On Aging and Figuring Out What's Next

On my 32nd birthday, I celebrated with a large group of friends at my favorite bar. I was so convinced that my 30s would be my decade. 

Then the pandemic arrived two weeks later.

I tell you this because the reason I missed my last post was that I just turned 35. And though this birthday I kept it simple, I really wasn't handling it as well as I'd liked. The truth is that the past three years have been loss-after-loss, so much of which had piled on top of itself that I kind of just stopped celebrating my birthday altogether. 

I stopped wanting to grow. I sought more than anything to get away from myself, and in doing so, lost what the point of it all was regarding my writing journey. I think that in the mess of things, I somehow lost my voice and the very things that made me want to write in the first place. I'd done so mostly out of survival - though that now, has ultimately changed.

There's this game of politics more or less, just like in any sort of career, that sort of comes with the territory. It's hit me pretty recently as a journalist. And I think with Chat GPT, and really, just how everything has changed regarding stances in what I'm calling "truth by convenience" (basically, news that only counts for the person so long as it fits a particular viewpoint regardless of actual facts; methods 100% driven to generate traffic/wealth) sort of has become most of the industry.

This was what I am seeing a lot lately. Friends more-or-less betraying friends, not realizing the daggers were already raised behind them, in this silly game of group hugs, just as the layoffs keep happening across the board. I don't think I want to take part in this anymore. I'm tired of living in a real-life Game of Thrones, and kind of, just want to do the things I like while not worrying about the rest... mainly, being stabbed in the back as many of my cohorts seem to be doing behind closed doors.

For context, I left the mental health field five years ago for this exact same reason. Honestly, I was tired of selling lies to people who deserved better. One of my last, very haunting memories, was calming a hostile client down at a doctor's office because they were de-compensating for the first time. They trusted my reassurance that things would be alright, and even, get better - as I got them the help they needed.

That help? Was lying to them about how we would consider looking into their situation (which was, to be honest, a delusion that they were experiencing that was completely not at all what was happening in reality). It was all in a quick-thinking do-it-or-die moment where I'd de-escalated the situation but did so pretty much by breaking their trust. And they went back to square one regarding their progress in our program. 

The truth, which is something that the field was pretty bad at addressing, was that these people were the ones likely to forever stay in the cycle of the system. Unfortunately, the people that make it out okay and recover... were usually people that came from high means and good wealth. 

What I learned early was that social work was a service... but not a cure. And most of my clients, users with addictions and severe mental health disorders were many, well, hopeless cases. People whom, in many ways, all I did was keep people off the streets. 

What a therapist hates to tell you is that they're almost always a band-aid on a flesh wound. A part of a system as dysfunctional as the education is in this country, in that things only seem to be getting worse the further we cut budgets. 

Nowadays, I write to process the many things that I felt the world wouldn't be ready for in handling. To tell them a story in an easier and more digestible way of understanding. 

But I was wrong. 

Or at least, I think the way that I've been going about writing was wrong. Let alone, my philosophy about living. Something has changed in me. Recently. I kind of fixed some of my own trauma and as a result, the very thing I feared for so long happened in that... I don't really feel the desire to write anymore. 

The problems are still there in my life, as are the hurdles I know that I need to fix but I just, genuinely don't seem to care. 

I guess I lost hope as to why stories matter... And by proxy, I've lost a sense of why I matter. I'm not sure why I'm doing this anymore. 

So I'm going away. 

I'm going to work on things I still have just a spark of passion about. Maybe, it's time to get away and unplug from so many things that make me - just sad. 

It's mostly all in the fields of media but also, just so much of life in general now - as I'm seeing news all the time about jobs being reduced, mid-level screenwriters finding it impossible to find work, and to top it all off: Chat GPT. Sort of making news writing a bit of a redundant skill.

More than anything, I really want to find an authentic way to keep doing this. Something that doesn't feel so fake. Because at this rate... I'm repeating my past mistakes in struggling to keep a dying thing moving in a broken system that's at a complete pivot point.

And... I just... I guess I don't know anymore. 

I knew once why I wrote. 

I just can't figure out why I write now.