things have been rough for the last while. the pastebin i posted back in july, nothing about my situation has improved. all of the things i was trying to improve have been reversed. things are still shitty.

on friday the 25th, on top of everything else, my great grandfather on my dad's mom's side passed away. he was 1 month shy of 105 years old and lived an incredible life. while he was blessed with a long and happy life, it was still sad for all of us. we weren't that close but grief is something i don't know how to handle or express well and sometimes i just bottle it all up. 2 of my good friends have died in the last 4 years and the topic of death is one i wish i wasn't so familiar with. i don't know how to talk about it, i don't know how to come to terms with it. i've never been good at dealing with it and there's been too much of it in my life lately.

furthermore, there's a lot of drama on that side of the family. none of it is the fault of any of my immediate relatives, but things have been tense over the last 20 years or so. we had reunions for my great grandpa's birthday every year, and his daughter (my grandma's sister) i hadn't seen since i was 8 years old bc of family drama. some relatives weren't present at the funeral bc of drama. some ppl who were attending have some really heavy tension going on between them. so my immediate family were all kinda hoping and praying that nothing would happen. thankfully, nothing did, everyone was respectful and either put their differences aside or avoided each other for the day. that was a relief.

my grandpa (dad's dad) and great grandma (his mom) are buried in the same cemetery that my great grandpa was buried in. when we were driving in for the funeral my dad said "i'm starting to get a little too familiar with this place". i couldn't help but silently agree. i was really close to my grandfather and my great grandma and went to visit their gravesites when the funeral proceedings were over. this town is far away from where i live so i haven't been able to do that for a while.

my dad's parents divorced when he was a kid, and both remarried either before i was born or while i was young. my grandfather's wife's name is on the tombstone for when she eventually passes, but that's another topic of contention and something that made it even more painful. she disowned the family in 2007 and disappeared and we haven't heard from her since. nobody really knows why it happened. she lived on property that my dad owns and we went to investigate after and she had left behind everything having to do with us. my grandfather's war medals, pictures of me and my brother, etc. it still stings me to this day because she had always been in my life, it was like growing up with 6 grandparents instead of 4. i think this is where my abandonment issues and related anxiety come from.

one thing i've taken away from this is that life is random. i could be dead tomorrow. i don't ever, ever want the opportunity to leave this earth with my last words to somebody i care about having been said in anger or desperation. and i need to keep that philosophy at the forefront.

and i've had a lot of time to think about that as recently a close friend cut off contact with me. it was a complicated and extremely painful situation where we were both at fault but also neither one of us was really at fault. hard to explain, but details aren't necessary and i'd rather keep it private and respectful and not about what either of us did or didn't do or should have and shouldn't have done. none of that matters right now and i'd rather only talk about what it's meant for my state of mind and relationships with other people. none of the negativity i've experienced in the last month is his fault and i alone am responsible for handling myself.

we didn't speak to each other for a month. i spent most of that month feeling depressed and anxious almost all of the time. i don't think there was a single day where i didn't randomly break down crying about it, hating myself for what had happened and regretting not doing things differently. it was hard not to feel like a complete fuckup. i tried very hard to find an escape, i picked up 4 new programming projects and submitted to 5 marathons to keep my mind occupied. but that only works for so long when you're stuck on a solution and your mind starts to wander. socializing with people helped a little bit but i rarely had the energy for it and quite honestly was overwhelmed by the idea that ppl might try to bring the situation up to me and then i'd just lose my shit having to open up the wound to explain it again, so i isolated myself on a personal level except for a handful of occasions. this is why i didn't stream. i started drinking more at a loss of any other ideas to numb the pain but i didn't let that get out of control at least. my old self destructive habits of starving myself and then binge eating a shitload of junk food came back and all the weight i lost before came back with it. ppl like to tell me i'm strong but i'm really fucking not. this is how i deal with shit and i don't know how to stop it and that is nobody's fault but my own. i can't let things control my life like this, all it does is make ppl feel guilty who don't deserve it and makes ppl not want to get too close to me for fear of making it happen again. and that's not healthy and not conducive to having good relationships with people, and i need to stop it. i don't know how yet, so i failed at that.

