The Long and Winding Road

... That led to my new door.

I've been spending an exorbitant amount of time reflecting on my last, well... Probably four years or so specifically, lately. It broke me. Completely and utterly... the Greg Bodack that is here now is not the person that wore that name in the past.

I haven't even begun to understand it all. So many things have changed, and I can't possibly unpack everything at once.

But I gotta start somewhere, so let's start in West Tarentum, sometime in 2021.

I was living large, sucking in pandemic funds and just being a mid-30s adolescent with zero worries about anything at all. I was becoming a Twitter darling, meeting new people, finding out so many things about myself...

While I sat around in a roach-infested shit hole doing nothing to improve my actual reality. I was drowning and chose to ignore it. Drowning in the feeling that I had no direction, no goals. Depressed because there was no "outside." Broken because my disabled and immunocompromised wife was constantly in danger. Panicked because there was zero separation from the people nearby, and zero contact with those who weren't. Now, none of this was an excuse for me to sit in filth, but what was the point? I couldn't find one, the future was so unbelievable to even conceptualize that nothing mattered beyond surviving "right now."

At least, I thought that was the drowning point. Then, we got evicted.  And honestly, OF COURSE we did. We were destroyers of a home, and it didn't look to anybody involved like we gave a shit about improving.  Looking back, I don't honestly know if I did. That was a mess, a bigger mess than the piles of bullshit and clutter that we let put us into the situation. This is more of an overview, though... Maybe I'll really pick this moment apart another time, but this is still the damn beginning of the story.

We predictably couldn't find a new place, and spent a good bit of time living with my mother-in-law. Moving back into a home I had stayed in as a guest, it hurt. The loss of autonomy was debilitating, and the rage I had at myself over letting us end up like this was projected everywhere except healthy places. Got myself kicked out of the house... And then I found a new bottom. Separated from my wife and kids, sleeping under my teenage sister's loft bed, basically living out of my car and staying at my mom's to sleep, then my dad's, then a friend's, etc for months.

It finally came to a head, and we decided we'd be better together in a homeless shelter than separated... Until the first night at the shelter we got to see a man choking a woman in the common room, while we were being registered.  We left, got a hotel room, and were able to find a different shelter, that put us up in the shadiest motel I've ever seen. It was terrifying, but we were together, and eventually got to an off-site apartment run by the shelter.

The apartment was isolated from most of our support system, and at this point most of my things were in storage or left behind in one of the many moves. We befriended a few rats, at least before I'd have to dispose of the glue traps in the middle of the night, but otherwise there wasn't much. It held us over until we were able to find housing, though.

And now, here I am... It's been about a year and a half since we moved into our apartment, and I'm still stuck on survival.  Lately, I've made some changes. Many medical, but some I think are possibly due to finally feeling safe, secure. It's a slow process, painfully so, but it is still movement.

I didn't even cover the interpersonal nightmares I've been through during this mess. This is barely even the beginning of what I've been pondering.

But it's painful to clean out these wounds.
I'll do it as I can. It helped a bit though... Just stating the barest summary of the long and winding road.

Until next time.

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