This is a really long post because it spans most of the year. Content warnings for addiction and suicidal ideation.

Covid 1

Everyone has their own stories of course.  That’s the thing about a pandemic, it affects everyone. And still, when those two little lines came up in April, it still felt so fucking personal. I HAD BEEN OBEYING ALL THE RULES! I WEAR A MASK ALL THE TIMES YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO WEAR A MASK AND MORE! I WORKED FROM HOME MORE THAN I WAS TECHNICALLY ALLOWED TO. And yet. I was testing expecting to be negative cos I had a sore throat I figured was from drinking too many glasses of wine that week. 

I had been drinking and crying because Cat Pausé had died, and people online were absolutely every bit as horrific about it as you can imagine any time a fat woman with a little profile dared to not apologise for her existence. Sara and I had driven Kath up to the funeral in Palmerston North, which was held in a pavilion on a lawn to fit all the people from academia and unions and fat liberation and all the other areas that Cat had touched. We wore masks, of course, though I removed mine for the requisite sausage roll afterwards. We laughed, we cried, we got in the sea on the drive home so that the ocean could take some of our tears. 

Cat was the first person I knew who did Fat Studies. She was the one person I’d see in the newspaper pushing back against systematic fatphobia. When I started House of Boom and she ordered from me, I was so fucking excited. She was a celebrity to me. I met her at the Fat Babe Pool Party at the start of 2020, my first big outing newly sober and with no one else I knew there, and was incredibly welcome. When I announced Camp Boom and asked her to speak at it, she was instantly supportive, paying not just for herself but also offering a scholarship. On the second night of Camp I went to buy a drink and discovered that someone had put a chunk of money on the bar for everyone, and even though I wasn’t supposed to find out who it was, of course it was Cat. She was so generous with planning Camp in 2021 as well, and supportive when I had to delay and then cancel it. I think one of the last messages I had from her was asking when Camp would be in 2022 because she wanted to go to Dua Lipa, and I laughed at her and suggested she was crazy for thinking I could do that to myself again. I wanted to quit doing House of Boom altogether. I was so jealous watching other fat friends shutter their businesses. But when Cat died I knew I had to keep going. 

I don’t think I caught COVID at the funeral. I know that would make sense, given the number of people from around the country in one place, and the removal of masks to eat. But I didn’t hear about anyone else catching COVID there, including the two people who drove up to Palmerston North with me, and in that kind of caring, community-focused audience, more people would have talked about it if they had. Instead, I think I got it from my uber driver on the Monday after, who had her mask under her nose and who was coughing a lot. It was raining so I didn’t wind down my window. I was masked, of course, but still, on the Tuesday I was feeling like shit, and while I normally work from home on Wednesdays, I canceled my meetings anyway in anticipation of feeling worse. So yeah, I tested, and up it popped straight away. After more than a year of being terrified of what it could mean for me, but more importantly what it could mean for my sister, I had COVID. 

This is where my privilege kicks in. My amazing neighbours had recently had it and I’d kept them stocked with treats so they brought me milk and an oximeter. I managed to get a grocery delivery slot without any difficulty, and my parents brought me chemist supplies and RATs. Anna – the first of my real life friends to get it, who I’d sent doughnuts to – dropped off a ton of supplies. That’s three different sets of hot cross buns I was delivered because it was Easter too. Callie the cat was happy to have me home for easy snuggling. Working from home was easy to do because I’m a public servant and our work was adaptable, even though i was the first one to get it. I was too sick to work for a couple of days and spent my time sleeping and watching home renovation TV shows. The first night when I used the oximeter, my heart rate was 105 so I rang Healthline like the piece of paper told me to, and they said they didn’t care, as long as my oxygen levels were fine (which they were). I tried to remove my gel polish with acetone in order to make sure I got an accurate reading but it did nothing. I dutifully tracked my temperature (always fine) and symptoms, aware of the statistics saying fat people were more at risk. 

