Category: Dear Diary

On Friday night – Saturday early morning, as my father would be willing to correct me – I had to call an ambulance. It’s the second one I ever had to call – for myself at least. If we call a visit to the ER that I didn’t call an ambulance for, then it’s the third.

This is too technical. What I am trying to say is that this is the third time that I have voluntarily addressed emergency medical services when it comes to my person.

OK, no. Now that I think of it, it’s the fourth. Yes. It was ambiguous, but ultimately I said yes. Everything else was not by me, or not for me.

I am- See, I hate writing sentences like these, because life surely does take pride in proving me otherwise – but I am not afraid of death, per se. I don’t want to die, but I don’t go around terrified of death. I am afraid of various long-term and/ or terminal illnesses that have the ability to take bodily freedom from me or put a term on my existence. And I don’t want to go around playing with my life, testing just how much shit the universe can take from me before it decides to end my presence on this earthly plane. Which is nice of me to say, but LORD knows I’m hardly able to learn from my mistakes.

I digress. I called an ambulance, because my chest, my jaw, and my upper arms felt like someone set my poppet on fire. It was just as sudden, too. One second I’m finishing my shift, the other I’m in debilitating pain. I ran down a list of what could be happening, settling somewhere between nerve pain due to my back problems and a heart attack because I really should eat less donuts. I took an ibuprofen just in case it was either, and tried to wait it out. It seemed to go away for about 3 minutes, only to continue with renewed fervour. About ten minutes later I called an ambulance.

The doctor asked me about my medical history and what meds I’m taking. She and her assistant did an ECG and read my blood pressure, ruled out impending cardiac arrest and stroke. She thought I might be having a panic attack, given the meds I take, but that day there was nothing to panic about, and I never had one before, so why the fuck start now? Just for shits and giggles, I suppose, the lady took my blood pressure again – and by her face I could see she didn’t like what the meter said. “Let’s give you something to lower that,” she said. She refused to tell me how much it was, but asked me if I had a hypertensive crisis before. Matter of fact, I did, and it was the second time I ever had to address emergency medical services.

They gave me a furosemide shot in addition to the initial captopril, and stayed with me until the digits started to go down. As they were leaving, I asked what the meter read again, and she told me it was 180.

“Yeah,” I said, “That’s a bit much.”
“A BIT?”
“OK, a lot bit.”

So here I am. I don’t have the blood pressure device, because a family member took both of them with them when they visited last time. Not sure why, I don’t care, all I care is that I need to buy one for me, and potentially hide it when not in use.

But since I don’t have a meter, I have no way of knowing what my blood pressure is right now. There are no visible signs of hypertension, and the symptoms I have are a headache and blurred vision – but I seemingly always have a headache, and blurred vision is likely because I fell asleep in my contacts the day before, and have an unfortunate case of the dry eye.

I should in all seriousness treat this as a cautionary tale. This slight medical scare together with my need to reorganise my life so I could straighten my finances should be enough incentive to do some shit and turn my life back to how I was. Psychotically organised, obsessed with how I look and feel, slashing every goal off of my list with a one-track mind ferocity of a really maniacal goldfish. When I’m focussed like that, I get results incredibly fast. It’s not that I’m special, anyone would, with that level of concentration on goals.

I am, however, going to end this day with a piece of chocolate cake and a glass of almond milk.

What it mostly means is the increasing speed of thoughts spinning in my head.

You know.

I have debt. I want to pay it off. I need to pay it off. The exorbitant payments I do each month only represent 1.47% of the total sum.

Before I pay off debt, I need to have a small cushion of savings – exactly for situations like my washing machine going out. But even the third of the price of a modest machine will take me about half a year to save, at the rate I’m going currently.

And it just layers on, and on, and on.

I begin thinking about my personal values, and how my existence has been in complete misalignment with them. Even if we take away my constant fluctuation between anarchy, personal liberation, and absconding to live as a witch of the woods and my perfectly capitalist desire to live like the Sultan of Brunei, albeit still very personally liberated – there is no alignment to my values in my current actions, because the most radical thing I do these days is refuse a coffee to go at the start of my day and get a free one from work instead.

