My birthday has come and gone and I baked my own cookies, coached my family's making pancakes, and cooked dinner despite my request that the rest of my family do the cooking and baking duties for the day. I really shouldn't expect much but I was disappointed. My sister barely registers anything that requires her to go out of her way for anyone else, my mom's been nursing her leg for coming on the 4th month, and my dad's pretty useless in the kitchen. I know these things limit their capacity to respond to requests like this but figured I would give it a shot.

I'm mostly over it, though I'm pulling back on the kitchen activities. It's been added to my list of things that just aren't worth it unless I'm doing it for my own wishes.

For now I'm just grateful that I have a safe place to live that isn't costing me extra rent since I'm still current on my NYC apartment, that we have food and are healthy, and that things aren't burning down in NYC or in south Jersey. I feel for Minneapolis because shit's on fire, yo. For real.

I still have nothing profound I can say about everything going on, but find myself just sewing and watching events happen, as there are few things I want or need to be involved in. I still wish that things do resolve in a positive fashion even if the road to get there is rough, but I've seen this scenario before and it rarely ends well. This doesn't seem to be any different.

To everyone out there, hunker down and keep on keeping on (wildly cliched but an acceptable response to 2020). I've said it before and will say it again: This too shall pass.

There are two major reasons why I know that if I hadn't quit, I'd be in dire shape.

From an external perspective, I occasionally hear from one of my ex-co-workers and it sounds like if I'd stayed at the job it would have been recession redux, which was the major catalyst that drove my drinking for years. The lack of resources, senseless cutbacks when the company was really doing just fine (as evidenced by salaries in the millions for the top brass), and more than anything else, pressure pressure pressure driven by fear. This attitude was encouraged and enforced by levels of bureaucracy of course.

It was the unhealthiest environment in so many ways and something that probably would have literally killed me if I stayed and ended up in that situation yet again, but working from home this time around which would have compounded the drinking.

Internally, the other reason was that to work in the field I had to turn off my moral center. I watched so many deals go down where I knew the workers of the companies would suffer while management who worked with our bankers would get rich. I saw so many things that weren't illegal but were flat out immoral that I had to just do my piece of the job and try to ignore the rest of the implications.

I convinced myself that I was okay with this; I was only a cog in the wheel, not the one directing the transaction. That level of denial can only get you so far, as it turns out. I think that drove a lot of the terrible nightmares I would have, and the constant low level stress that exhausted me. I knew that I was selling my soul and that was the price I was paying for a job that gave me a financial cushion.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I don't know where I'll end up, but god knows I don't want to be back in that situation.