I'm somehow still alive
It's been difficult to blog lately. My life was hard enough last fall, and now I can't seem to catch a break.
About a month ago, my best friend had a stroke. Although she's doing well and even managed to travel abroad since then, there's no clear explanation for the incident at this point despite visiting multiple specialists already. Anyway, over the past few weeks I've had to drive her all over town on more days than not because her freelance work takes her to multiple locations. I sometimes spend three hours behind the wheel in a single day. Only a few days ago did my property management finally get around to granting me permission to park her car at my place, so I've spent ages going back and forth from our apartments via public transportation or Lyft.
I semi-recently realized that I've been suffering from a B12 deficiency since almost a year ago. Only after about two months of injecting myself daily with B12 ampoules has my brain fog started to dissipate. I've had to order these from overseas (with tariffs, of course) because they're not available OTC in the US, and no doctor I've consulted here believes me. I started to feel like I was developing dementia at 29, so that's another reason why I haven't blogged much yet this year.
Meanwhile, I still have a job. Somewhat. I'm unexpectedly losing my funding at the end of June. I'm under pressure to renew my lease for six months by the time it expires at the end of May, but now I don't know if I'll have a source of income moving forward.
There is a chance that I can become a postdoc in another lab whose work really suits me, but we'd have to still apply for funding because the investigator probably can't afford to pay me out of their own pocket either. Tomorrow I have to give a talk at a mini conference and somehow impress them.
I have my first and thus far only job interview for a program management position on Thursday. I'm not getting my hopes up.
Needless to say, it's looking less and less likely that I'll move to Germany this year, which sucks because I wanted to try to move on with my life by the time I turn 30. An arbitrary number, but still.
This is all hard because I feel like I'm doing nothing with my life right now. Here I am, having thought that I've done all the hard work already but instead am stuck spending the next month fighting the possibility that I have to move out and start sleeping on my best friend's couch. Not really how I expected things to go right now.
I think I'm more sensitive to these situations than the average person because I don't really have someone to bail me out. As an adoptee, I've never felt like I did. I don't have a family (i.e., parents or a partner). If not for my best friend and her parents here, I would be on the verge of actually becoming homeless. I'm a financially savvy person, but I lost a lot of money last fall, and my rent is too high for me to afford for several months without work.
I don't like making these kinds of posts because they feel uncreative and whiny. I'm adding recent photos to try to compensate.