So I could either put away the two bucks towards life in the woods or the golden Rolls Royce. Whichever. Either the one that comes first, or proves to be most lucrative to my emotional state of the moment.

Please forgive me this jumbled narrative. I’ve been omitting one of the more important medications in my protocol, because I can’t find my back-up box, and there’s a shortage of it in the country, so I can’t buy any. It sure is fun to be a crazy bitch in 2023.

I suppose it’s more fun than being a crazy bitch in the 1960s.

But I digress.

I will need to get a little (just a touch, really) more radical with my value alignment, because my washing machine is about to bite the dust, and winter is coming, and I’ve got bills to pay, and debt to kill, and promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. If I am to refuse that wretched cup of coffee for any period of time, I am to restructure half of my slack and lackluster habits. And it’s not even a matter of me constantly complicating things and wanting to be perfect in one smooth action. It would mean to have some breakfasts ready at work, because more often than not I also take a croissant with my coffee, because I was too late to have breakfast at home. So it will also mean waking up earlier. Which will mean going to bed earlier (though if my medication will be gone for another week or so, we can just exclude sleep from schedule). Which will mean leaving work earlier. Which will mean being more aggressive with my time and also eating at my desk, which will mean prepped lunches, etc. etc.

Who would have thought I’d have to abandon my languid swamp all because of a daily to-go coffee.

I haven’t done one of those month-long marathon content-outputting challenges in a while, and this year I cautiously believe I can try again.

The issue is, there are several of these challenges, and obviously I want to do them all.

And this is where burnout begins. So let’s just… Let’s just talk.

There’s Inktober. It’s a challenge for artists. It even comes with prompts. The rules are to do a complete drawing a day for the month of October. ‘Ink’ implies it needs to be inked, but I assume no one would shoot me in the eye if I just do pencil.

Then there’s Vlogtober. A vlog a day, or at least every other day, for the month of October.

There’s the obvious NaNoWriMo. It usually runs in November, and encourages you to write 50k words, aka the first draft of a book.

Then there’s NaBloPoMo, an unofficial variation of NaNoWriMo. It, too, takes place in November, but it focusses on writing a blog post every day.

And then there’s Vlogmas and Blogmas – a focus on vlogging or blogging daily/ every other day all through the month of December until Christmas. My Christmas is in January, so whenever I’ve done Vlogmas, I stopped at the end of December.

I can tell I’m entering hypomania, because I get a gleam in my eye from the sheer thought of DOING THEM ALL, AT THE SAME TIME.

Can I do it? Can I push myself for 90 days of rabid creativity, obviously without failing my other commitments, with a few caveats of maybe pre-writing posts if I’m in a particularly proliferous mood? Not if I want to keep most of my commitments. So let’s trim the list.

I can tell I’m not doing Vlogtober. I won’t be in the mood to film full-fledged vlogs any time soon. Maybe come December, so I could do Vlogmas. … Maybe I could do Reeltober? Or TikTober? Shortober? The possibilities are endless, but I think I might just do Inktober and Blogtober. The latter would replace NaBloPoMo for me. Then, come November I’ll be able to focus on NaNo. I haven’t written fiction in a while. The thought terrifies me.

In December I will be able to take a break from writing – not that I ever want to, but there’s a difference between daily writing and daily writing challenge – and focus on video. I hope I’ll be in the mood by then. To tell the truth I do kinda miss vlogging, but I just want to scrap what I’ve been doing before and change the format. Maybe I’ll also do a combo of vlogging and blogging for the month of December. A blog post alternating with a vlog, 15 of each in total.

All of it sounds overwhelming and monumental, but like every other thing in life, it becomes easier the more you do it. And as I mentioned, I might be able to ‘cheat’ with blogging by writing more than one post per day. I suppose NaNo could have those cheats too, as long as the total is 50k words of fiction.