eight hours of coding (ie stopping, going back to correct the code, starting again).

I stayed at my parents house last night, but tonight will spend the night, and those going forward, alone in that apartment. I'm just astonished how quickly I can go from a known person in nice surroundings to an alone person in rundown surroundings, and no one really cares or notices. This world is cold.

That being said, I already have several plans, and will post more about them soon.

Thank you for listening.

[manuel_moe_g]

Don't apologize for how you are feeling. We want you to validate your feelings, because you are a soul that needs the input from your feelings to know what you have to change to thrive, because you deserve to thrive.

It gets worse before it gets better. Trust me that there are people who care about you in your time of need, so at least you have that going for you.

Strength to you, my friend and brother.

[bigeekgirl]

Congratulations, oak!

A place of your own is a BIG step. I wish we could all throw you a house warming party. But know it's a big hairy deal and we are celebrating with you.

[oak]

Thanks MM and BGG!

@MM: During my first day I read your encouraging post ten times. It was all the encouragement I had. You made my life better.

@BGG: Inspired by you, I intentionally went to the local coffee shop Friday morning, before work, to get out of my head and to start to meet people in town.

There is much I want to say, but for now: I am doing better, am meeting my neighbors (they all seem to be lovely), and I am heartily sick of being working poor, and everything that comes with it (I had an existential meltdown when I realized I had to back to the laundry mat, in the sense I am too old for this and work too hard for this.)

I have several deep issues to face (budgeting, earning more money, escaping a dying profession for a modern one, making friends, dating, living more comfortably with more fun), but for now I am very proud that I've taken action.

I say that because the action I've taken in the last five days took me 5-10 years to eventually get around to after I went broke in 2006.

I'll have much more to say once I get internet (I can't afford it now), but for now know that this forum has changed my life for the better.