Mostly I was really productive – if snot was a useable product that could be traded for goods and or services. The scariest part came when somehow a bird got into my kitchen. I went to open the dining room window, which gets opened about twice a year, and doesn’t have a sash so it’s incredibly heavy. My lungs BURNED with the effort, like I’d smoked a thousand cigarettes in an hour and it absolutely wiped me out for the rest of the day. Other than that, while I’d cried as I got the positive result, I thought I was okay. 

More importantly, Jo was coming. And I had been holding on for so long to see her. Her first night in Wellington she spent at a friend’s house because I was still in isolation, though I was incredibly relieved to be testing negative by then. I really wanted her to meet Saj, because they’re both so important to me, so I had her and a bunch of people over on the Friday night. I tried really really hard to be a relaxed hostess and not run around after people, but I coughed so much I peed myself a little (elegant!). Jo is of course a darling and would never have made me do anything, but I wanted to go out with her. We ditched our plans to spend a day at the pool on the grounds that it was school holidays but went for lunch at Pickle & Pie (which we had to leave cos the music was so terrible) and did a gin tasting at Denzien  instead. Then as we walked to her hotel two blocks away, I felt like I absolutely couldn’t go on, and asked her to carry my handbag for me. That’s how weak I felt. I absolutely hated the feeling, and was incredibly ashamed – although I know I shouldn’t have been. There’s a thing that comes with being fat, I think, where you’re so socialised to try to be the “good” fat, so you want to be strong, you don’t want to be seen to sweat or to puff or to not take up any kind of physical challenge. Fatphobia is a hell of a drug.

Speaking of fat, I had been asked by friends of Cat if I could look after distributing her wardrobe to the wider fat community, because it was such a treasure of hers. So Jo and I drove up to Palmerston North on Anzac Day, and absolutely crammed my little hatchback with bags of goodness. I write that like we both did it, but in truth I lifted one bag and had to sit down on the garden wall and try to breathe while she and the friends did it. Would it have been prudent to wait until I’d recovered more? Absolutely. But I wanted to help. I didn’t want Cat’s friends – or her poor parents who’d flown over from America – to be burdened for any longer than necessary. I remember how it took a year to get rid of Opa’s books. I didn’t know Cat nearly as well as many people but I could step up and play my part. And it felt like good timing to do the roadtrip while Jo was with me, because we could chat and listen to good music and sing and just be together. I cried three times on the way home. She was polite and pretended not to notice. I cried every day while Jo was staying because I felt so fucking weak and pathetic and because I’d cried and been pathetic while we were in Tasmania the last time after my gallbladder surgery and I was so angry at myself for not being more PEPPY, for not being a better host. And she said then, and she’ll say now, that I have nothing to apologise for, but I hated it. I hated being weak. 

I still tried to be realistic though, and put a call out to people to help me set up for a size 24+ clothing swap in order to distribute the taonga that was Cat’s wardrobe. Obviously amazing Sara answered the call, and we spent a long night sorting clothing and laughing and cursing at the fact that Cat owned one singlet in over 20 colours amongst a lot of other clothes of course. The next day I had a dozen or more fat babes at my house running around in their underpants, and it was AMAZING. Not cos I’m a perve (that too) but because all of these individuals – most of whom I’d never met before because Boom was out of their price range – were able to find community and clothing and power. It was such a good feeling. But it was so fucking exhausting. 

Longer Covid 

There is no doubt I pushed myself too hard. That I took on too much of a sense of responsibility to the community because Cat was so irreplaceable and I wanted to limit the burden on her loved ones. It wasn’t until I returned to work until I realised exactly how fucked up I’d become. Walking to my desk felt like a Herculean task. Holding a conversation for more than five minutes – even with the people who I liked, talking about cats or whatever became impossible. 

Here’s the most visceral description I can give you of the brain fog that comes with Long Covid. 

