Incredibly, after several touch-and-go moments, my elderly budgie Biscuit pulled through his illness. As I suspected, the issue was a cold that set in during a surprisingly heavy molt. This combo zapped his energy to the point where his poor body language was screaming “I am about to die” for three straight weeks. As I may have already shared, my first bird died in my lap of molting shock, so I at least knew what I was looking at.

Fortunately, it looks like my interventions helped him through. He’s really slow now, but he’s playing and singing once more, which is something I was -certain- I’d never see again. I’ll bet I get one more year with him, and will be extremely grateful for any remaining time I get. The next time he gets sick and eventually dies, I won’t be caught off guard.

As all this was distracting me, my mom contracted really bad pneumonia and landed in the hospital. She’s better now, but I’m starting to realize that this parade of upsets will pretty much be “life,” so I’ve shifted my thoughts towards learning how to roll with the punches. "Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child" comes to mind. And, God knows, I've read journals that freeze my blood. There are people out there who have it way, WAY worse than I do. That, too, motivates me to quit whining and adapt.

Regardless, the sudden shock of all this made a bunch of things fall into place. I’ll share these things in a follow-up journal. The gist is that I spent 2014-2022 in a manic, waking coma made of amphetamines, alcohol, ambien and psychiatric quakery. Due to a complete absence of my prior shyness as a consequence of this psychotic-cocktail, I proceeded to make more friends that I could consciously track, and then ran my life and career completely off the rails.

I am only just realizing what has happened. Now that I’ve quit all these things as of 6-12 months ago, it’s as though the “me” that I was for seven years has vanished, leaving the current “me" with scores of upset and confused people asking “what happened?” I really do feel like I’ve suddenly “woken up” after an insane dream, only to find out that the dream was real, and that I’m completely surrounded by the debris of my errors. It’s a very disorienting feeling, one that's taken a few months to finally articulate.

I haven't changed too much, however. I am still a very loyal person, and the sudden sense that I have betrayed or misled dozens of people that I care deeply for has frozen me in a state of existential horror. It doesn’t help matters that my innate shyness has returned with a vengeance. Anyway, I’ll share more on this later. Eight years of my life, at least, were drug-addled cringe. Sigh.

For the first time in my life, words are helping me more than pictures. It’s unexpected, but I’ll take the assist. I really want to better develop my understanding of English grammar and writing.

This is all just to say that “I’m fine.” I’m just very quiet and focusing deeply on writing, learning apache and php, and rebuilding a sense of self, let alone a new connection with art. Please forgive me for not responding to people right now. I’m still powerfully shy, and my body has been asking me to limit social contact to my one irl friend and my family. I’ll be reaching out to people real soon.

I’ll most likely be freezing my Patreon charges again this month. I’m feeling better, but don’t want to force my brain to do art when it’s still somewhat in wound-licking mode, nor do I want to charge for a month of no activity.

Thank you for putting up with journals like this. I do this only so that I can fix my sense of self and get back to art.