I'm not one to complain unless I can spin it in a way that hopefully makes people laugh, at least pretend I can be a comedian and make my misery humor for someone else, but lately I just can't shrug it off anymore.

My life has been a steady slope down into depression, little things here and there paired with the feeling that I'm making no real progress in life, and it always wells up near the end of the year. The holidays are usually not a fun time for me, as much as I try to make them. Poor income generally makes me feel like shit because I can't afford to get my friends the things I want, and being around my family fills me with more shame than warmth. Everyone there is some form of success- my cousin who is more like a sister is becoming an attorney and is bringing her newborn child this year, while all I have to talk about is current events and half-baked witticism.

Usually my only solace, the one thing that made me bear this season is the cool weather, and I don't even get that blessing seeing as it's still 80 degrees in December. Not sure how many of you follow my twitter nonsense but yesterday the motor in my AC blew out so I was sweating in my own condo. Today I got the call that it's 500 USD to fix it, so more expenses that I can't simply shrug off because money is tight, soon as it gets back into spring that's a downright health risk not to mention how much sleep I'll lose if I'm sweating on top of the sheets.

I don't know why I let my mom talk me into that arrangement, I'm hardly responsible enough to own my own property, when shit goes wrong I don't possess the resources to fix it myself. She keeps trying to hold me to the same standards of living she has been used to for longer than I've been alive, which my lifestyle and income can't keep up with. Because I have no one else to turn to when things look grim, that's the only advice I can get, and it feels like it's only digging a deeper pit of despair in the long run. I feel like a bird that keeps trying to fly the nest only to be dragged back into it every time I crash.

Compared to most, I know my life isn't that bad. My family doesn't despise me or have any deep internal dysfunction. Though money is tight, I'm not starving. It feels like I'm sitting on top of a house of cards that's about to collapse and the stress is suffocating me. Again it feels like I'm going nowhere, whenever I have a small streak of luck, anything that might give me cause for optimism it quickly gets swept over by something blind-sighting me. Always one step forward and two steps back, determination is growing harder to keep my fingers around.

I'm just getting tired of where I am, the city I grew up in and this state in general is starting to feel symbolic of my life's stagnation and I just want to go. Not even really sure where, but I feel like I just want to disappear and start over somewhere new, somewhere were I won't be reminded of every bad decision that led me to where I am now. I have no skills that would allow that, no jobs I could pick up to try and make it on my own or even networking skills that would let me root myself in a new community. I feel so stuck and I just don't want to be the same person anymore.