Having a bit of money - a little bit, only, really - is not the same as having money enough to be ok for a while, or even having some money. So by December I was already running out of money. The night I described in my previous post truly did a number on me, and soon thereafter I stopped going to the gym, and I went back to eating crap. The wights I'd lost would soon start to return, bit by bit. Back then - and thank god for that - I wasn't drinking alcohol regularly, which might have actually saved my life. To save some money, I cancelled my gym membership - every penny saved would soon become invaluable.
This was also the time where I found myself diving even deeper into social media. I had accounts on pretty much every platform, though I only used facebook regularly, and myspace infrequently. But my usage of those platforms had been, at least so far, quite cursory compared to how intense it would prove to become in the following years. When I first started using social media, I'd add people whom I knew and some other people who I'd chance upon, but I never had a huge amoubt of followers or 'friends'. Around this time, I started expanding my connections to the hundreds, and then the thousands. I'd spend entire days lost in a deluge of information and updates, endlessly doomscrolling through the lives of an untold number of people I didn't know and most likely never would. I started searching for groups that catered to my specific music tastes, groups for comics, for movies, for books, pages for artists, authors, and filmmakers.
It was during this time that I finally started to realize just how broken I had become. Nothing I was doing with my life was neither healthy nor productive. But I couldn't, in all honesty, see a way out of this. I'd have to break myself some more to do that. But I also realized that I wasn't the only broken thing out there. There many more out there, baring their wee hearts on the ether, screaming for affection, desperate for love. These modern ways of connecting us seeme to amplify our suffering, and gave us avenues to publicly open up ourselves. I found it addicting, coming across human wrecks that were on the same journey as I was, or who were worse than I was, or who just couldn't yet face up to their demons. I accumulated 'friends', I had a chance to go to someone's house and get laid, someone I only knew from facebook, but I didn't go. But all this was emptying me... and fast. I was fast running out of steam... I was fast running out of everything.
And not even the few truly good things I managed to extract from that time seemed to uplift me - I met a few people who would eventually have an impact in my life, some time in the future.
A future, alas, that almost never was.
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