Fucking Hell it was a long winter this year, and normally I’d attribute most of my depression and mental struggles to that.. living in the rain and being awake at night kind of add to that feeling of ‘dreariness,’ and really bring me down. But, not this year. The weather was probably the least of my concerns with everything else that’s happened in the last 6 months, but it does always seem to play some sort of factor, so I always include it.

I’m not going to be overly specific with some pieces here, but in short.. I’m single again. I have been for about 7 months, though the time after our relationship was still spent pretty close emotionally. Her and I were going through a lot during that time, and it’s not like breaking up with someone needs to jump to immediately no-contact with that person, I think the older I get, the more I realize how mature breakups can be. That doesn’t mean they always are though. Just before I ended our relationship, I was fortunate enough to be the target of identity theft where someone just reached into my bank account, and took whatever they wanted. I wasn’t super happy about it considering the bank that was supposed to be safeguarding that money, didn’t jump into action until my account was almost entirely drained. I thought I was dealing with stress before, but when I, all-of-a-sudden couldn’t pay my rent.. that was a whole new mess to deal with. Everything there got figured out in a couple of weeks, but man.. that was a huge pain in the ass, and I was struggling..

Lacey started showing symptoms in January, and from about February on, we were awake at weird hours.. making multiple trips outside to go to the bathroom or puke, and any sort of consistency in my own life was pretty much gone. I had lost a lot of motivation over the last year or two, just from being unhappy with myself and life, and then also watching Lacey slowly fade away knowing there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Life has just kind of been beating my ass mercilessly once I get over the last thing.. but, I will say that there was a small shining light that occurred still, even amongst the shittiness that was going on. Being single again, also motivated me to want to be myself again, it reignited wanting to take control of my life again. I think the reasoning for that was because I had met this person who I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with, and since she felt the same, maybe it felt a little bit.. pre-planned? Or like, destiny or foretold, or something? Like, if we were ‘supposed’ to be together, more things would’ve slotted into place, or we’d have a bit more natural chemistry, or there’d be more passion.. or something. But we started planning our ‘forever’ together, and the more I looked towards our future, the more exhausted I was. None of that was her fault, and it wasn’t mine, I still just think that we weren’t the match I was hoping to find.

I learned a lot from this relationship, but one of the biggest things I learned is that when you date online, your relationship timeline is kind of reversed.. which, if you give in to those feelings and that passion early, you get sucked in.. and I guess it could be a form of love-bombing, though not intentionally meant to be harmful, and both people were self-aware enough to look for signs of that. We fed off the excitement of finding one another, but our fundamental views on relationships were different, as were our lifestyles. We adapted to one another when we started dating.. unfortunately, we picked up each other’s bad habits that were worse for our partner than they were for us.. for instance, she smoked weed much more regularly than I did, and I stayed up late because I didn’t need to be up at any specific time. I started smoking more, and she started staying up later to talk to me when we were dating. I still have this love/hate relationship with smoking weed, and I think I probably hate myself more now than I ever have for it.. I have ALWAYS used weed to disassociate from the real world.. never in a healthy way either.. and being around someone who makes that feel even more okay, made this confusing for me. The more I smoke, the less active I am in life.. the more I avoid the things I don’t want to deal with.. the more lazy, and distant I am to making connections.. and if I want to find reasons to stay alive, I need to stop handicapping myself with things I know are going to break me down. That’ll only frustrate me more, and most likely, I’ll just resent myself for it. I didn’t want to be a better person for them, I wanted to be their person.. but their person wasn’t a good version of myself.

I mentioned our ‘fundamental views on relationships’ as well, and I think this should be posed as more of a question for anyone reading:

Do you think that you can pick anyone you get along with to love, and have a long-standing, healthy, romantic relationship with? Or do you think you need to find someone special in order to have a relationship like that? 

If nothing else, it’s an interesting thought. I remember a comedian I watch saying something like, ‘you just have to pick someone and love them,’ and he meant that they don’t have to tick every box on your list, they don’t have to be perfect, you just have to put in the effort. I thought that might be true, and for some people it probably is.. for me, it’s not. I can pick anyone to love and care about. I care about people I’ve never even met before.. but I can’t just romantically love anyone. I know I can’t. That’s part of the reason I started looking on the internet specifically for who I wanted.. but anyway, online dating seems to always work in reverse: you get to know each other, you meet, you fall in love, you date (especially if it’s a long-distance relationship), but then you continue to get to know each other over the course of that relationship. The biggest difference is that you don’t have that physical time of really getting to know one another, or that dating history that came before we had the internet. The time of being friends prior to dating is important, and so is the actual dating aspect. It’s important to develop that passion, and that interest in your partner, and not only that, but to develop a HISTORY with them. Something that, when you get into an argument, or you disagree on something, you have memories you can fall back on of times that you’ve made it through tough things together. Or you know what they were like before they were interested in you, and you can make sure that you’re a positive person to have in their life, and you’re not dragging them down instead of building them up.

