This Fucking Year

We're nearly three weeks into a whole new decade and yet everything seems really fucking familiar. Perhaps things are even worse.

2010 ended with such promise. I was happy in a healthy relationship, was about to switch to weekday day hours at my job, and the comic I've been working on for a year was coming together.

Now I feel like everything is unraveling and spinning out of control. Weird shit seems to have tainted my happy/healthy relationship, the day hours prove to be so exhausting that I can't even get any writing done, so the comic work looms like an impossible task above me.

So I sit alone at Botanica drinking cheap happy hour drinks because it's familiar and keeps me from having to go home to my tiny room in Sunset Park that I have to clean out and vacate very soon. The apartment search has gone well but now there's doubts.

Am I rushing things again? As different and healthier as this relationship is, I suddenly feel this anxiety about mixing my life with someone again. I fear that this is a mistake and that it will have the same outcome as before: terrible emotional suffering for us both.

Am I damaged goods? I try so hard to not be stressed out and to let the weight of these epic problems sink me. Okay maybe not epic problems, but everywhere I turn right now there is tension. And if this relationship goes bad...

I wonder if it's me. I am better than I've ever been, so hopefully this is just stress talking, but every day this week I transport myself back in time exactly a year and imagine myself back in the psych ward and then it feels like nothing has changed, though really so much has.

Maybe I need to focus on the positive. Reilly believes in me and our comic, so if I can find some sort of stability in the next two months and get the work done on our comic, well I could quite easily develop that into a career writing comics and more.

This past weekend we all hung out with new couple friends who are creative types that don't know comics that well but are both producing comic movies and developing motion comics. Even if that doesn't go beyond a friendship, it's still really cool.

More of my friends seem to be around and socializing is definitely much easier than it once was. I'm not writing as much but I am getting closer to getting projects done and out there in the world. Or at least beginning to collaborate more. I guess I just worry that I won't be able to get anything done with this job.

I'm not quite writing all this with the existential dread I once did. I feel more positive, much less susceptible to despair. I just need to catch a break. Have a stable living situation, a less stressful job, make sure the relationship is good and strong.

Right now though, everything is fucked. Not one aspect of my life isn't in flux or stressing me out. I don't know what to do. Is this temporary? Do I need to uproot my life and start over? Can I even do that at this point? Do I want to? Am I overreacting?

I just want to be back in St. Vincent's right now. Chit-chatting with Marshall over dinner that's chosen for me, made to come socialize with the other patients in the common room, told when to go to bed, when to wake up, given a pill that makes it all better.

It sounds so juvenile and like a cop-out. And it is. I didn't belong there. I was a faker. A wannabe. A tourist. Wanting to be fucked up so someone could wipe my mouth for me when I drooled, someone to make my decisions for me so I didn't have to deal with consequences.

I dunno. How long do you need to pretend to be crazy? How do you snap yourself out of it? Why is it so hard to be an adult in this world? I don't like change and I guess none of us really do, but this time there's just a lot of it. The most amount since I moved to NYC seven years ago.

If I survived it then I can now. Tonight it's just with the help of alcohol. And words.