This has been the worst decade of my life. Although I’d had plenty of struggles and bad times before 2017, I had no idea that I could have so much pain, misfortune, relationship drama, financial issues, and other troubles in a span of ten years. Unfortunately, I could, and did. Here’s the worst of it.
The year 2017 remains one of the worst years of my life. It started terribly with my maternal grandfather’s death in February. From there, life kept kicking me while I was down and knocking me down again every time I got back up. Everything that could go wrong did until the last few months of the year. Years later, when life wasn’t content with just taking my grandfather, 2024 took my maternal grandmother. That’s when I joined the many folks who know the pain of having no more living grandparents. In between their deaths, my dog and best friend ever Sawyer died in 2022. After Sawyer’s death, which happened just a few months after getting a concussion and then leaving a job on bad terms, I spent over three years without a steady day job while crawling out of the deepest, darkest pit of misery I’ve ever experienced. It’s a wonder I didn’t die from heartbreak during that time.
When I finally got a steady day job in early 2025, I had to deal with bullying from a coworker for most of that year. That largely ended when I called him out on it and stood up to him just over a year ago now, although he is still one of the rudest, most hostile, and overall worst humans I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with. He’s by far the worst coworker I’ve ever had. Last year also brought tons of unexpected expenses, mostly from car repairs. Making that money back has proven impossible since lots of work has been canceled this year due to a number of issues, meaning I’m worse off financially now than I was this time last year after barely rebuilding from years without steady money coming in.
Now, just when it looked like I had gotten a temporary job while waiting for my main job to get back together, I got diagnosed with a hernia last Friday. This will likely prevent me from doing any kind of manual labor in the foreseeable future, which eliminates both my day job, the temporary job I could have otherwise started, and most other possible job prospects. Even if I get it fixed through surgery, I’ll still have to avoid heavy physical activity for six weeks while I recover. Surgery itself is another issue. I have no primary care doctor nor health insurance, so I have no idea how to get this hernia sorted out without breaking the bank. If there’s any good news here, it’s the doctor saying that there’s no urgent need of repair at this point, so I have time to possibly figure something out. I hope I can, though I’m not holding my breath for it.
This hernia is, sadly, just the latest of my many health issues this decade. A few ear infections plagued the last part of 2017 and the early part of 2018. Gastrointestinal issues have ramped back up since 2024 after largely leaving my life in my teenage years (they were a constant part of my upbringing). A concussion in late 2021, knee injury last year, ankle injury earlier this year, and stepping on a nail at work last year and this year were the biggest issues this decade until this month. Although my body has survived a lot, these incidents remind me that it is still fairly fragile and make me think that I’m no longer cut out for manual labor jobs.
The financial and health issues couldn’t have come at a worse time this year. After my day job had totally dried up and before the hernia first showed any symptoms, I found out that I’ll have to leave the house I grew up in and have lived in for almost my entire life. There’s no definite timeline yet, though I’m sure that I will be living somewhere else by this time next year. The stress from current issues plus my utter lack of skills in living alone or with anybody other than my parents has gotten me paralyzed with fear. I still feel overwhelmed by it all even with all the letting go I’ve done in my time away from work over the last few weeks.
And to top it all off, I can’t express frustration over anything without somebody jumping in to make the conversation all about them instead of showing compassion for me and my pain; tell me not to feel upset because somebody else out there has it worse; tell me to smile which they can do easily when hearing about my pain because they don’t have to deal with my problems; or give advice I don’t want, didn’t ask for, and which will likely not help or even be counterproductive. If I want compassion and understanding to be delivered in ways that actually help me feel better, I have to do it for myself. That’s exhausting and gets harder to do the worse I feel and the longer a hard season lasts. I wish humans were better at comforting each other.
Ever since I graduated from high school in 2012, it’s as if there has been a giant weight marked “DOOM” floating over my head. Frequently, it will throw horrible things my way, from health issues to financial troubles to deaths of my loved ones. Sometimes, it’ll crash down on me with an exceptionally brutal disaster. One of these days, it’ll end me. That I know since everyone will die sooner or later, and I don’t know when my time will come. Even though I’ve made it through all my bad days so far, I won’t make it through one hundred percent of my bad days as my last bad day will be the day I die. With how the past ten years have gone, and unless some major changes happen right away, it seems like my life will become an endless series of bad days before it finally ends. How disappointing for one of the two students voted most likely to succeed during senior year of high school.
The post I wrote back in May about being in a new flourishing phase now reads like the last dying breath of a beautiful dream before I woke up in this nightmare. I had no idea at the time what horrors the remainder of 2026 would hold for me. No matter how the final few months of this year turn out, I’ve experienced enough so far to declare 2026 to be another bad year for me. That makes three bad years in a row now. Despite the last ten years giving me the best year of my life in 2018, a fairly good year in 2019, and a decent year in 2023, it has also given me the worst years of my life. In addition to 2017, the first three years of the 2020s were terrible for me, with 2022 being the worst year I’ve ever had upon Sawyer’s death and all the misery that that caused me. After a bit of a break with 2023, three more consecutive bad years. Seven terrible years, two decent years, and one great year. A failing grade by any decent school’s standards. What an awful decade.
A saying I like about survival says that one can only survive for three months without human contact, three weeks without food, three days without water, three hours without shelter, three minutes without oxygen, and three seconds without hope. Exaggerations aside, it is extremely difficult to survive long when all hope is gone. With all that’s happened over the course of my life and especially the past ten years, I’m almost ready to give up hope. The more I strive for better things, the more I lose. What’s the point of continuing to try if this is going to be my lot in life? How can I make it if something happens every few years to knock me on my back, destroy everything I’ve built up, and make me start from scratch? Anything that might help at this point seems like too little, too late. I can’t catch a break without getting knocked down every time I get back up, and I can’t take much more of this. I feel so tired, sad, frustrated, and scared. I want to be a kid again and just have fun while other people keep me safe from all this danger and pain. Last week’s post ended without any kind of resolution, resurgence of hope, or plan to make things better. This week’s post will end the same. We’ll see how next week’s post will end.