I broke up with my therapist via text message. Well, not really: after seven years of pretty regular visits, she'd started not being available for our calls (when I moved here, we moved to phone calls). Normally that would manifest as her straight up forgetting that we had an appointment. This after four-ish years of me being here, wherein she'd not accepted payment; this felt less like therapy and more like just chatting with a friend. And that is a valuable thing, and I do miss it, but it wasn't really therapy any longer, it was talking to someone who knew every aspect of me while I sorted out, out loud, my feelings about things.

So after she'd missed a few meetings, she texted me to schedule a different time, and I texted back that maybe now was a good time for a break, ya know? And she never texted back. She's either dead or she took my text at a different value of emotion than I thought I'd expressed. Anyhow. A bad ending to a very good relationship, and I miss her.

My talks with her were primarily about my job, my lack of any sort of joy in my day to day life, and the sudden multitude of dead people in my life over the last seven years. Starting with my uncle, then my grandmother, then Gordon, then my grandfather, then my brother, then my other grandfather. Somewhere in there, probably after I became an only child, I pretty much just stopped engaging with my own life: my routine was the only thing I had. I wake up at 0415, grabe a shower, pack my lunch, drive 45 minutes to work. I work ten hours, then drive an hour or more home. I eat something, I drink an entire bottle of something, and I pass out.

So, now, hey, look. Patterns are what we are about, but there's not much good in that one, hey? So I spent a few years digging into it, and found....nothing at all. I have no desire to continue it, but it's easy, ya know?

So instead I gave up everything I enjoyed, and from that starting point, I let that guide me. I stopped drinking for about seven months last year, and now drink off and on, but nothing heroic; I'm tired of poison, and all it does is fuck with my depression. I gave up all animal products from my diet a couple of years ago, and while my cholesterol went up one point (exceedingly difficult if you're vegan) and I had to get on a statin, I'm mostly OK diet-wise. I also stopped eating lots of food, and just eat a little. I only eat now because I have to, and hey, I'm at the same body weight I was at when I was fat in my 20s. Thirty five pounds down, since july. That's like 2.5 stone sterling or whatever.

In the interim, while I was not drinking or eating and not improving my cholesterol or blood pressure, I started really spending time with music. I assembled, with the cunning use of money, a couple of sound systems that 15 year old me really wanted. My primary critical system had remained fairly static for about two years. It was very, very good (300 watt class A/B amp, vintage Marantz quad for a pre-amp, Fluance turntable, Denon SACD, Schiit DAC with an IBM thin client running a Linux distro called DAphile that, to my experience, is better than Roon, and a pair of Klipsch KG-4 with Bob Crites crossovers and Crites titanium tweeter diaphragms). It's precisely the kind of thing a childless white guy in his later 40s starts to get into.

I built an amplifier, a kit from a guy called Dan who runs an outfit called Akitika (which is palindromic, and easy to remember). It's a chipamp, good for 50-ish watts into my Klipsch. I had a hell of a time with the kit. In my 20s I soldered, and was taught how by a guy who helped wire the primary cockpit controls for the Columbia. He was very, very strict and I learned a hell of a lot from him, but it is a frangible skill, and I had none of it left.

I sent the amp back to Dan, he fixed two things, admired my heatsink mod, and now it's the beating heart of my system.

So I've got that: I can listen to music and it sounds great. And that's the very best part of my week.

The rest of it may catch up. I'll have to see. Without my therapist things aren't worse, but I liked having someone to talk to about things that you talk to therapists about, so I might have to locate one locally. I've also got plans for the future (well, plans for December), which is new. After my brother kicked the bucket, I sort of lost any interest in things more than a few minutes ahead of me. But now I'm planning a trip in December to see a friend from Austin, somewhere in New Mexico. So there's that.

There's a thing with recovery, where it's always "recovery" and never "recovered." I've been recovering from things my whole goddamn life, from abuse to substances to events to things that literally all of you have dealt with, and it's odd to think of things in terms of how far along we are, where we are in the path of recovery from the last disasters. But that's where I'm at, at the moment: always recovering. Once I got that in my head, that there's no stable location to land? Once that was in there, everything seemed less dire. I'm OK with that for now. It'll all change, anyway.