It’s the same every year. I spend the first four months of the year buying stuff that needs to be bought — and, ok, some frivolities, but hardly any really in the grand scheme — and then May comes around and my account is empty by today.

Today I am wondering^1again what life would be like had I spent the second half of my twenties working a “real job” instead of feeling like I was doomed to clean up after making one mistake at twenty-four that would never be erased, ever, that is fraught with love and divinity and resentment.

I don’t know how to work for a living. I don’t know how to have money. The little money the government gives me, it’s not actually that little, and if I wasn’t spending it all on stuff that seems necessary but maybe actually isn’t all the time, I would have some savings now and might be able to go on a trip now and then, give Liam the first real vacation of his life with me, or spend two days in a hotel in a foreign city where nobody knows me and nobody cares over my birthday.

I’m always afraid of coming out as a fraud to people I encounter. I am not who you may think of me as. Or I am exactly the person you think of me as. I have never received an adult salary. The one point five years that I worked “for a living”, I received less than half of what a person of higher rank did. Fair, I had no actual responsibility and all that.

I wonder what it’s like to think of stuff outside of your immediate sphere of influence at home all day long, and get paid money that isn’t immediately gone by the sixth of the month because it’s more than 800 for two people.

I wonder what people expect of me. Maybe I should ask them.

It’s Day 18 of my cycle and I feel catastrophically fat, useless, ugly. My body was hungry, I ate, and now my mind wants us to disappear forever. How dare I eat.

My ankles are the tiniest bit swollen, or carry the smallest amount of fat. Point is, one cannot see bone, tendon, and muscle underneath the skin. They might as well not exist if they’re gonna be that way.

Last revised May 18, 2026.