Hell is anxiously checking for a response to a message you haven’t even typed yet, much less sent. It is having made a decision that you haven’t followed through on yet, essentially forcing you to make the decision over and over again as your mind picks at it. It is knowing that you have to keep making a decision every day for years if you want it to ever pay off, despite how far away that moment might be. It is knowing something and being unable to act on it, not now and probably not ever. It is all these moments of anixety and powerlessness and more besides. These days, I find myself steeped in such things: conversations I don’t know how to start, things I feel foolishly compelled to heavily qualify before sharing, decisions made long ago that I must stick to because nothing’s changed enough to reevaluate them, and recognitions of problems I can do nothing positive to resolve. All my other choices are worse than whatever I’ve picked, acting on anything will most-likely return bad results, and no amount of practice is going to make it any easier to start conversations I feel weird for having because I was trained to ask nothing of people and still struggle to ask for anything that might require other people to put in effort on my behalf. I hate being in these kinds of no-win-but-the-long-run situations and even my therapist agrees that my life is pretty much entirely made up of them these days. I just want problems that are easy to handle, a society that doesn’t feel like it is on the verge of collapsing, and the ability to ask things of people without feeling the need to preempt all the potential negative directions the conversation could go if I was misinterpreted.

Most of this is stuff I’ve written about before. My job, my living situation, my lingering student loan debt, my feelings of isolation, and so on. All of that is a problem I know I need to solve and all of it is currently on the best possible path towards resolution that I have available to me at the moment. Knowing that does nothing to help me, though, because it is yet another year of my life focused on the future (a future that feels as distant today as it ever has) at the expense of the present. But, as always, what else am I going to do about it? The stability afforded by my current job, with its expectation that I will have a job still in five years, no matter what happens, so long as the country I’m in and the market we serve survives in some way, is a difficult thing to beat in any kind of tech-sector job. I am not afraid that my job will be downsized out of existence or that the company is going to get gambled away on some dumb venture-capital debt-destruction scheme. I don’t need to worry about being demoted or losing pay or anything like that because this company has proven the lengths it will go to avoid firing people. And while I could change my living situation, that’s not something I can do yet, nor is it something I can do lightly because I actually like my current setup and anything cheaper (aka smaller) will come with added costs like needing to toss out furniture or needing to rent a storage unit large enough to hold everything that wouldn’t fit in a new, smaller apartment. I’m already doing all I can to pay off my student debt, to the point that all the overtime I’m taking in pursuit of that has actively damaged my health, so there’s really no room to change there. And the one time I broke my personal isolation to visit friends, I got the sickest I’ve been in years. It’s difficult to find anything I could reasonably be doing better with.

So all that remains to me, in terms of what I can do now, is have conversations with the people close to me about my preferred name and how, despite not telling anyone what I was doing or even that I was thinking of doing it at all, I tested out a new preferred name in my Final Fantasy 14 online community for the past year and have hit the point where hearing people call me anything else feels bad. Especially people who are a part of that community and who also know my legal name. Which, to be quite honest, I’m not super excited about. Asking people to use my preferred pronouns was enough of a struggle, one I still balk at quite often considering how infrequently I correct people who misgender me, so asking them to also use a different name feels like it’ll be way more of a struggle. I mean, I’m sure they’d all do it. I don’t think I’ve got anyone left in my life who would refuse to do something so simple as to call me by a different name, but it still feels like I’m asking for a lot, especially from the people who knew me by my legal name and by my assumed name in the online gaming community we’re in. Not because it’s difficult to do, but because character-bleed is an insidious problem in any kind of roleplaying game and its related communities. Using the name for a character I’ve spent so much time playing over the past year feels like a giant red flag that others should be rightly cautious of. I don’t think any of them would doubt me if I explained that the name choice back then was a calculated decision I made to test out a name in an environment where people would actually use it to address me, but I can’t shake the feeling that I NEED to explain it at all.

Once that conversation is had… Well, it’s back to waiting. To passing time and working as hard as I can all the while. I wish I had some other things I could do, little markers of progress I could find to make it all feel like I’m getting anywhere with anything, but I’ve been in some kind of a holding pattern for a decade and a half now, trying to get my life into any kind of order or good place so I can do something without the shackles of debt or trauma or whatever holding me back, and it is all I can do these days to stay the course. I don’t have the time or energy to look for ways to make myself feel like I’ve accomplished something while doing the same stuff I’ve always done, especially when getting one of my loans paid off wasn’t enough to make much of a dent in how I feel about all this. How can I come up with something that feels more like I’m making progress than me literally hitting the first benchmark to show that I’m finally in the backend of my debt repayments? It’s probably underwhelming, or perhaps not even registering, because nothing functionally changed for me as a result. All the money going toward that loan is now going towards other loans and I’m sure it’ll feel great eventually when that adds up to real, noticeable progress every month, but right now I’m just measuring that impact in years still and it’s difficult to feel much of anything on a scale that large. I just hope getting people to call me by my preferred name will be enough of a boost to get me through however long it takes to feel a change in my student loan payments or living situation.