A letter from May 02, 2025

Happy birthday Bran! You're 31. I don't know if you remember, but we made a promise together to fly away once we hit 35. How are you feeling about that now? Do you think you'll be able to stay this next year without flying away? The following three years? As for me, it's not even my birthday. It's right around my half-birthday. I've tapered off my sertraline and have gone off therapy, which has given me, variously, despair, ease, joy, suffering, and a modicum of control. I wonder how you're faring, six months or so from now? For the moment, these actions are giving me some hope. I feel better than I did when on my full dose (still a baby dose, but made me stagnate emotionally), and it opens up the avenue for me to try self-medication with other methods. I wonder if you've had good or bad experiences with these other methods in the time when you are. Most notably, and the prospect that's giving me the most hope, is that I'm experiencing deep emotions for the first time in awhile -- and even the negative emotions really help me. I don't know if it's catharsis, just proof that I'm human, or drawing the pendulum deeply to one side to let it swing equally to the other, but it's helping me. Last night, I watched the latter half of "A Place Further Than the Universe," which as you and I both know, is a surefire way to get me to feel. It worked magically, and I cried all night. I didn't even care whether or not I was heard by Ricky, who continues to camp outside my room, taking up space and forcing me to engage in actions involving my worst fear for now: being perceived in my own home. I'm sure he left because he heard me sobbing. That's probably for the best, but I still can't help but be self-conscious. I'm still drinking daily, sometimes all day. It's Friday now, and I bought this handle of whiskey on Wednesday. It's nearly gone. I think this tends to happen when I have a large amount of alcohol in the house. I drank Wednesday night, all day Thursday, and began drinking around 3pm today. It's 6pm now, and I'm not even that drunk due to my huge (and growing) tolerance. I'm hoping some of the other medication methods that I mentioned above have at least contributed to having a better relationship with alcohol. In general, though, I find that there are two things that are really driving my suffering: living in the place that I do, and drinking as much as I do. I wonder if any of those things have changed, and if they have, I hope that you are ******* proud of yourself. As it stands right now, I can't see a real, solid, radical, positive change. My scaffolding, made up of coping mechanisms (which I'm sure you still have) is purely to my detriment. I'm working with chat gpt to amend this, to find some steps to rebuild a different scaffolding, or else translate the current structure into one that works for me rather than authorize my drinking at 8 or 9am, going to piss outside, spending way too much money on takeout and therefore divorcing me from my love of cooking. There's so much despair in my current situation, and how it feels like the exact puzzle piece to enact the most suffering possible in my life. I generally feel very unlucky in this way and many others, like the world is conspiring to make me suffer. Of course, I know that this is a fallacy, but I desperately hope that you have concrete evidence that proves otherwise. I really hope you're happier than I am right now. I want to love you. I want to love the me right now, or even the me tomorrow. I can't right now. I hope you're different, and that you've learned some more things about love that I don't myself. Bran