Right around the time of the breakup, my Reddit account also got suspended. I didn’t want to explain all of this shit before, but fuck it, you should know what I was going through if you’re already here reading this.. I just woke up one day, checked my Reddit because I had posted while I was sleeping, aaand nothing. It took me a few hours to realize what happened, but all the content I posted to a subreddit not owned by me, that was the only content left on my page.. in other words, the pictures. And even still- about half of the pictures/videos I had posted on those subreddits got marked as spam, so they were also taken down. A year and a half of consistent effort, and then 4 years of history before that.. just gone. I didn’t know why, either. I had one guess: I used an auto-posting service to set up posts at certain times, because I wasn’t always going to be awake at 4am to post. That service went off of Reddit’s API, I had been using it for months without an issue.. but on that day, apparently, I was spam. Even with my verification posts to the subreddits..

I appealed that ban every day for the next week and a half.. and received nothing. Not even a response to any of my messages, let alone any sort of message to let me know that they’d look into it. I fucking hate feeling helpless. I did nothing wrong and I still get punished, and then I’m not even allowed to appeal it? I’ve been trying to change that profile back to SFW since this happened, regularly messaging Reddit’s support.. I’ve probably sent them 30 messages and support tickets over the first couple months that this happened. Nothing. Randomly in January, my account was unsuspended. No message from support, no reason, no like, reinstating of my previous content.. it was all just, gone. I should mention, all my writings were posted on my own page, and in my subreddit I made.. so when I got marked as spam, they were instantly deleted.. as well as all my comments, and everything else. It didn’t even matter if I got my content and shit back, the history was gone, and it was fucking defeating.

I found out Lacey had pancreatitis in February, but it didn’t even occur to me that the xray the vet took was a bit more conclusive than anyone led it on to be.. the next couple of months were a blur. I was constantly trying to change Lacey’s food up to find something she could eat, and something that she would eat, but she wouldn’t touch dog food. I knew that if she only ate chicken and rice, it wasn’t going to be enough to sustain her body for long.. I tried different dog foods, wetting it down so it would hopefully digest easier, but everything I tried.. we’d be out in the middle of the night with either diarrhea, or needing to puke. I ran out of options, and I decided against talking to an MRI specialist.. I knew Lacey was going to die, and my options were to either dump all the money I had into trying to hold onto her for just a little bit longer.. or, let her eat what she wanted to, or what she could, and hopefully enjoy the time we had left together. That time passed way too quick.. because like I said, her symptoms started in January.. and by May, she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink anything, and her stomach couldn’t keep anything down.. she was trembling, most likely dehydrated because she couldn’t drink anything, and everything about her.. it all just, decayed so fast.

That was the first time I’ve ever had to put a pet down, and I was bawling my eyes out before I had even walked in the front door of the vet hospital. I knew why I was there, and I was honest with them from the moment I walked in.. I knew she was dying, and I knew she had been struggling trying to make it through her days.. but she was still so full of life, just.. it just wasn’t the same. I learned a lot about pancreatitis in dogs during the time Lacey was sick.. first off, it’s incurable- you can manage it with a super-low-fat diet and medication, but it will never go away. If you have a dog that likes to randomly eat things off the ground.. then you’re fucked- and that was one of Lacey’s favorite past times. She was so quick that I could never get to her before she’d swallow whatever it was. Because it’s incurable, if that diet isn’t started immediately, pancreatitis can do permanent damage to their digestive tract.. and her symptoms were showing that of an Upper GI bleed. The inevitable in this situation was that she was going to die. The variable was the amount of time we could prolong it.. but she was in pain in April, and the night I took her to the hospital.. she was trembling. At the end of every exhale, she would shake. I knew that my options were limited then too.. it was either go get her an IV so she could be hydrated for another few days, keep going, and then we’d probably be right back in that lobby in about a week when she doesn’t eat or drink again.. either that or put her to sleep, and let her rest from, most likely, the pain she’s been in since January. It would’ve been selfish for me to keep holding onto her when I knew she was hurting the way she was.. And I will never know the full outcome of her condition, but after everything I researched, the xrays, and the information I had from the vet.. I’m pretty sure that Lacey had pancreatic cancer.. and it got aggressive pretty quick. I’m just happy I got to spend the time with her that I did.

