Yes and no.

Tl:dr I should be dead but I’m not.

My health has become a monkeys paw. False anaphylaxis and seizures I can work around but the medication has made me healthy enough to gain weight and muscle. Then my boss gave me a very physical job. While I put on 35 pounds of muscle the doctors added osteoporosis to the symptoms list of my disease.

So now I’m strong enough to break my own bones if I’m not careful. And have dealt with chronic pain for long enough that twice now I’ve been to the hospital and discovered months old fractures because ‘it doesn’t hurt that much’. Soooo fuck me I guess?

Layer on top of that a bunch of gender identity issues and delayed puberty(second? I dunno I’m 36 with a proceeding hairline and my pecks are visibly bigger than last week) and I feel like im turning into a monster. My wife says a sexy monster which does help a bit. Pro-tip: don’t complain to your overweight wife about your anxiety around becoming physically attractive.

But I have a meeting in January to start a research project and pivot a bunch of my time at work to research and software development. I work at a lumber mill? My boss may be a complete fuckshow when it comes to safety but he’s a pretty nice guy and lets me work how I work. I do make him a buttload of money. I’ve learned to run a planer, filing cnc, front loaders and their kilns. One of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten was this year when after 18 months working the kilns they told me ‘there’s things you can do better but they are matters of diminishing returns for us so we’d like you to focus on something new’. They expected that timeline to be 5 years. I’ve developed spreadsheets and algorithms to track and extrapolate moisture data for my lumber. I led a skunkworks dev team in Turkey to make an OCR app and deployed it at work for the basis of an inventory system. One of my projects this summer is to expand that system to their entire yard from my purview at the kilns. I’ve made and iterated processes for their saw filing and tracking and eliminated about 30k/week of downtime. I’m fucking killing it honestly but still feel like shit about myself. I struggle a lot with whether I’m actually smart or just good at reading. There may not be a practical difference. I would like to be paid more. Im considering the startup route and founding my own company but having access and resources of the mill would be a huge help for development so subsidiary company? I don’t know. My boss is the kind of stupid where he gives a former apple employee a computer but no IPA so I’ve got some cards to play.

My wifes grandfather passed away last week. We moved in with him and gramma 7 years ago when I went on disability and they needed home care. Gramma is in a long term care facility with PSP(super-Parkinson’s) now. My wife is an absolute saint. He gave us a place to live when I was sick and I owe him a lot of who I am. I also knew him longer than any but 1 of my own grandparents. It’s really hard. Also the 6th person to die around Christmas since 2016 so we are pretty well done with the whole month. We don’t even know if her dad committed suicide on the 26th or 27th. Fuck Christmas.

But our time spent caring for the grandparents and various other circumstances means that we might be able to buy/inherit the house! We might own a house! Ahhh the millennial dream! Start work at 11 years old, work in 9 different industries, have 6 years of disability off work and save up just enough of a down payment to inherit a house! It’s pretty fraught. Just the whole melancholy and juxtaposition of moving upstairs and having windows again because an amazing person died is a bit too much.

And like…my dad tried to start a cult so I’m glad they’re getting divorced but having been the person to ‘not cause it, but you did open my eyes a bit’ is all sorts of fun to process. Sorry/Thanks mom. She is doing a lot better now so that’s nice. My dad not so much. Not sure if I have it in me to see him at Christmas. But as mentioned previously and statistics I worry about suicide at this time of year.

But hey! I’m autistic, high school diploma, post-traumatic and non-specific traumatic stress disorders, cycle food and environmental allergies on a weekly basis, 25+ fractures through my body, had fucking scurvy twice, 6 years off work in total and I make my national median wage, I’ve got a job that I can keep for as long as I want it, a boss who actually accommodates my disabilities and weirdness, an amazing wife, two dogs and too many cats, I look better than I ever have and my doctor told me to write my will at 21. I’m 36 now so fuck all y’all.

If anyone read all that thank you! If not it still feels good to just put it down in words.

I posted this in another comment in this thread. This poem always comes back to me when I hit these moments or these threads. Any suggestions on how to get ‘thissus offeroede thissus swae maeg’ as a tattoo without looking like a Viking fascist nutjob?

http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=get&type=text&id=Deor