The Effects of Pressure

I woke up around 3am as I usually do to take care of the bodily needs eczema causes. It’s a stressful pressure (long term sleep deprevation, itch) I’m used to that is so normalized that it’s hard to image what I could do without its constant presence. Another kind of pressure is the one I became aware of when I unwisely checked the messages on phone. Baring some kind of financial miracle on the landlord’s part, I must find somewhere else to live by the middle of Janurary. Without savings, a job, or a healthy body, it seems very unlikely that I will. I tried to sleep more and I’m unsure if I was able to.

The crushing weight I feel upon me has gotten heavier and now the task of “coding or writing my way out of poverty” just seems less likely now. I miss the days when I was in college and threat of deadlines helped me focus enough to complete tasks I probably would have not completed otherwise. Now that the “dead” in deadline has become a bit literal my mind is a chaos and things like programming exercises and cover letters have gone from difficult to impossible.

I went for a walk. Normally that helps a little. Not this time. Maybe in a day or two my mind will be clear enough to work. But now the clock is ticking and 29 days left seems a lot scarier than 30 days left. Even just imagining how it’ll be when it’s 10 or less sends me into a spiral. I understand why people turn to dangerous and desperate things when the pressures of poverty start to add up. Even if there are truly other options the ability to think clearly is one of the first things to go when you learn you have 30 days to find new shelter just as winter is starting to get deadly cold.

One small bit of relief I have is that the worse thing that can happen to me is that I will die from this. I’ve spent a decade clinging to the idea that someday I’d go back to the life I had in my late 20s and that it’d make all the pain and suffering worthwhile. If that’s always been a foolish illusion then I should be relieved that the “retirement plan” I used to joke about is happening sooner rather than later.

“I’ll walk into the woods and wait for the cold to take me”. To a person with things to look forward to that seems bleak, but if all I have left is to be in endless medical studies that can only help future sufferers of this terrible illness with nothing for myself then I can be grateful for an ending. Photos of eczema covered body are used in the education of dermatologists and my participation in several medical studies have brought drugs like Dupixent to market, so my suffering wasn’t all for nothing.