To be honest, my backpacking trip feels like it happened a lifetime ago. Life has been weird and hectic the last week and a half.
I don't think I mentioned - I got promoted at work right before I left on my trip. Which was both nice and annoying for complicated reasons. But I had about three days of being grateful for that and feeling like work was finally improving before all my project teams decided to just lose their minds about stupid stuff. Yesterday I had a team decide that escalating their release date would give them good visibility to the CEO, and gave me half a day's notice that release was moving up by a month and I had two days to get them my deliverables. I'm already on tight deadlines for multiple other projects and told them two days wasn't feasible, but that I could juggle things to get them something by end of week (which is honestly still unreasonable and will mean a lot of overtime this week with no extra pay since I'm salaried, but the employee I took the team over from screwed them on a bunch of stuff so I've been trying to be overly accommodating for them to re-establish goodwill between our teams). This apparently wasn't acceptable and they immediately escalated with threatening report me to my manager and VPs etc (which offended me on principle and hurt my feelings but otherwise at least isn't a problem since I have a good relationship with my manager and immediately told her the situation myself anyway, and she agreed they were unreasonable and rude).
One of my cats had to go to the emergency vet the day after I got home. She's doing okay otherwise, but has an infected ulcer in her eye which is both painful, terrible to look at, and very expensive. We have ongoing follow-ups with an eye specialist for the next couple of weeks at least. Part of her eye has basically gotten so infected that it died and sloughed off which has been.... traumatizing for both of us to say the least. She is doing much better on a concoction of meds I have to give her 6-12 times a day.
I don't have many close friends local to where I live (side effect of moving 3k miles from everyone you know, I guess). One of my friends who I knew from NY moved back to the east coast at the beginning of the pandemic. Another one moved to WA while I was away. A third is moving at the end of this month. Two of those are my closest friends in CA.
My partner is struggling with ongoing health issues. They were due for surgery in March which got cancelled due to covid. Were able to get the surgery in June, but had a very rough time with recovery. Underlying issues are starting to be better, but now having complications with surgical site and healing.
That not even covering the ongoing stress of covid/lockdown, shitty depressing politics in the US, world events, etc.
All this to say, I'm tired. On one hand, I tend to lean towards being annoyingly optimistic. But I also kind of continually feel like I never just... get to enjoy things. There's always some shitty thing happening immediately whenever I feel some sort of joy and it has me feeling very run down. Does everyone feel this way? Is it just the cyclical nature of things? I'm trying to distract myself by planning things to look forward to or do, but covid has made it difficult to create concrete future plans. Most of my loved ones are so far away.
I mostly just wish things were simpler.
In the meantime, running at least is helping me stay a bit centered and sane.
Hope you're well.
