austin_dern

 Yeen ended things with Husboo last night. I came home last night to Husboo making a martini while he gave me the news. It was...a sudden end to a relationship that hadn't quite been working for some time. 

Husboo is heart-broken, of course, and I'm heart-broken for him. He's doing his best to manage his grief, but he poured his heart and soul into the relationship for over a year now. When you try so hard and your efforts are still rejected, it's impossible not to take that personally. 

But it honestly had nothing to do with him. Yeen is...young and his heart is bigger than his brain in the sense that he commits to things with no real sense of the work involved in keeping that commitment. I don't think he understood what he was signing up for with a poly relationship -- much less one with someone as intense as Husboo tends to be. Once he realized this wasn't someone whose life he could dip into for two weekends a month and then leave alone, I think he couldn't find a way to balance everything without burning out. 

I don't blame Yeen for this at all. He's young, and as a recovering over-committer myself I know how easy it can be to fall into this trap. The reality of your dreams is always so much messier and so much more work than you think it will be. 

But this leaves Husboo wondering if he's unloveable, or will never be seen as someone special again, and...of course not. He's special to me, and I know he knows this too, but I think he misses the total immediacy of new love, the excitement and rush of endorphins. I, on the other hand, have never known the suffusive warmth of old love, being with someone day after day, building a life, a rut, habitual comfort with them. I feel so lucky to have someone to build that with, and I cherish him for it. 

It's just easy to stay focused on all the ways in which we're not fulfilled that we don't give enough air to all the things that are getting us 80% of the way there, you know? I think the quest for fulfillment is good and natural, but we get locked into the mindset of finding the flaws in everything, tallying up all the ways we're unhappy like a to-do list that needs to be checked off. I know there's a middle path between contentment in stagnation and total restlessness forcing a death march to perfection, but staying on it does require a level of intentionality I haven't been putting in. 

There are a few places in life where I need to step up. For now, it's important to me that he knows I love him. <3

 Coming back to this after a long time away. I'm hoping I can find time to do this and slowly, steadily, get my head back in working order.

It hasn't been too bad, come to think of it. I'm working as a Customer Service Rep for a local waste-management company, coming up on 3 months of employment now. It's not a bad position -- it's easier than what I had been doing and I get paid more, so that's all gravy. I do have to commute to an office nearby, which isn't the worst thing either. 

I hadn't realized how much I needed to be out and about with other people to feel LIKE a person. Of course I'd much rather be working from home and enjoying all of the free time that would give me -- but having to look at myself in a mirror every day, make sure I'm presentable to the world, prepping to leave my safe home for the wild world outside, re-learning how to interact with people on a daily basis...it's all stuff I really needed to be doing because otherwise I would be shrinking back into myself and totally fine doing so. 

The commute isn't so bad, either. I work from 8 - 5 with an hour for lunch; I leave home around 7:20 AM and come back a little before 6 PM most days. It's a couple of hours "lost" to the commute, but it's also not really lost time. It took me a little while to remember that you can fill your commute with decent activities too, like listening to a podcast, audiobook, or calling up the people you haven't talked to on the phone in forever. 

The job itself is...an adjustment. We split time evenly between actual customer service (mostly by phone with a little email) and operations stuff -- data entry, generating reports, refining processes. Honestly it's kind of perfect; the customer service skills are coming back online slowly but steadily, and I think my time as a QC analyst has sharpened my operations 'cadence' so that I can sharpen up a few things now that I know what I'm doing. 

The commute means I see Husboo and Ratty a lot less, which is a bummer. It also means I have a lot less time for house upkeep, which sucks. Thankfully, Husboo has been picking up a lot of the slack and I'm really grateful to him for it.

Tonight, he'll be going on Date Night with the Yeen, leaving Ratty and I to our own devices. I definitely want to spend part of the evening just hanging with him -- we haven't been able to really connect in a couple of weeks, it feels like. But also, at some point, I'll need to sit down and bang out the plot for tomorrow's Unlicensed D&D game. 

The game has been pretty decent overall since coming back in 2026. I've been happy with the sessions even if they haven't quite gone down the way I anticipated. I mean, isn't that the way it usually goes down?

Busy weekend with Husboo's baseball scrimmage, our softball clinic, and a trip to an Ethiopian restaurant on the books. It IS a good thing I'm getting paid tomorrow, but I'm also dedicated to spending as little as possible whenever I can help it. It's time to start building back my savings and paying down my debt.