for whatever reason the only things that really made me feel better were hanging out in streams, particularly albrecht's and v0oid's and bluntbunny's. if i was struggling a lot and i saw any one of them was live i'd go there to calm down. not sure why that worked. all 3 of those guys are really cool.

i didn't like talking to people about it. it did nothing to fix the situation and it made me feel even shittier to talk about it at all. i hated it. but i spent so much time overwhelmed with sadness and anger that occasionally i needed to vent to somebody. the people i vented to would almost always be someone who knows my friend on a personal level. this was on purpose. i hate harboring any kind of feelings of negativity toward someone i care about, and this friend never means to hurt me or do anything maliciously. mutual friends know the way both of us operate when we're overwhelmed, and more importantly that we're both good people who don't mean to hurt each other. talking to people who know this first hand helps me be reasonable and fair about what i'm feeling and gives me real perspective on the situation. it didn't fix my destructive coping mechanisms but it stopped me from letting my feelings turn from hurt to active disdain. if you were one of these people, thank you, seriously. i don't think venting to anyone who doesn't know him personally would have accomplished this, and an echo chamber of agreeing with my negativity and "yea well screw him anyway" woulda probably made it worse. i didn't want that. i didn't want anyone getting the wrong idea about my friend just because i was upset. that's my friend and i'll still stick up for him even when i'm mad and won't let anyone speak badly of him to me. i told my friends not to bring it up to either one of us and to respect his privacy and i think everyone complied with that. i would still like for ppl to follow this instruction.

even more than being angry, i really, really missed him. but we started talking a little bit again, and it's been respectful. im having a hard time holding back tears writing this because just last week i thought we might never hear from each other again. it'll take time, but i'm happy that we at least exist to each other again. i woke up this morning in a good mood for the first time i think since my birthday.

trying to keep all of this as nondescript and impersonal as possible because the details of my friendship with him are nobody's business but ours and i have no interest in making our personal stuff public, but all of you see the way i act out every day on here, how i go from upset to happy and back and forth very quickly, and not respond to people, and i at least should explain why things are the way they are for me. i lost a friend, i let it affect me too much, i only wanted to talk about it to mutuals, we're in touch again, that's all i'm gonna say. i've reread this paste like 40 times now to make it both respectful to my friend and our privacy but also to explain my weird behaviour to everyone else.

i'm fortunate to be surrounded by so many wonderful people, and i felt like an asshole pushing everyone away because i just really really did not have the energy to be around anyone or even talk to anyone most of the time. even ppl trying to cheer me up about the situation was too much and made me even more reclusive. i stopped reading my PMs and would go take a nap or whatever. but i'm lucky that ppl understood this and also understand that no two friendships are the same. losing someone important to you does not mean you can always really replace them with others, it's not really like that. but it's not about replacement, each and every friendship is unique and important on its own. it doesn't make anyone else in my life any less important to me. if anyone else i'm close to cut me off like that again i know it'd be the same as it was this time. not the first time it's happened. but i'm the one who needs to learn how to deal with my weakness in times of stress and i'm not going to let my fear of self-destructiveness get in the way of developing meaningful relationships in the future. i don't know how to fix my issues yet but i know for sure i'm not going to give up on trying. i'm still here and surviving so i must be doing at least 1 thing right.

things have been kind of emotional for me. if you got this far thanks for reading. i need to be somewhat reclusive for a while after all of this upheaval so please understand that this is why i rarely ever respond to DMs and facebook/discord messages except from ppl i already hang out with regularly, and would appreciate receiving no PMs about this pastebin. being in the twittersphere or in groups is fine, but talking to most ppl 1 on 1 is too much for me right now. it's not personal. i want to spend more time fixing my life and less time having to talk about it.