This song is an absolute banger, right? But it’ll make your brain feel funny, because it SOUNDS like English, but it’s not (the Italian dude that sang it wrote it cos he saw a lot of English songs going to number one and figured that anything that sounded like English would be popular, even if it wasn’t) 

That’s what it felt like for so long trying to understand even the most basic conversations. My body was physically exhausted as bad as right after surgery for my gallbladder and the surprisingly long time it took to come right after that, but I’m used to my body being a disappointment. I’ve always been the smart girl, able to think of a million things at once. My brain has always been the only thing I’ve had going for me. To lose that ability was a real betrayal. I learned that mental exhaustion can absolutely fuck you physically too. 

One of the hardest things to deal with while I was struggling with COVID was emails from my web host, who kept shutting down my websites (and my email with it) because they were riddled with spyware that I couldn’t clean out of them, no matter how I tried. They wanted to sell me all kinds of upgrade packages promising to deal with it for me, but I had no money. And I know I’m not the most technical person but I used to be able to poke around in stuff and fix it. Not at all in this case. I kept replying going “I can’t think, I can’t function, I can’t do anything, my brain is completely fried, can you please just give me some time?”. I begged people on twitter to help, like I would have happily thrown money at the problem, but I just don’t know the same kind of geeks that I used to. Eventually I just decided to migrate my sites onto wordpress.com directly, which is why this site looks so ugly right now, and there may be advertising on it. Hubris is badly neglected and I need to update her on so much. Writing here is my Acceptance Commitment Therapy, where I sit in my feelings. As you read on you’ll appreciate that it’s deeply ironic that I’m about to pour another glass of wine while I try to finish this story. 

I started to need to turn on TV captions in order to be able to follow anything more complicated than Shortland Street (https://houseofboom.co.nz/blogs/news/it-s-2021-time-for-shortland-street-to-get-some-fat-characters?_pos=1&_sid=61883eb42&_ss=r) . I felt fucking useless at work and wondered why they bothered keeping me on (I am very lucky to be in a small team at a ministry that should care more than others). Doing one extra thing a week would wreck me for the next week. I had to turn down invitations from friends to hang out at the same time as I was feeling extra lonely and isolated.

I can’t remember the exact timeline or sequence that events happened in, but one of the shows I was watching with captions was The Deuce. In one scene, a character commits suicide, kind of out of the blue, with no prep and no planning and I was incredibly incredibly jealous. To just let go! To be released like that! To not have to care about anyone else! I wanted that for myself (while also knowing it was unobtainable and not an option). And I thought about it a lot. So I made an appointment with the Employee Assistance Programme to get some counseling because I couldn’t go on crying every other day with exhaustion. She also had me make an appointment with my doctor to get blood tests (and a doctor’s note for work) and I cried in the doctor’s office over how happy I was that she could hear a wheeze in my lungs that had never been there before, like I wasn’t just making things up. My Vitamin B12 levels were also incredibly low once again, so I got a shot of that, and it made a huge difference to my energy levels. Because I was one week off before three months since I’d had covid, my official diagnosis is Acute Covid Syndrome, but that’s Long Covid to you or I. It’s weird, because I don’t talk about where I work here, but I guess I could say it’s in the disability sector. I was worried about going into the disability space as a non-disabled person, but here I am now and I guess I’m starting to accept that label. 

When I started counseling, I was basically so worn out that I would sit in her office eyes shut, I couldn’t even look at her and sometimes I’d lie down on the couch. She’d ask me what I was hoping to achieve and at first I’d be like, I just want you to listen because you’re paid to, and it’s a safe space, and I’m not burdening anyone else like my overburdened coworkers or my overburdened friends. She has really furry pillows, which is an excellent thing for a counselor to have. I enjoyed how over our six sessions I could feel myself start to look at her her better, as the vitamin b12 kicked in and I started to be able to focus a little better, even though some work things continued to be hard. I now ask people to please email me bullet points if they need something from me, knowing that I can’t sustain a meeting for more than half an hour. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It is easing a little. This is December when I’m writing of course.

