Well.

It passed.

The amoral, atrocious, vindictive, abomination of a bill passed the house today. The more I read about it, the more I am horrified. Truly horrified. The media has been focusing on the pre-existing conditions clause, but what has made my soul ache is the complete destruction of Medicaid and the loss of $880 billion in funding. $880 billion. The fact that every single medical society, every single healthcare advocacy group decried it should have meant that they considered the ramifications and had a thoughtful, careful approach to it. But I overestimated their moral conscience.

I’m enflamed and outraged. I am also terribly depressed and worried. I’m not comforted by knowing that it has to go through the Senate, as everybody keeps saying. All this revealed is how much our voices are ignored. I hope that this really does bring change at the midterm elections – but it didn’t when the republicans shut down the government for weeks so I don’t know why this would be different.

A few years ago, I was really into politics – I read about how the Supreme Court worked, I followed different bills and lawsuits, etc. A colleague of mine suggested getting involved in the AAN (American Academy of Neurology), as they have some political leadership courses and I could get involved in advocacy. And 4 months into this presidency and all of those kinds of thoughts have vanished. I’m tired and the thought of getting involved more… I hear that this has encouraged many people of the democratic party to seek office, and boy do I wish them well, and sort of wish it was me, mixed with gratitude that it’s not.

I met with my department’s financial administrator today. A year or so ago, my division suddenly had a shortage in our budget, which has meant a year of trying to figure out why. So, in response, I took over in understanding our numbers and working as a liaison with the financial administrator. I’ve spent hours trying to figure out why, met with the billing department, changed our documentation, etc. etc. And found out today that it hasn’t made much of a difference.

Working in the health care business (and not just as a health care provider), has been filled with these frustrations. I work in a academic hospital and there is still so much pressure for better billing and collections. I spend so much time writing notes, putting in accurate diagnoses, making sure that the wording is clear and detailed and it still doesn’t feel like enough.

And it’s only going to get worse with the likely repeal of the ACA, in so many ways. Patients losing insurance again and not getting the care that they need, not being able to go to the rehab centers that they need afterwards, not getting their medications – being a resident in Milwaukee when so many of my patients didn’t have insurance was a nightmare, and I can’t believe we’re going back to that. Our hospital, as pretty much every hospital in the country, has been dependent on funds from medicaid for funding, which impacts the care we can deliver and so on.

The health care debate and debacle has been so stressful that I haven’t been sleeping well again. Having absolute ignorant, greedy politicians refusing to listen to how this impact their constituents, refusing to take their time and make improvements to the system. I hate them. I utterly loath them. I am having a very heard time thinking charitable thoughts about them – and I don’t like that. Even though I’m a fairly hard left leaning person in my politics, I’m also someone who believes pretty firmly in compromise and that there could be value in some conservative values, but this is truly trying.

It’s been months since the election and I’ve had this constant pit of anxiety that never really goes away. I started seeing my therapist again because I wasn’t sleeping and was cycling into a really dark place – that’s improved, with a couple of relaxation apps. My grandfather died when my mom was 15, from a bleeding ulcer and complications related to that, but my mom will say that he worried himself to death. While I know that the two are unrelated, I wonder how much of that worrying nature I’ve inherited.

At a Mormon feminist retreat this weekend, one of the sessions was about narrating your story and I felt such a longing for the time when I first started this journal, and the bits of my soul that I recorded and preserved. I’ve had spurts throughout my life when I’d attempt to be a great journallingist (compared to being a journalist). In junior high, I poured out my loneliness and crushes and sins into our old computer, saved carefully on floppy disks that I no longer have access to (they’ve either been lost or can’t be opened). In college, I wrote my words in bound books, but sporadically; long, passioned descriptions of the events of my life. Once my car was broken into, and a bag containing my journal was stolen. The absence of my thoughts from that time gnaws on me to this day, more than any other valuables lost. And then gradually, I found myself here, where I opened up and shared my life to the anonymous public and then to friends and family when they discovered my blog.

There’s so many small details from the last five+ years that I have lost because my journalling petered out, memories forgotten. I try to recreate them at the end of the year, but that’s relying on vague Facebook confessions and photos taken, and there are so many holes (also I am bad about getting them done on time).

For much of the last five years, I would open up this journal and try to write, the words stuck beside my inner turmoil about so many things: my faith and how it wasn’t fitting quite right anymore, even though I desperately wanted it to; singleness and trying to adjust to a life that I never thought I’d have; imposter syndrome; anxiety over work, etc, etc. So I didn’t write and it was harder to come back and try to write.

Anyhow. With the slow destruction of LJ and the migration away of so much of fandom, I’ve been hit with nostalgia and with a need to hold on a little longer. So I’m going to try blogging again this month. Yay?

LJ apparently celebrated their 18th birthday (and then sold us all to the dictatorship next to Alaska). I haven’t been here the whole 18 years – but I was sort of shocked to see that it’s been well over a decade – this is my entire 30s and a good chunk of my 20s encapsulated here in fragmented form. No wonder I am grieving at the loss.