It looked like I was going to be able to pull it off on my own originally, but it was going to take a year and every waking moment of every day was going to suck in the meantime. I was right about it sucking, but I was wrong about pulling it off. I had finally breathed a sigh of relief the weekend before Christmas Eve in 2019 since it looked like I was actually going to make it and it was only a matter of another month or two. I hadn't allowed myself to attach hopes to anything less than concrete at that point. COVID really screwed that up, and I got reset to zero.
I've been barely holding it together since then. Five years of working sh jobs for even worse people who know they have you and delight in it--even more than they value their own bottom line. Now I don't even have a job; it's been a month since my last paycheck and no more are coming. I look young and inexperienced and give the impression that I'm healthy enough financially/circumstantially to be able to absorb whatever shocks I might incur from others shifting onto me the things that they'd prefer for someone else to bear instead of them. But none of those things are true. People in Austin almost seem disappointed when they peg you for a slacker but it turns out you're not one, like you're doing something wrong.
I'll spend whole days looking for jobs from whomever might take me, including bad ones, with nothing to show for it. Once I write down my professional experience or we talk, anyone with a brain can tell I'm at the wrong place--I should be working somewhere that's a good job. Good jobs take 6 weeks to 6 months, but I don't have that, and I don't have the environmental stability to make it through the process, anyway, as far as take home assignments and clear, distraction-free thinking go. I can't even start to work out how I'm going to wash the last 5 years off my resume.