Five years out from almost dying and I spend my lunch breaks crying, worried I’m not enough for anyone because I’m not good enough for a job. Five years ago I thought I might die and I fought so I wouldn’t. Fought ER admission staff, nurses, eyes rolled in my face and concerning blood clots I had thoughtfully collected in plastic bags tossed into the waste bin with ‘oh neat that’s a biggie’ from an MD. Today I cried on my lunch break because of a slack message. I’m no fucking warrior, I’m no pitiable weakling. I just don’t know how to square the circle of myself into everything required to live a life in this current world. It’s becoming harder to hide the trauma brain with checklists and reminders and alarms, harder to keep up with a pace set pre-covid and one I never agreed to, harder to manage the ADHD with caffeine and weed, harder to quash the anxiety with 0.5mg of Ativan (only ten at a time and the monologue of trauma must be repeated for continued access).

The concerns I carefully bag up and carry around with me like the ring to rule them all are pulling in ways no one can see but I feel so deeply it’s physically painful. I have nowhere to put them down because covid is over, according to industry. Nowhere to rest because the survivors who don’t go back to work just kinda die, according to my oncologist. And we all need money to simply eat, so- how’s the career going? What about your side hustle, have you monetized your Instagram yet? Big props to those team members who choose to work while sick, we just love you and appreciate it so much. Rest up as you need to, but only the newly legally required 5 days for covid and aren’t we lucky to have gotten more sick days out of a pandemic? No, they can’t be used to care for a family member, use your vacation days for that. You should have hustled harder, never quitted harder if you wanted to take real vacations and have any real rest. Coffee is for closers, loser.

Five years ago I was slammed directly into a brick wall of systemic medical red tape, literally bleeding to death in front of doctors telling me to come back if it gets worse with a horrified look when they saw how much blood had soaked through the paper covering on the exam table because they instructed me to take off my adult diaper while waiting half an hour to be seen. Blood dripping from my toe, having ran down my leg, if it gets worse…wondering just how much worse it has to get before I am helped. Now, years later I see the systemic response to covid trickling through industry and drip-drip-dripping on all our heads as we’re told not to worry, it’s not raining- it’s just blood. Those people that died were weak anyway– the red tape is a feature, not a bug.

Being flung back to that moment from catching site of blood on my sheets from an over-scratched mosquito bite and continuing on with my day, like a fucking warrior. Crying into my keyboard because I couldn’t handle a simple task, like a pitiable weakling. Because at the end of the day, it’s all a business, baby– that you can’t ever catch up is a feature, not a bug.