mishmash thoughts at 5am

5am.

my school loans are in repayment this month, which means that I can no longer continue to pay ben's credit card minimums and bills, as he pays for food and incidentals with his credit cards--over 50% of my income goes to school loans now, and I've literally been eating an 18 cent packet of ramen with an egg in it for lunch for a week now.

his project is nearing completion, which is exciting (!), but right now he has no income, so how the other half of food and rent are going to be paid is an open question. (if you have a website that needs to be built, please contact him).

i had a topical staff infection on my legs last month-->antibiotics for a week-->yeast infection for a week-->month-long period, and concurrent irritability.

i find that i am battling the "you are better than everyone (this is the best school in the country), you're smarter than everyone (all those med students are lazy kids that weren't good enough to get into vet school)" brainwashing/bullshit/rhetoric that they fed us ad-nauseum from day one at Tufts. I knew it was bullshit, and was disgusted by how blatantly they were so self-indulged in their pompousness, and yet here I am, down on myself constantly, feeling like an utter failure, feeling frustrated (and disgustingly 'better-than' and therefore guilty and like a failure) because so many around me don't have the work ethic, the drive, or the smarts that my former peers did.

I just found out that this kid in my former class, who was a known cheater, and obnoxious in many other ways, made a D in a rotation, (which equals failing during rotations), contested it, threatened to sue the school... and so they gave him a C and didn't make him repeat the rotation (when I went to discuss my poor grades with teachers they merely told me not to worry about my grades, as long as I was learning, that's all that mattered. And then they dismissed me for those grades.). My classmates, up in arms, wondered "Why didn't Alyssum just threaten to sue the school?!". It's all so disgusting and predictable.

Ben reminds me that 6 months is not a long time to have had your heart ripped from your chest (him speaking from literal experience). "give it a year" he suggests. Meanwhile, people keep telling me that they're sure that I wasn't *supposed* to be a vet, that i was clearly *meant* to do something else, and that while it may not be clear now, it will be, and they are positive that I will come out victorious and whistling. While I certainly hope that the latter sentiments are true, and am trying to keep my eyes open to new possibilities, I feel anything but victorious, and I don't know why they think things will get better, or why they have so much faith in me. I've had bad luck for the past 4.5 years, and I have no reason to believe that anything will ever get better. I mean, it could get better, but there's definitely no certainty that it will. Most people (in this country, that I'm acquainted with, anyway) have had a pretty easy life, comparatively, and aren't acquainted, themselves, with devastation. Repeated devastation. I expect it now, and I'm not the same confident, enterprising girl that started vet school, I feel utterly beaten down most of the time. And, regarding the 1st part of that general sentiment (the *supposed to*s and the *meant to be*s), I am pissed off and indignant about that. It's such a cop-out, easy thing to say, and it's pointless to say, really, because here I am whether it's true or not, and I am pretty sure that Whatever It Is that I End Up Doing, I *probably* could have done it WITH a D.V.M. and an ability to pay off $250,000 debt.

Incidentally, our landlord is a drunken, useless piece of shit who hasn't fixed the leaking faucet in our bathroom for over a year. So now, it leaks constantly. By 'leak' I mean: it's literally a constant stream of water 1 cm in diameter. Rather than "leak" I should just say the bathtub is "on" all the time. He pays the water bill, but I hate seeing so much water being wasted. There's nothing in our lease that holds him accountable to fix issues within a reasonable time, and calling him every day about it leads to promises of 'fixing it tomorrow', forever. Cutting the water off at the valve outside the tub leads to a flooded bathroom, which is worse. Sometimes the pipes make a terrible sound like a freight train is coming up the drain into our home.

My parents are in a very different part of their lives than I am. (Duh, of course they are, but it's more apparent now than ever). Mom is into leisurely things like gardening and going to motorcycle conventions, and 'coming over for dinner' to her means 4 hours of preparation, eating, chatting, etc. Dad is into politics, moving on from 'energetic dead-ends' in his life, reading, playing music. Those things sound great to me. But I'm very much in a literal dead-end that I need to move on from (rather more dire than an energetic one), and while I enjoy long visits, it's also very stressful for me because it means I'm not applying for jobs, finishing projects, practicing dance, cleaning my house, or just spending time with Ben. There's been no 'upward mobility' in my life since I moved to this apartment 6 years ago with Ben, and in fact I'm worse off than then, because of the huge millstone around my neck that is my crushing debt. I have an education that can't be robbed from me, true, but one that is basically stillborn and virtually useless.

My sleep has been erratic and fitful lately. I was always glad that sleep was something I could hold onto, that allowed me to rest, in the past, and now I don't even have that.

I know things tend to feel worse in the middle of the night, but without expressing these things, they fester and I rehash them in my head over and over. I have been meditating recently. "come back to the breath" "that negative feeling is really just a thought that can be watched and let go". sometimes it helps. sometimes my negative thoughts and feelings are stronger than my will to meditate.

things I'm grateful for: sharing life with Ben (who Gets It and is struggling alongside me), cuddling with my kitten and taking her places with me, dancing (it gets me out of my head), the well-wishes people send me.