Losing Lacey snapped something inside of me, of course I have regrets of things I wish I would’ve done differently, but the last year or two of her life we mostly spent at home, or close to home. We didn’t get out and hike, or really do much outside anymore. We used to, like back when I graduated school and was getting out of therapy.. right around that time, we were really living.. and then I fell into my comfort of smoking weed and playing video games. The best part of my day was to get high and play video games with my friends at night.. it’s what I would look forward to, and there wasn’t much to look forward to in my future.. so, it’s been a pretty dark place for me. But losing Lacey also made me realize that I haven’t always been like this, and I’m not helpless to change it.. I just lack the discipline and self-control to do it. I’m weak when it comes to doing things for myself now.. because I don’t think I deserve it, or I don’t want it bad enough.. or I just get high and avoid it. That’s not me though.. none of those options are who I am. I have so much passion inside of me that half the time I can’t control it.. why the fuck have I just, given up?

I’ve removed the people that have added to the habits I don’t want to continue doing.. and sometimes those people don’t always need to be removed, but one of the worst behaviors I used to have was numbing my emotions by smoking.. I’d have something shitty happen, I’d get pissed off, or hurt, or whatever, and the first thing I’d do is get high. I ran from having to deal with the emotions because they were unpleasant.. I had to do something I didn’t want to, so instead I chose to ignore it.

You can’t run forever though.. what you choose to avoid today will probably progressively grow inside of you.. the guilt, or the hate, or the sadness, or the pain will fester and you’ll begin to resent yourself for avoiding it. Because at some point, you’re going to have to face it.. whether it’s a trickle of a stream, or goddamn firehose, you’re going to have to face it if you want to feel like yourself again. So.. I guess now everything starts to happen in reverse. All the pages and places on the internet aren’t for me anymore. I bit off more than I could chew with content creation, and went down the sex worker road a bit further than I had intended to go.. I miss managing one or two pages because I wanted to, not because I have to advertise myself to break even every month.

I don’t know what comes next to be honest with you. I’m picking up the pieces of what’s left, but I’m so much more optimistic about my future, even if I have no idea where it’s going. There are no limitations anymore, no plans, and no way that anything is supposed to be in my life. I’m just living one day at a time, trying to get back to the healthy habits I had before.. the things I was doing for me, and the balance I had because I knew I needed it.

It’s not a new start.. but it’s a new chapter, for sure. Lacey was in my life from the moment I got out of the military, and she has experienced so many of my struggles and fighting to keep my sanity over the last couple of years. Everything about her I will miss, but I am so grateful to have had a dog with such personality and gentleness.. she was one of a kind. She was also the motivating factor behind a lot of what I do in life, and without her.. well.. I have to do things for myself. And make healthy choices for myself, and set goals for myself, and keep moving forward for myself.. because even though I feel like my life has been a jail cell, I’ve had the key to it the whole fucking time. I just.. wanted the easy route.. because the life I want for myself is so much harder.. it’s not numbing myself when things get tough.. it’s facing everything head-on because I know I’m better at dealing with everything with confidence, rather than shuffling my feet and being uncertain. Amongst all of this.. I turned 32 this month, and in hindsight, 31 was very much a growing and learning year. I had a lot of tough lessons to learn, and ones that I have struggled to instill because I’m a stubborn shit. But I’ll get them through my head eventually.

I know this is a stupid way to close this out.. but I don’t know if I ever mentioned this in a writing.. there was a saying in the Army that we joked about- there were only two types of Army Rangers: a Smart Ranger and a Strong Ranger. It was very rare that they’d be both, so if you weren’t one.. you were definitely going to be the other. If you were a Strong Ranger, it’s probably because you were an idiot, or a ‘problem child’ so you’d get smoked until you were a Strong Ranger. Whereas if you were a Smart Ranger, you’d get smoked less often, and therefore wouldn’t be as strong. If I don’t learn from all of this every time something happens to me, I may not ever be a ‘Smart Ranger,’ but I’ll be one real fucking strong one by the end of it.

Til next time,

Cowboy