Herding Cats #1

I’m just going to unload what’s on my mind today and what will be on my mind later too.

• I’m finding I can no longer watch or listen to certain things anymore. They actually make me sick to my stomach. Anything with couples, dating, marriage, family, love, or loss.  The trouble is I don’t like death metal and shitty television.
• Why don’t I matter to anyone? More precisely, how did I instantly stop mattering to anyone on a fateful afternoon in 2019 and on? No one asks my opinion or thinks to let me know things happened.
• How is it that people can so totally leave my life without looking back?
• Why do guilt me about things no other person would? I have an opportunity to do, be, and live how I want to and all I can think is how other people will be affected by it when they have all moved on as if I was just an annoyance to them?
• Back to the mattering thing, why is it that my efforts, accomplishment, and hard work never matter to those I work for and with? Oh when things go tits up, it falls onto me no matter what. The trouble with the DMV? My fault even though I haven’t been in charge of it for almost 2 years. Why are sales down? It is because somehow I don’t do enough. The paperwork is wrong, even though I had nothing to do with it. The daily money is not balanced, although I am not the cashier it is my fault. All I wanted was to put my name on my sale orders, but no, I can’t even be acknowledged for them.
• For some reason on dating sites, I can’t catch a break. She contacts me first, I reply, and I never hear from them again. If or when they do, it is to tell me they just don’t have the time to date or they aren’t looking to date. Why then are you on the dating app? Oh. I see I’m not up to your standards. I’m not good-looking enough or flashy or well off. I see.
• How is it I can’t just accept my place in the world now? Be the bitter lonely old man that hates everyone and everything, not be in my kids and anyone else’s lives, and just live in my dark musty apartment shut off to the world until I die alone where no one will mourn me and be surprised years down the road to find out I died years back.
• Why do I have zero interest in any hobby or distraction? Why is it I think I can only be validated by how others think of me?
• Why am I not allowed to raise a family in the traditional sense? How come I get pushed into a supporting role in my children’s lives while Mr. Dickwad, who broke my family up because he had no respect, gets to make day-to-day decisions and raise my kids? Why do my exes hate me that much knowing that was all I wanted?
• Why can’t I find the strength to just end it and stop being a thorn in everyone’s side?
• Why aren’t the therapy and medications working? Why the eating well and exercising working? Why aren’t the prayers and living a moral life not working?
• No, there aren’t the “little things” to me anymore?  The sun rises and sets, birds sing, flowers bloom and sometimes the air smells and feels sweet. I don’t f#$%ing care. Not anymore. Food and drink have lost their taste to me. All I have is the constant bad things that have happened to me these 3 years. I had a great fulfilling morning on a Thursday in January 2019. I blissfully drove to work knowing I was loved. I had a beautiful loving wife and family. I lived in the home I was raised from a baby to a man in. I had savings, a great job, and a future. In 9 hours it was all gone. My wife, my family, my friends. a couple of days later my home and savings are gone. Then the car broke and I could not afford to fix it, I was essentially homeless, and within the next month, I was unemployed because the new management insisted that the job I had done for 2 years had to be done by a microbiologist. The quality lab manager made positions for the 2 others in my position, but not the guy who was going through the hardest thing he faced, essentially poor and homeless, and with absolutely no means to find another job. The company fought me on unemployment benefits and by the time I did find this job, I had been approved, but I was working again so sorry about the last 2 months, but you aren’t unemployed anymore. Here’s a couple of weeks of money, but know that come tax season we will order you to pay it back and when Covid shuts down the world 3 months after that, we will use the last 2 months as a reason to stop weekly benefits in 2 weeks into the shutdown and let you swing by your nuts and not give you anything. Oh, sorry but when you do go back to work and based on your estimated average income, you don’t qualify for food stamps or money assistance.
• No Colby I don’t have your agreed-upon share of the house. We spent too much going on camping trips and buying new furniture and home fixing during covid. Oh, the $4500 stimulus and the $9000 tax refund went to the kids, are you saying you don’t love them because money is more important? Oh, by the way, you are 2 weeks behind on child support and our debts are now ours, it’s only right because although I was all on board with the vehicle and such, I never wanted that, so it’s all on you.
• I can’t help you and if I could I wouldn’t. I’m the boy’s Aunt and you and her don’t even care about the boys. You don’t even pay child support anymore, why are you 2 weeks behind, that’s for the boys… You act like this is the end of the world you selfish ass. Can’t you see what this has done to me, what your daughter Kayla’s death did to me? You don’t know hardships!!!
• Why did you get a dog? Why did you rehome the dog? Why are you depressed? You have no reason to be, it was just a marriage, it’s not like someone died… Jesus, poor Colby…

This is just a small sampling of the 2,000,000 thoughts I deal with in my head and trying to make sense and peace with them is like the title says, “herding cats.”