Two months after I had COVID I had my birthday and I had to ask my dad to carry my present bag to the car for me. My counselor suggested to me that I have someone else organise my birthday party and I laughed in her face knowing how much more that would stress me out.  

Covid Too – the sequel 

What happened next is that, finally starting to feel a little bit more like myself, I wanted someone else to feel me. I was horny. And I was specifically horny for a cis dude (any dude would do). I was craving the hardness of a body different from mine, to be scratched by stubble during a marathon kissing session. I set my Tinder account to be open to men as well as women, for the first time in like five years, and while most of the profiles reminded me exactly of why I’d stopped looking at men in the first place, I eventually matched with a silver fox and sent him a witty response to the question in his profile. When we started talking, he was like “Wait, are you HUBRIS? We’ve met before”, and I laughed because of cooooooooooourse he has, everyone in Wellington knows me, but I never remember anyone else. I suggested a couple of places where we might have met, and he said “actually it’s more embarrassing that that – we actually kissed. You wrote a blog post about me”. 

“I know that my gut instinct is correct in thinking that the boy I kissed this past Saturday is trouble, but oh, what a kiss. ”

Oh. OH. The boy I kissed in 2009 who I felt would be trouble but whose kiss I couldn’t get out of my head for a number of years. The boy who’d watched me fuck a friend of his (turns out it was his ex girlfriend) in a hotel room. The boy I’d meant to hook up with after that but it never happened cos generally one of us was too drunk for us to get together. THAT boy. Well fuck yeah I wanted to talk to him and see what could be, and find out if he was still trouble. Hey spoiler alert: yes. 

I want to capture the feelings that I had before I’m looking back and going why the fuck did I allow myself to ignore all those red flags. I want to also remember what it felt like to bask in a shared glow. I want to remember that actually, sometimes it’s okay to let go and take a calculated jump even if it doesn’t end up where you hoped it would. 

So I wanna tell you about the absolute tingles of driving out to a lighthouse one evening, after joking to your friends it would be the perfect place for a murder cos no one would hear you screaming, and having them tell you it would also mean no one would hear my loud screaming orgasms either. Of the butterflies of anticipation during smart, intelligent conversation about the journeys we’d both been on since the last time we met, and about his sobriety. Of an absolutely ridiculous situation with a briefcase full of gold coins that needed to be counted and then finally hours later another kiss. Some things are worth waiting for, and that was one of them. A lady would draw a veil over the evening, but since I am no lady, I’ll tell you about just how fucking amazing it felt to see him watching me walk naked to the bathroom, like a cartoon character whose eyes are popping out of their head with lust. I know you shouldn’t need someone else’s validation in order to feel comfortable in your own skin, but fuck it’s nice to have though. 

He was supposed to go back to his own town the next day but we still managed to spend most of the day in my bed. I could tell that I was falling for him already, and I let myself be pried open (my feelings, obviously. Legs open for a lot of people, my heart does not. I had only ever said “I love you” to three people face to face before this) . Later he took me out to dinner and charmed the waiters while I was so well-fucked basically all I could do was giggle and try to rehydrate, thinking of the puddles I’d left on my bed, thankful for waterproof mattress covers. We kissed goodbye in the rain and he left Wellington, but I knew I’d see him again soon. We stayed in constant contact on Messenger. 

Two days later he posted on Facebook about testing positive for COVID, but didn’t mention it to me until I brought it up. I tested too and yup, though the second line was pale and slow to emerge, it was present. Fuckety fuck fuck fuck. I was terrified that the second time would be worse than the first. He suggested that we isolate together but I didn’t want anyone to see me in the whining whinging ball of snot that I become whenever I’m sick. We talked three times a day or more. Very quickly I got used to facetiming him so we could see what each other were eating for dinner. We talked about FEELINGS. He sent me a cake.

