2022-10-21 — Reclusive

I’m really struggling right now, and I just keep getting worse and worse. That steady overall decent continues.

Emotionally, my health is at perhaps the lowest point of my life. My physical health is playing a large part in that as well. I’m stressed and discouraged pretty much constantly. I’m having more joint pain than I think I’ve ever had before. My ankles, knees, hips, and back are all really bad right now, and there’s not much of a let up. I’m wondering if I’ll even be able to do my backpacking trip to New Zealand/Australia.

Emotionally, I’m bad enough right now that I’m barely functioning.

I’ve never really had to deal with anxiety before, but as I lose more and more hope in my life, and as I see more an more issues making simply being alive an unattractive ordeal (such as chronic pain when I already don’t really have much hope for figuring out how to be happy regardless of what’s going on around me)… it’s taking a pretty big toll right now.

I’m going forward mostly clinging onto the hope that I’ll be able to find a way to choose happiness in life. In the meantime, the other thing that keeps me going is being able to help people.

I have so many things going on right now. I’m stressed inside and out and sideways.

The gazillion things I’ve got myself involved in right certainly have increased my stress load immensely. Those, of course, are my own choice. I could reverse course on those, but… I have people who depend on me right now, and it’s not intelligent to just bring my life to a stand still right now, right when I’m on the cusp of reaching some of my biggest financial goals (passive income).

In the meantime, though, I’m tired. I’m discouraged. I’m in a pretty decent amount of pain right now. I’m an emotional mess of volcanic proportions, and the physical pain has amplified my feelings the last few days and especially today.

I’m almost paralyzed today. I’m only slightly functional.

It’s hard not to think on the past right now. Decisions I made several years ago are what has brought me to where I am now–well, one decision really. The financial issues I had for several years wouldn’t have happened had I made different choices. The physical issues I’m dealing with right now… I’d never have come to Arkansas and done the things that caused my body the damage it’s dealing with now. The life circumstances would almost certainly be completely different. I’d likely have gotten married probably back in 2010. Of course, there would still be huge life issues to deal with. Life is hard for many if not most of us here on this pale blue dot in the middle of this sprawling universe.

I’m tired. I want to be free of stress for a while, but I’m not mentally/emotionally capable of that right now, and I keep giving myself more and more and more to do. Can’t seem to kick that part of my nature.

Very likely in the very near future, something is either going to work out, or I’m going to have a complete emotional breakdown.

I’m sure there are other possibilities, but I’m… yeah.

Today, I can barely move. The very air I breathe into my lungs has a weight to it that pushes me into my chair as I write. Or so it feels. It’s as if the only functional part of me is my hands, functional enough to write.

I have this day, relatively open to get so many things done that need to be gotten done before I leave, but I can’t move myself–only enough to make sure the people who depend on me are taken care of.

I’m tired.

And the biggest challenge of my life… making a choice to abandon or embrace that choice I made so many years ago that has led to most of the biggest challenges of my life… I can’t make it. I honestly don’t know how. I’ve tried. Again and again and again, I’ve tried. But I can’t make my heart feel good in the choices. Fear dominates. I’ve tried to abandon that choice, change course, and move forward in that new direction, but life gets worse and worse worse.

There are so many factors, and it certainly can’t be claimed for certain as a causal relationship of events. At best, it’s correlational. It’s possibly causal, but there’s no way to prove that.

I try to abandon, but there’s a good deal of fear. There’s no peace in the choice, and I’m falling apart faster. When I embraced the choice, I had cycles of fear and peace, but at least there was peace, until I let myself start to worry again.

Today… I have no peace. Pretty much ever. Cycles are anxiety and calm, mostly in some level of worry or another (and please forgive me any of you out there who have anxiety as like a major clinical thing. I don’t mean to diminish your experience. I just don’t know how else to describe mine).

I want to talk it all out, and I’ve done so with some people, but it doesn’t seem to help. There’s one person I want to talk to, and we’ve lost touch, so it’s not a possibility for now. And even talking to that person, if things aren’t different than before, probably wouldn’t help. It would probably just bring more pain.

I feel like I have a hole in my soul–something’s missing.

In other news, my LLC formation has been completed for the tree service company. So that’s good. I’m still waiting to hear back on the S-Corp election, and I have yet to receive my EIN number. It’s taking a good bit longer than expected, but hopefully it’ll be better than the nightmare I went through last time. Jury is still out, but here’s hoping.

What else… oh, right! The spider lift. So I mentioned that one of the issues with the spider lift was that the brake was locked on for the swing boom, leaving me unable to rotate the machine at all, just go up and down.

So… in an effort to save money, I tried to do some of the work myself. I figured i could at least remove the brake assembly and take it in and have them fix it.

It took me a while to get it all apart. Once apart, I decided to try to disassemble the brake assembly itself. So I began, and it wasn’t long before I realized I was completely over my head and didn’t even know how to get the thing back together. 😬

On a cold night, I tried and tried. I finally managed to get the assembly itself put back together after a while, but not sure if I’d screwed anything up in the process, as parts inside had changed places a bit. Then it was a mess trying to get the assembly back in the lift, as I’d spun the gears inside, and they no longer lined up with the lift. Because of that, I had to disassemble the brake assembly two or three more times to find the position where the gears would line up together. But once I finally got those two lined up, the gear on the motor that drives the other gears wouldn’t line up.

At that point, I was pretty discouraged, frustrated, and cold, and it was dark outside. But I had the idea to run the motor without it being attached to the rest of the assembly, and that worked. I got the motor to spin the gear just enough to put it back into the brake assembly housing and then get everything bolted back together.

Wahoo!

Oh, I guess I didn’t mention I was putting it all back together because the repair place wanted it all together to be able to properly diagnose it (which makes complete sense), so I put it back together.

Once all the bolts were back in place and tightened down, I went to make sure that I hadn’t screwed it up worse and to make sure that I hadn’t made the original issue unreproduceable. I went to rotate the lift to make sure I could prove that it would try to spin but would get hung up, and what did I find?

It wasn’t broken anymore. 🙃

The machine… could spin, just like it was supposed to. It… worked.

So… whatever it was that I did apparently… fixed it. 🙃

I don’t know what I did, other than take it apart and put it back together. I did notice that the hydraulic fluid that was in the brake assembly was thicker heavy hydraulic fluid and not the transmission fluid that the system was supposed to use, so… maybe that was it? I drained the thick stuff out of it.

Who knows. But it’s working now, so that’s fabulous!

All right. I’m gonna go for the rest of the day and try and… get stuff done that needs to be gotten done.

I’ll try and write a follow up tonight. G’day all.

Oh! Funny/scary story. I was replacing the dead-bolt assembly in the garage door, and I felt something on my ear. I reached up and grabbed it and through it to the floor. What did I see hit the floor?

Yup. A brown recluse.

That was last night, so I’m probably ok, but you can’t generally feel brown recluse bites, so you don’t know right away if you’ve been bitten. You just have to wait.

Gratefully, it’s been like 18 hours, or so, I think, and no symptoms, so I’m good. In the 6 1/2 years I’ve been here, this is my first experience with a brown recluse crawling on me.

And how on earth did it get on my ear?!?! It must have either dropped from the ceiling or hitched a ride on my hand when I brought it up to my head at some point?

Who knows.

Love and hugs. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen