I find myself contemplating the life I was living just a few years ago and how out of balance it was. I hold up my life today as a model for comparison and it would seem like someone else’s.

In 2021 around this time, I had really begun to feel the effects of burnout from helping run a business. I was never able to be truly free from the day-to-day concerns of the venture and it sapped my strength do want to do much of anything outside of what needed done. I was near the peak of my drinking problem and more and more of the daylight hours were spent in some stage of intoxication. Alcohol is numbing and it is effective on pain of every variety including physical, emotional, and mental. But that temporary relief was less effective by the day and I had to ramp up the quantity because my tolerance was becoming heroic.

Now it’s three years later and my life has so few concerns that I look back on this period as an informative one. I could see every single thing I didn’t want my life to be daily and I felt powerless to change course. There was no end in sight so I resigned that things would finally come around when I was able to step away and put this life to rest for good through a business closure at some distant point in the future. I clung to the idea like a drowning man clings to the floating wreckage of his ship.

I was sure it would take a death to be free of it all, and almost as if by fate, there would be one.

But now I have the exact opposite set of problems to contend with. Although I’m not burned out from having way too much on my plate, I’m finding myself more and more disillusioned with having literally all of the free time in the world. It has made me available for others 24/7 and there is a sense of fulfillment to be had from being there for those who need you when they need you. But the pay for that kind of work is nonexistent, so I have to pick up freelance gigs to cover the few obligations I still have.

I want to be doing something with my time that helps other people on a broader scale and also allows me to make a living like the one I had from the business. I wasn’t an employee, so I didn’t report to anyone, and that is how I will have to work for the rest of my life. It is one of the few aspects of my old life that I want to maintain in the era I find myself in now.

Not having a lot of resources to draw from has been a blessing and a curse, because although it sucks not being able to get out and see more of the world, I worry about so little. It has made me prioritize what I want my life to be about, and it makes me appreciate the feasts between periods of famine.

There is nothing that could make me want to go back in time and relive the life I was struggling with a few years ago. Not even the alternate universe where dad didn’t have a stroke and die. Because that life didn’t seem to have any happy endings, and this one seems completely open to the possibility. I just have to make happiness a priority and find it everywhere I can.