I sent him flowers that arrived before the cake.

I joked with my friends that I felt like I was in the episode of 30 Rock when Liz’s friends secretly hire a sex worker to seduce her because he just seemed so absolutely perfect for me. Demelza told me they weren’t rich enough to hire anyone for me. He asked how could he know that I hadn’t been hired for him?  But he was the one with the briefcase full of coins. 

We told each other stories. He liked my terrible terrible jokes. Two days into isolation when I wasn’t sicker we tried to figure out if there was a way he could get down to me without coming into contact with anyone. I could see he was a person who thrived when bouncing off other people and could use the company but I just didn’t think I had enough energy to drive to his town and back in one day. In retrospect, maybe I should have. Maybe it would have changed the course of events but of course hindsight is 20/20, right? So is thinking about two years ago.(That’s a joke). 

There were a couple of phone calls that were less than great though. This is where I swing into questionable territory with Hubris. My thoughts and feelings and experiences are my own, of course, but talking about other people’s stuff creates the question of when does it veer into someone else’s story, someone else’s business? So I guess I will focus on the me, as much as I can, although this will mean some obtuseness. One of the reasons I was so attracted to him this time around was his sobriety, and his willingness to talk about that. I still carry the memory of the start of 2020, when I stopped drinking for a while because I knew it was becoming an issue so I think I have some kind of insight. Everything was so fucking terrifying and I felt like everything I did was like dragging myself over a cheesegrater. Every part of me was just so raw. You may have read all that over past Hubris entries, and know that I try to be sensible now – making sure I eat, making sure I drink plenty of water, using H.A.L.T as a way to think if I’m hungry, angry, lonely or tired before I drink and trying to solve those problems instead of avoiding them. The last time I drank badly was the day that Cat died, when I mixed alcohol with tramadol on purpose because I was in pain. So it was exciting to be maybe building something with someone who didn’t drink, who talked about their feelings, because it meant I wouldn’t be drinking when I was with him either. What is not exciting or fun, however, is to be on the phone to someone who is not sober, and to be terrified they are going to do something to hurt themselves.

The notes app on my phone started getting a lot of use as I put down my feelings and tried to sort out my brain. I am proud that I set boundaries – “Don’t call me if you’re high” and considered what dealbreakers I would have. You know me, I’m a Gemini and while not everything about that stereotype rings true, communication is EVERYTHING to me. I can cope with just about everything as long as people are honest and communicate with me about it. When we got out of our respective isolations we made plans for him to come down and spend the weekend with me. I tidied my room. I baked a pie. His boss texted me to say he wasn’t coming, that he needed some time. I took the sad pie over to my neighbours instead. Eventually he messaged. We spent three hours on the phone the next morning talking about what had happened. I decided I needed to go and visit him instead. 

Once I got out of COVID isolation I was able to return to my EAP counselor. We spent a while talking about semantics because I noticed so many of the words I used to describe him – enchanting, magical, bewitching – could have negative trickery connotations, and I tried to figure out if it meant that I was doubting his sincerity or just whether I actually deserved such attention. I told her that I’d promised myself that I would always tell Jo everything, and that if there were things that I didn’t want to tell Jo, that’s especially when I would know I needed to tell her (and writing this now makes me chuckle uneasily cos oops, I have not told her a few things lately). We talked about issues around addiction, and she checked in to make sure I wasn’t feeling responsible (and I’m proud to say I was not). She asked me “yes these are all things that are important – but how do you feel when you’re actually with him?” Safe. Warm. Cared for. Sexy. Interesting. Admirable. All the things. I loved how I felt reflected in his eyes.  Do you know those minutes when you’re sprawled across a bed naked and you look backwards over your shoulder to smile at your lover coming to bed and your hair is skimming your bare skin and everything is tingling and in that minute you feel like the absolute centre of the universe? Like that. Like coming home. Every cliche. My counselor told me it sounded like I had thought things through well, and was realistic. “What will you do if it fails?” she asked me. “Cry a lot. And come back to you to talk it through,” I said. Falling for someone is always risky, you can get your heart broken without distance and other issues involved anyway. So she said “Go – go and let yourself be dazzled”. I did. 

