March 2025 was both my worst month of this year and the worst month I’ve had in a long time. Here’s what made it awful and why I’m so glad it’s over.
My health got quite bad for most of last month. The issues were similar to that of March 2024, except even worse in some ways. I felt concerned about what might be happening, especially when the methods that had worked in the past seemed to exacerbate the problems this time around. It’s fairly rare that I have bad health issues and even rarer that the usual methods fail, so this was a big scare for me.
March also featured some disappointments in my search for a second job. I attended a job fair after learning about it the night before. While some attendees landed interviews or even got hired on the spot, unfortunately, I did not. Determined to keep going, I started using a job-finding website to look for jobs I’d be able and willing to do. The website also made it easy to apply to those jobs, so I started applying to one new job each day. Despite not hearing a word back from most of those places, I did manage to get an interview with one! It ended up being a few minutes and left me with the impression that I wouldn’t get it. That got me feeling majorly depressed. A much better second interview at the job a few days later gave me hope that it just might happen. I also applied to a few other jobs the very next day. Even if I get a good one, it will still take quite some time to improve my financial situation, and I have lingering concerns there.
One of my financial struggles as of late was a big, unexpected expense. That really discouraged me and seemed like a huge slap in the face, especially after all I’ve done to try to get back on my feet after being down for so long. It also made me feel even more desperate for a gig, more hours at my current job, a second job, or something else to bring in emergency money before it’s too late.
There were a few more experiences that added even more to my pain and left a bad taste in my mouth for March as a whole. Archie the rhino died at my local zoo after living there since 1975. He was one of the oldest rhinos in the world and his over sixty descendants helped keep the Southern white rhinoceros population going. I’ll miss seeing him on my zoo visits. To top it all off, I had a brief fight with a family member on one of the final days of the month that brought up a lot of old pain and left me feeling angry, scared, and depressed for nearly two whole days last weekend.
All of this had me feeling majorly depressed. Even more than the normal amount of depression I’m prone to feeling. By the time March ended, I was feeling a ton of despair, hopelessness, and seemed to be at the end of my rope. It was as if all the ways I have messed up my life had come back to haunt me, and that there was no way to avoid or recover from all the bad seeds I had sown. I also felt extra sad knowing that April would bring with it the three-year anniversary of my dog Sawyer’s death. His absence made everything mentioned above even more painful and harder to handle.
Fortunately, there were some good things in March. Some of my favorites were the extra time I got to spend with family members whom I don’t see often. Several of us had lunch together one day at my aunt and uncle’s house, there was a similar visit at my older sister’s house another day, and I spent a lovely afternoon with my aunt a bit after that. I had lots of good juggling afternoons with some great people, including a wonderful gig on the first day of March. I enjoyed playing some fun board games and had many fun times at the zoo; although I wouldn’t consider paying tribute to Archie at his celebration of life to be fun, I’m still glad I could participate. The worst of my health problems seemed to finally go away, thank goodness, and I feel much better physically than I did for most of last month. I also I met with a job coach shortly before starting a second job fairly quickly after talking with the owner of the company. It seems promising and I’ll keep you updated on it.
It took me a while to determine whether January or March was the worst month of this year for me (which gives you an idea of how 2025 is going for me if two of the three months that have happened so far were both incredibly painful). After all, I had some health issues back in January as well. A bit of car trouble, saying goodbye to Banks the jaguar at my local zoo, and the loss of my grandparents’ house all gave me a great deal of pain in January. However, because of the different sort of health issues that were more concerning to me, the death of Archie the rhino, that family fight, financial issues that didn’t come up until last month, and a huge amount of emotional pain, I now consider March to have been my worst month of 2025. I hope that each month from here on out is much better as far as my health, relationships, finances, and emotions go.