A hard day

 I should be happy enough; my mom is slated to be vaccinated today, and it's Friday (even though I have some work I should do this weekend) (But I also carry the tiny vague worry of "what if she's one of the vanishingly rare ones who has a terrible reaction to it?")

But I'm tired, and sad. Someone I was friends (or maybe friendly acquaintances?*) with online apparently deleted their accounts and I don't have a contact e-mail for them so....okay, no more friendly banter from that quarter. And I feel sad.

And of course, I am still thinking again of the losses I've had since 2018. (I see that as the start of my "modern era of loss" - that's the year my friend Steve died, and after that, there have been a few people every year since). And I know it's unreasonable of me but I also worry that, I'm just gonna keep losing people until I have no one left to talk to or who I care about. And that because of the damned pandemic, I'm not meeting ANYBODY new (not that I ever really did often meet people) and that when it does end (IF it ever ends, and I still have my doubts), everyone else will have filled up their friend-pods and there will be no room for me.

Yes, I know this is very much Brought To You By The Nine Year Old Girl Who Was The Only Girl In Her Class Not Invited To Kristin's Birthday Party And Kristin Gleefully Told Me That but still, I have a lot of issues about worrying I'm not "wanted" around.

(*I think I assume deeper friendship than other people do. That, like, I'm a C-list friend of someone I consider an A-list friend of mine, because I have few friends and they have many, and also I am not "sparkly" in the way some people are)

And yeah, my counselor yesterday mentioned "I can tell you are really feeling the isolation hard" and she's right, but what do I do? Another Zoom thing online? That's unsatisfying even if I could find someone willing to do it. Masking up and going out somewhere? Then I worry about exposure time. I don't know. 

More and more, I feel this is just to be endured. Maybe for the rest of my life? I don't know.

I also again feel some doubts about my work. A report about high levels of cheating via Chegg (dang Chegg. I hate Chegg) and other places and I don't know. I try to make exams less "cheatable" but that's hard and a lot more work both on the front end (writing them) and the back end (grading them) and I have like ZERO bandwidth for doing additional work these days. But then I feel like I'm generating worthless degrees for people if people can just cheat their way through and get the same degree as someone who works hard. And then I got thinking about "well, there probably won't be any jobs when they graduate anyway" and I'm beginning to feel the line "pointless work for pointless pay" I heard in some song somewhere. Like, I once took a lot of meaning-of-life from doing my job and feeling I was good at my job, but I don't feel that as much any more so....where do I find meaning now? Not in relationships, the ones I have are either so distant or so tenuous that finding meaning in those probably isn't good.

Oh, I know 90% of this is being tired, and being overwhelmed, and it's like what Louise Rich wrote in "We Took to the Woods" about how we never question what we're doing when things are going WELL, it's only when there's a struggle that we look at it and go "is this worth it? What's the point anyway?"

"It amounts to this. "Is it worth-while to live like this?" is a question I never ask myself under fair conditions. I ask it only when exasperation or discomfort or exhaustion pre-determine No as an answer...Happy people aren't given to soul-searching, I find. Revolt and reform, whether private or general, are always bred in misery and discontent..."

 And yeah. I don't know. I tell myself "if you quit your job, you'd be way more miserable than you are now, look, you really aren't even THAT miserable, it's just that times were sufficiently good before that you didn't appreciate them and now a little discomfort is throwing you for a loop, just suck it up."

But also part of it is the uncertainty - the realization that "this might never be 'over' in the way you want it to be 'over'" and also the "so you say, "okay, I'll stick out another day" but you keep doing that and you never get closer to things being better." I mean, there's a point where you just....you've just stuck out a bunch of days in the hope of things improving and you just get tired and discouraged and that's where I am at the moment.

I dunno. I half-joked on Twitter that if I could find someone to hug me for like five minutes it might do a "hard reset" of my emotions and then I'd be able to be normal, but even in the before-times I'd never find someone willing to hug me for that long.

I might, when I FINALLY get home for the evening, try rolling myself up tightly in a blanket; that's literally the only substitute I have.. It won't help but it will be something. 

Though I will say at least I don't think my brain is broken, or at least, not broken in a way I have to worry about; my counselor noted that "we're not really laying down memories at the moment [I had done my "I don't even REMEMBER January" thing at her] because everything is so much the same every day, we are doing so little that is new and different, that the part of our brain that deals with novelty kind of goes to sleep, and it seems like everything runs together" and again I guess it's an issue of my rat-cage having insufficient enrichment, but I don't know how to GIVE it enrichment given how limited things are right now. I don't even know what I did in the before-times that gave some sense of differentness to the days....