For real though, 2015 has been kicking my ass. Hard.
(TL;DR: New job, new apt, car accident.)
January I started a new job as an online college tutor. The job is decent but my budget is pretty tight and they held my first paycheck for a full FOUR WEEKS. So for a month I had to borrow money from my parents just to eat and pay my bills. I don’t get along well with my mother, so this was a challenging, humbling experience, and it wasn’t the only job-related issue I had because a few weeks ago it became very clear that a co-worker of mine is trying to get me fired because she’s a miserable human being with nothing in her life but scheming and sabotage. She didn’t succeed, luckily.
At the end of January I found out that my landlord lied about settling her lawsuit with the homeowner’s association out of court, and that they had moved for a summary judgment of foreclosure on my unit, which meant I would have been homeless come May if the HOA hadn’t mailed me legal documentation notifying me of what was going on. My landlady never to this day came clean about that shit. She still denies the lawsuit ever existed. I had to basically spend my February finding a new apartment and packing up all my shit, and my parents came up to move me out on the 28th.
It was the worst move ever. I had hired a mover 2 weeks in advance, who stood me up. My friend voluntered to be the back up plan, and he got sick and couldn’t come. My father got stung by a bee on his HAND. And it was pouring rain SO HARD all day that the parking lot was FLOODED (all my shit got wet, some of my boxes all all smooshed because of the wet cardboard). We had so many delays, my parents had to get a hotel room to stay over night so we could finish the next day. I had the babies, so I spent the night on the floor of the new apartment, and I woke up COVERED in flea bites. The new apartment was infested. Took until April to get rid of that shit.
Fleas and unpacking aside, my neighbor from my old apartment that I had moved from decided that her son in law wanted his cat back, the one I took in because they weren’t taking care of him. I’ve been paying for his food, litter, vet visits, and medications for over a year now. He’s lived with me in my apartment for over a year, and they just decided they wanted him back. I refused to answer her and she and her son in law harassed me via text message (and now phone calls from numbers I don’t recognize) for probably a month. It seems to be dying down though, I’m hoping they’ve given up. I was pretty anxious about it for a while, though.
Then on Wednesday evening, while I was driving to work, a man ran out in front of my car in the middle of a busy intersection while I was going 50mph and had a car in the lane on the other side of me. I swerved to avoid him but was afraid of hitting the other car, plus I didn’t realize he was going run into my lane (since pedestrians frogger across major roads all the time here, I thought he would pause at the dotted line and run behind my car after I passed), so my reaction time wasn’t fast enough to avoid him. Or maybe he was moving too fast. Or maybe I didn’t see him soon enough. Either way, I hit a man with my car. For a series of agonizing moments, I thought I might have killed a man. I have never in my life been as terrified as I was then. But he was okay. We had to turn him on his side because he was aspirating on his saliva, but then he started to talk to us. He even tried getting up– it took 2 people yelling at him in Spanish (he didn’t speak English, and I was in so much shock I literally forgot how to speak Spanish) to get him to stop trying to move. A witness held me until the ambulance got there because I was shaking pretty hard and he wanted to make sure the police knew I had a green light (in fact, at least 3 people came forward to let the cops know I hadn’t broken the law). The police report says the man I hit was taken away with “non life threatening injuries.” I called the hospital 3 hours later, but they had no record of anyone with his name.
My insurance company has put me in a pretty swanky rental (a Kia Optima I’ve named Velma), and they decided yesterday that my car isn’t totaled. It’s being towed to a mechanic on Monday and should be repaired in a week or two. My adjustor told me she’d look into finding out what happened to the man I hit. They have to find him anyways, since he’s liable for the damages to my car (I had a green light and he wasn’t even at a crosswalk), though I doubt they’ll get that money out of him. I feel like getting hit by a car is punishment enough, but I also can’t afford my deductible without help from my parents again. They’re willing to help, but still.
Logically I know it wasn’t my fault. I know that there wasn’t anything I could do. Even if I swerved sooner or swerved more, I might have still hit him, or worse, hit the car in the next lane– who knows how much worse that could have been. I know that he’s probably fine. But I still freak myself out whenever I drive, and my sleep issues are worse. I should have been in bed over an hour ago. It’s getting better, just slowly. I don’t feel like I have a right to complain, that poor man got hit by a car. So that compounds my guilt, and it’s a vicious cycle.
Physically, I’m okay though. I still have my health (at least for now) and my babies are doing pretty well. My budgeting seems to be working, my job is stressful but bearable. I applied for my MFA in creative writing, so that’s a huge step in the right (write?) direction, and I started filling out the application for Obamacare– I really need to finish that. I just pitched a new plot idea to an oDesk publisher who hired me back in December and has waited this long for me (bless his heart). My new apartment is really nice, now that the fleas are gone. It’s kind of lonely up here, though. Now that I don’t speak to Sara & Tiffany, I have no friends here except for people I’ve met at my new job.
Fuck. The sun is up. I should make an attempt at relaxing I guess. Well, that’s been 2015 so far. I hope anyone reading this is doing better than me.