schema

• I got my driver's license, and a car! I'm still a terrible driver, but having the option of driving let me search for jobs in a much wider radius, and has been pretty helpful in general.
• I had a job! From April until the end of September. It was a seasonal office job, full time for the most part with a lot of overtime in June and July. My bosses thought I was awesome and I managed to save a bunch of money.
• Through said job, I acquired a posse of tea-drinking nerd friends, which has been pretty great.
• Rather less positively, in August and September I got hit with some pretty catastrophic fatigue (sleeping 12 hours a day, falling asleep at my desk, etc. etc.) I never found any kind of medical explanation. I have since gotten back to a "normal" energy level for me, but I have no idea what triggered the fatigue or how to keep it from coming back. I'm kind of terrified of that happening again. It's extremely difficult to crawl my way back out of fatigue like that, because it leaves me with no energy to manage anything beyond the very most basic self-care (if even that), making it almost impossible to make and keep medical appointments or do other things that are "supposed" to help. Thanks, body?
• After being laid off from that job, I was thinking about looking for something part-time, but eventually decided to go back to community college and finish my AA. And then... wavered on that for months, alternately panicking and despairing and pretending I was super motivated and everything was fine. Everything was not fine.
• Found a therapist. We haven't made enormous amounts of progress on anything specific yet, but I have fuckin' issues with therapists, and the fact that she has not pushed me to make rapid progress on anything in particular is to her credit. Cautious optimism there. Maybe someday I will learn how to handle an ordinary workload without having panic attacks?
• At the last minute, I made the decision to defer going back to college until next quarter, by which time I will hopefully be able to manage it with less resentment and terror. Part of what makes the idea of going back to college so difficult for me is that... well, I don't actually want to. I view getting a bachelor's degree as the only way I am likely to ever attain a middle-class standard of living. There are parts of the process that wouldn't be completely terrible, but I feel that colleges are fundamentally exploitative.

( behind the cut: unexpected rant about the higher education racket )

I'm planning to major in economics, because this economy is so broken. (and for more reasons than that - I have some intrinsic interest in the subject, I think its core assumptions are extremely flawed and the field has failed to incorporate the insights of behavioral economics, and as a nice side benefit it seems to leave a reasonably broad range of career options open that are mostly pretty high-paying.)