I am struggling today, friends.

More like... I'm upset about my age advancing when I don't feel like I've actually lived the years. If my life experience and satisfaction matched up to the years, and to this face... I believe I'd be fine with it.

But I spent well over a decade stuck in depression, too poor to do more than survive, get through a workday, try to recover over the weekend, and then do the same thing again. 

It is literally to a point where... every new wrinkle, every new gray hair, along with every new survey I come across where Facebook friends are marking an X (or a pumpkin, or a star, or whatever) next to each country they've visited, it just causes pain.

Traveling the world is the biggest dream of my life. But I haven't been outside of the US since I was 3. And that was only Canada. I've never had a passport because I haven't needed one, but I really want the kind of life where you have to add in extra pages to the damn thing before it's due for renewal.

And the very moment I can actually afford to grasp that dream... fucking global pandemic. And hordes of idiots who are insistent on doing every stupid thing to prolong the plague ad infinitum, apparently. And absolutely no coordination from government, just gazing wearily and jealously at places like Germany, New Zealand, Australia, places that... actually got to have some normalcy for more than a few weeks in 2021. 

All the while, my face gets older and my joints get creakier. I have arthritis in my hands already. I JUST want to actually life a LIFE before I'm too old to actually enjoy it. I want my scars and my wrinkles to be trophies of a full life.