It’s genuinely nice to hear you’re enjoying your time here, and that your “trajectory” seems to be for the better.

Mine’s been pretty much the opposite. My health started taking a sharp turn for the worse a bit before COVID got going, and I still haven’t come to terms with all of it. Started off with a tumor in a particularly vexing place, which caused personality changes over a couple of years although I didn’t know it at the time, and doctors chalked up my mental and physical symptoms to everything from anxiety to panic attacks to HIV (which I don’t have and really had no chance of having). My up to that point fantastic marriage disintegrated because I turned into an anxious and tired mess, and I was frankly a shit partner. A while after the divorce I lost my job in the company I helped found because the tumor affected my cognitive function too, but doctors kept telling me it’s just anxiety, depression, alcoholism, what the fuck ever.

After a while I did end up getting a correct diagnosis, and when I got radiotherapy it triggered an autoimmune condition that really fucked me up, but that also took more than a year to actually get diagnosed correctly, and at that point there’d already been enough damage that it took 20 years off my life expectancy. Naturally the radiotherapy didn’t do the trick so I also needed surgery, and its complications combined with the autoimmune stuff have left me unable to work and generally so tired that I can barely function. Haven’t had the energy to eg. see my friends all that much, and since I now live alone I can sometimes go for weeks without speaking to another human (I talk to myself a lot…). I’m often in neuropathic and arthritic pain, and I can’t even fucking swallow too well anymore because of nerve damage, so eating and sometimes even drinking is a chore and can lead to coughing fits. Thanks to the autoimmune stuff I occasionally get, well… let’s say acute diarrhea which has led me to shitting my pants a couple of times because I couldn’t get to the toilet in time, and I was at home the second time that happened. So leaving the apartment can be a dicey proposition sometimes for days at a time. I drink way too much nowadays, but it’s either that or having to deal with all this sober, and I don’t have the energy for that, let alone interest.

If I’m being honest, I’m just waiting to die, and hoping it’ll happen sooner rather than later because none of this is curable and will only get worse. My life has lost all meaning, and it’s difficult to enjoy anything anymore due to constant brain fog, pain, and tiredness.