My August weekend in the town he was living in was one of the best weekends of my life. I had Bridget Jones and her obsession with mini-breaks in my head. But just to be there with him, to touch him after a couple of incredibly intense weeks getting to know one another from a distance was unbelievable. He was real. I hadn’t made the whole thing up. I hadn’t made up how I felt. And holy fuck he felt so good. 

Now we come into a whole diversion about my sexuality, and how strange it felt to have so many feelings about a boy. Normally I forget that the whole thing about being queer is that it’s the word I prefer to describe myself with, as it’s more of a call to action than “bi” but oh yes, I do actually like boys too. In fact the last person I was in love with, at the end of 2019, was a man. There were tangles in my brain too, about how I often end up being domme with women but my preference is to be submissive and yet it’s only dudes that top me. And then the I AM A STRONG FEMINIST, I DON’T NEED NO MAN part was screaming about how fucking nice it was to be with a man and have him take care of me. It was nice to be the little spoon. It was so nice to be taken care of. On the Sunday I took a nap in the back room of his workplace and he came in to check that I was warm enough, and to bring me water. That seems like not a huge gesture, but it felt like everything. He made me feel the way I try to always make others feel. Just how absolutely right it felt to be with him made my overheated mind go “wait have I been lying about being queer after all? Am I actually just straight? Am I even failing at being gay?” which is of course nonsense because there’s no right way to have a sexuality – it just speaks to the lack of care previous lovers had given me. And that seems worth mentioning – how everyone I’d loved before had girlfriends or husbands or massive internalised homophobia that they prioritised over me. So to have most of one person’s focus for once was absolutely intoxicating. And he told people about me! I wasn’t a dirty hidden secret for the first time ever. Wow.

I’m a planner. Y’all know that. Someone can smile at me across the street and I’ll imagine the potential arguments we’ll have about where to send our children (I’m never going to agree to let my son go to an all boys’ school, COME ON). OId undiagnosed ADHD noggin here cranks at six thousand thoughts per second, so just because I consider something – like the children I’ll have with a stranger on the street – doesn’t mean it’s necessarily something that I really really want. But to watch him at work, I could see a future together, even in separate cities. I loved how he treated everyone, the space he created. I was deeply deeply turned on by his ambition. His sparkle combined with my getting shit done attitude could have created some really great projects. And I loved feeling my brain work on ideas too, slowly shifting out of the sludge it’d been mired under for so long. He felt like such a catalyst, because if a man that great could be into me, well anything could be possible and achievable. I asked him to take photos of me in various Boom clothes I’d brought up for the background, and he pulled out a ladder onto the street to get the best angles. I was embarrassed at the attention, and he was like “They’re just looking at the hotness of you” and it felt conceivable. The enthusiasm! The spotlight! The attention! Honestly again, if I was to try to describe the way I wanted someone to make me feel, it would just be describing that weekend. That night I had the same reoccurring nightmare that I have so often about being at school and having missed most of the year and being about to sit an exam and not knowing where my classes were, and it was amazing to be able to wake up with him at my side and have him wrap his arms around me and comfort me even while making fun of me for having such a nerdish nightmare.

Weekends end though. I went back to Wellington. We discussed him coming down for the next weekend. He relapsed instead. I tried to reinforce my boundary of not being called when he wasn’t sober. I said that I’d be there for him as long as he was doing the work and if he wanted me. Rinse, repeat throughout September. That withdrawal of affection hit so hard, to go from constant joy to breadcrumbs was a hell of a come-down. It also had far too many echoes of how others had treated me in the past. I didn’t like how I was acting either, begging for scraps. Previously I’d been proud of myself for setting boundaries, for talking openly about my feelings, for asking for the things I needed. I liked that I wasn’t comparing myself to his successful exes, that I felt secure thinking that I was the right person for him at the time (though you know the group-chat got pinged when one of them appeared in the paper). 

