The last few months have been hell. I think a US-based trans woman posting about what hell means is fairly obvious on its face, and a quick web search tells all; I will not insult your intelligence, nor am I interested in wasting your time. I am a very tired and depressed girl, and whilst they cannot take away what I already am, they can certainly wear me down.

At risk of stating the obvious, talk is incredibly cheap, and trust is a very fragile thing. When I moved out here, from the Michigan Wastes to the rusty, dusty city of Steel, I was expecting my life to finally take a turn for the greater. I was ready to put forward the effort into myself and the place I found myself in, in order to become something greater. Needless to say, this didn't happen. I will not speak on the specifics of the situation if it doesn't call for it, but the frustrations that have occurred in the last few months weigh very heavily on my soul.

I dared to ask for a bit of assistance to leave a dead end behind, but what I got instead was heaps of new damage and a realization that asking for help regarding anything was a fucking mistake. The experience has been harrowing but incredibly informative. It is clear to me now, that if I want to get where I want to go and live a life that is worth living, then I must severely limit the types of trust I import, and exist with the possibility that asking for help isn't permissible if I want to avoid getting hurt.

I beat around the bush, ultimately, because the drama is stupid and I don't totally hate the people involved. If anything, I really want them to figure their shit out just as much as I want to figure my shit out. I fucking hate that I wasted my time, my trust, my resources, yeah, but I also remember the good and take it all with the bad. I guess in that sense, it wasn't truly a waste.

Organic Misery, Freshly Squeezed

I am certainly no stranger to getting fucked over, but I think this is the first time where I've explicitly been forced to reevaluate my principles in such a bastardized way as a direct result of bullshit artistry. What I mean by this is that there are people that will tout a certain ideological premise as a function of themselves, yet use that premise as purely posturing.

I think the primary thing that hurts in this instance is that self-awareness and consequences appear not to be a part of that function suite. The difference between me and someone else appears to be that I know what my mistakes were, how to fix them, and what can be done better next time. I want to be able to trust people to do the right thing, but I cannot trust them if they cannot take responsibility for their actions whilst I'm busy claiming mine.

The mistake that ultimately led me to this point, I think, was sticking around after the initial chips were cashed in. For the first week or so, I spent multiple nights, sleepless, because there had been no accommodations despite promises to the contrary. I should've just returned from whence I came. Instead, I toiled on because I thought I could make a difference. Idealism is not a replacement for sleep nor food, and I'm done with being told the opposite.

Trading Wounds

Things have been nothing if not complicated. On one hand, I've quit smoking, photography has displaced worse hobbies, I've made a few art pieces about it. On the other hand, I almost certainly need therapy for all the shit that I have seen, experienced, and learned. A girlfriend put it succinctly; the wounds may heal, but the scars will still ache.

If there's one thing that I take solace in, it's that the creativity that I relied on for devwork continues to strengthen through art and photography. The rare moments of clarity, when I get them, are used to much greater effect nowadays. When I get out of this and stabilize, I will almost certainly be much better at certain aspects of development, and that's actually pretty cool, but also incredibly ironic.

See, by the time that I had moved out to PGH, I had actually begun to heal from my dev burnout in more significant strides. The job I had just left was kicking my ass, and it was becoming clear that, from the workplace culture becoming incredibly hostile, I was not really welcome there any further. I was actually trying to go back to school to handle that, but the downward pressure was on me to ensure I had the ability to even consider moving out here at all and give it a shot. If I had not done so, I wonder what code I would have written instead.

The Hypothetical Castle of Sand

Whilst I am only really permitting myself to speak in vague terms, it became clear pretty early on that moving here had resulted in my entire livelihood being placed on a castle of sand. The power dynamic, transactional nature of the living situation, and the intent of my being here were all veiled in false pretense, and the social contract was thus violated. I was called an insane pessimist in light of my often-correct cynicism, nearly called an anti-intellectual for my critical stance regarding large language models, and was regarded as impossible to communicate with despite my attempts to facilitate that. In contrast, some people have called me strong or resilient, but truthfully I can claim neither, as I collapsed under the weight and misery of it all and have effectively been pacified by it. Additionally, since the original intent of all of this was to create a temporary situation to begin with, I can't really hold that against anyone but myself, nor would I wish to. I would've preferred a much saner outcome, but perhaps I ask for too much.

To be clear, the intent in all of this is more of an explainer of where I've been and what to expect moving forward. Whilst I cannot guarantee regular posts anytime soon, I do have rough sketches of getting out of my dicey situation and into a place where I can finally, truly begin to work at anything more than 10% of what I'm capable of. I think if anyone is reading this out of curiosity or otherwise, they'd probably realize the horrors of how long this took and how awful that is when it's been four-to-five months of even more bullshit wearing down on me like sandpaper.

Rather unsurprisingly, it's not the city itself I despise. I actually adore it quite a bit, but I think it's poisoned for me now, and I need to come back when I can do so under truer terms. I want to visit the things I couldn't before and get those pictures I wasn't able to get the first time around. But my life is driven by the stupid, dumb symbolism I create myself, and just as I drank my first Casino cocktail to symbolize my leaving the life of a blackjack dealer, I will surely ask for a Dark 'n' Stormy to symbolize leaving this godawful situation behind me for good.