I do try to remain positive on here, and when I don’t, to not follow it by another negative post, especially when my life is so good overall, but I need to vent somewhere, even if I feel my problems are all first-world, and they are, so please bear with me as I scream into my privileged void.

We are going to bed a half hour earlier and getting up a half hour earlier, and for both my husband and me, it has created no end of misery. I do it because if I sleep, I lose my chance of 15 minutes with him in the morning as he gets ready, and right now every minute with him feels precious. But I am irritable and tired, and he is just tired. Then he leaves, and I don’t see him again til 9:00 pm when we have dinner the moment he walks through the door.

By then, I’ve been so hungry, snacked so much, that I continue to get heavier and more unhappy about it. I want to exercise to balance this out, but even as I wake up today, at 7:15 am the temp was 81°, or 91° with the current humidity, an utter misery and in the hundreds by the time I want to exercise.

It seems so petty to be irritated by waking up at 7:15 am, perfectly normal time that it is, and a half hour longer I am a different person. It’s also not like I don’t know what truly waking up early is: it is waking up at 4:30 am to take a bus, a train, and another bus, to make it to work before 8:00 am and with 45 minutes to spare until your workplace opens, because if you miss a single bus or train you’d be late so you need that buffer. I did that, for months, so I know what that feels like, and how ridiculous our current complaint is. But for some reason, it really, really is very hard to have a good morning as a result. Even though I sleep well enough, and certainly enough hours.

Compounding my bad mood, yesterday I noticed a single mite in my most precious snails, my poms. I wanted to cry. It’s possible however that they too came with mites, likely being wild snails. Only two weeks ago did I put them in soil without hypoaspis since their arrival, so it could be I had been treating them all along without realizing it and stopped too soon. I don’t know. But, more hypoaspis are arriving today and I’m going to be very aggressive treating these snails because if these die, I won’t want to have snails anymore or ever again.

Meanwhile, the four left of my original group haven’t shown mites in well over a week, but they are weak and will not eat. So the prognosis is bad.

In spite of all this I am still trying my hardest with everything. Work on the book continues, with another chapter completed; commission work continues with a comic for Snowthebear now in process of inking and Island’s commission being shaded. I keep up with my housework. I keep doing my best.

Above all, even though he mostly lays on the couch in the evenings (or used to) while I go about my business, I miss Christopher’s presence in the house very deeply. We spend, on average, two hours a day together. Due to his snoring, we currently don’t even sleep together. I’ve gotten used to the loneliness caused by the pandemic, to almost not seeing my mom at all this year, to not having our dinners or parties anymore. Mites aside, the snails help, as do the cats, as do my stuffed animals, and books. But for all I have, without my husband I am so unhappy. Not being able to sit in a coffee shop, people watching while I work, makes it much harder, as this helped my loneliness a lot.

All plans canceled and nothing to look forward to. I’m becoming bitter and jaded about it all. Everything just seems to matter less and less.

Please don’t think I’m not grateful for all I have: a beautiful home, a library, lots of toys, good things to eat, my pets, a loving husband. Honestly having so much just makes my being morose and depressed all the more a source of guilt.

I am not asking for advice or solutions. I just needed to vent.

The one upside in my life right now is how good of a decision it was to leave all the sites I left (primarily Twitter but also everywhere else.) The last step I took was a permanent Twitter block, so even without my account, I can’t ever visit Twitter or Tumblr on any of my devices, even when my main blocks are off, those are never available. It’s effectively as though those sites no longer exist for me and it’s so freeing.