So in order to keep myself from losing the plot, I decided I needed a distraction. What better way to salve an overthinking brain than by bringing back a huge fucking big deal? I decided to hold Camp Boom again and soon found myself overwhelmed with decisions to make and things to do and financial stress, but he was still on my mind.   

 He disappeared for a week and then surfaced to ask me to lend him money. That was my dealbreaker. I waited two days before replying to say that I was done, that I’d take his call when he got to the ninth step, and that I hoped it wouldn’t be another 13 years before we saw each other again. He sent me the nicest message saying he understood. It hurt. It still hurts. But in a surprisingly responsible move, instead of throwing myself under the nearest person, I made sad playlists and tried to sit in my feelings, allowing myself to feel the grief of all that lost potential, the things it felt like we had been building and that we could have had. I second-guess myself constantly, trying to figure out if any of it was real or not. I think it was. I hope it was. 

Third time’s a charm? 

The theme for Sajoween  (the annual Halloween party Saj and I throw every year) VI was Horror Prom and the stupid fucking ridiculous romantic in me carried this tiny little hopeful spark inside that he’d show up, because guess who’s seen the Prom episode of Buffy  way too many times? Somewhat ironically, I got drunk and messaged him to say I missed him. Sorry Jo, I didn’t tell you that. 

The weekend after that was my friend Rachel’s amazing wedding, where I drank a lot of water as well as a lot of wine so that I would behave myself. Even though we were asked to RAT beforehand, it turned out some people at the wedding had COVID, and when I got sick I thought well fuck, this is it, number three. I stayed home, felt really fucking sick, took RATs every day and was surprised every day when they were negative. I even went and got a PCR test to be sure. Still negative. It was just my crappyass immune system fucking up. That cold has left me feeling kitten-weak all over again like the first bout of COVID.  

I spent way more money on Camp and scholarships than I had budgeted for. I didn’t sell as many tickets as I needed to. I launched a new season of House of Boom because I am always a stupid optimist and had to pay for that while trying to hold money to pay for the venue and the catering. I had to refund someone because they got COVID (and that was my promise to make people feel more comfortable about attending). I currently have $25 left on the overdraft in my business account. People who received scholarships didn’t bother showing up. Speakers were really uncommunicative. Other speakers got COVID and I had to pivot seven thousand times? One person out of the 45 or so people there was basically unbearable. And yet Camp was amazing? Full credit must go to Sara for being the most amazing number two a girl could ever hope for, and for others for stepping up when my stupid fucking longass COVID self physically could not carry anything anymore, or really mentally either. 

I am incredibly proud of what I created. And yet, as soon as it was over, as soon as I stopped having to make a million fucking decisions on the fly all the time, I realised that gaping giant great big hole is still there. Camp was a much more productive way to try and kill the pain than many other alternatives, and caused a greater net good, but I still feel him missing. And yeah, I messaged him to say that (sorry Jo) and he sent me back an incredibly lovely message and I felt that spark again and no. He’s moved on (it doesn’t take a Veronica Mars-esque best friend to know that, but it helps) and I don’t know how he’s had time to take care of himself and be able to take care of someone else too, but it’s not actually my business. 

I don’t feel like we are done forever? There may be some time in the future where the planets align and we are both where we need to be. Maybe in another 13 years? For a non-spiritual person, I am surprisingly into the idea of FATE. I didn’t intend to catch COVID on Tinder, let alone feelings, and yet here we are.  

Look, this shit is all pretty grim. I wanna end on an up note. The full funding of Trikafta may be a huge fucking deal to someone in my family and that’s worth celebrating. Cheers.