2024 & the human behind the cryptid

Hey friends. It’s your favorite cryptid Al.

I’ve always debated with myself as to how much of my personal life is appropriate to share on the internet. I tend to like my privacy, which is why I have almost no ‘personal’ accounts to speak of online. I don’t see the merit, and the people who see me face-to-skull tend to know what’s going on with me.

But, I’ve also built up a little bit of a following on Bluesky thanks to my modeling, and there have been times this year (and likely times that will follow), where I just tell people ‘I’m depressed and I can’t right now’. Depression is a heavy word. If you’ve read some of my previous posts on here, you have an idea of what’s happened, but I’ve left out a lot of the weight on purpose. In some ways, I’m prideful about my ability to handle things, and in this particular instance it has been to my own detriment. I’ve had people tell me, “Wow, you’re handling things so well.” and “You’re so strong.” Maybe I believed it a little, but with winter on our heels, I feel myself breaking down. Seasonal Affective Disorder is a bitch.

Often I find people seeking my counsel, not because I’m necessarily qualified to dispense advice, but because I’m a good listener, and I’ve (usually) been in similar situations. I try to give advice based on my own experiences, and when someone has something ugly in them, I tell them to write it out. Get it outside of yourself. If you keep it in, it will fester. I usually try to follow my own advice, but this time, I slipped. I didn’t think I needed to. I did. Maybe I won’t publish this. Maybe I’ll just write out the terrible thoughts and leave this in drafts. Either way, if you’re reading this, it’s because I found merit in sharing it.

Before you continue, here are the trigger warnings: Descriptions of traumatic events, descriptions of the death of a family member, manipulation, shitty parents, PTSD. Please, if any of that makes you uncomfortable, I ask that you stop here. It’s depressing. It doesn’t have a happy ending.

On a Wednesday night in January, we had just experienced a blizzard. Unfortunately, we are rarely prepared for blizzards where I live because our winters for the last decade have been rather mild. There is snow, yes, but nothing like what we got that day. I lived on the same property as my parents and, in fact, used to split the mortgage with them. We had two houses on this property; I live closest to the road while my parents lived up the hill.

It was around 7PM that Wednesday night, and I’d been making a cobbled together dinner out of what I could find in the pantry. I hadn’t been grocery shopping recently and was starting to regret it. That wasn’t the first time we’d had a ‘threat’ of a blizzard, but this time the threat was a promise. My stepmother called as I was boiling some beans and she was absolutely frantic. I’d assumed a pipe might have burst or a toilet overflowed, but no. She told me my dad collapsed on the floor of his room and he wasn’t breathing.

As fast as I could, I turned the stove off, got on my shoes, and ran up the driveway in nothing but a tattered jacket and my pajamas. My stepmom was waiting by the front door and I had a clear view into dad’s room where he was laying face down, half fallen over the bucket of scrap he’d been sorting out, not moving an inch. I have no idea how long he’d been laying there, or how long it had taken her to call me, but I start screaming for him and I flip him over.

My dad was blue. He was the color that people tell you a living person should never be. He wasn’t breathing. I was not trained in CPR, but I still had to frantically try. I compressed his chest and breathed into his mouth. I could taste whatever he had coughed up on his lips. I kept yelling at him that he couldn’t do this to me. That I still needed him and I couldn’t do this (whatever this was. Live? Exist? Be an adult?) without him. He was only in his 60s, not even quite retirement age yet. He had mostly been healthy, or so I’d believed. He was trying to cut back on smoking. He was making plans to travel once he finally retired. We had talked about getting together and mapping out our ancestry, and talking about those who had come before us so their stories could continue on after he was gone. *We* had made plans. He couldn’t just abandon them like that. He couldn’t just leave without giving me a final piece of wisdom.

But, he did.

Eventually my roommate joined me up at the house and started doing CPR, and I ran down to the street waiting for the ambulance to show up on the icy road. It took them 20 minutes. It felt both like an eon had passed and as if I’d only been standing outside in the cold for a minute. I kept telling the universe not to take my dad away from me. My dad was my childhood hero. My dad saved me from a life with a mother who neither wanted me nor was fit for the job. My dad had given me all that he could give at the expense of his own comfort sometimes. I still had to pay him back for that. I still had to show up for him and be a good daughter. I still had to get to the point where I could take care of him and make sure he had everything he needed.

I have a lot of respect for ambulance workers and first responders, but part of me hated how casual they were about the man laying on the floor. Some of the color had returned to his cheeks by the time they started working on him, but there are times when you just know that there’s no good outcome.

The best case scenario in my head was that I might get to speak briefly with him in the hospital. Or, even if he didn’t speak to me, I’d have a chance to say the things I needed to say to him. Once they stabilized him, they loaded him into the vehicle and my Stepmom went with him. And I sat, in their empty home, on their worn down couch, staring at the wall and waiting for any kind of news, or some sign from the universe that things would be okay. I was eventually coaxed back home where I sat in my office and continued to stare, shell shocked. My step sister had made the treacherous drive to the hospital (which is the only reason I didn’t go, because I didn’t have a car that would make the trip), and she was the one who called me.

“He didn’t make it.” Was what she said. No formalities. “I’m sorry.” And, I guess that was all that really could be said right then. Dad died of a cardiac infarction. More or less: his heart broke in an irreparable way. There was no saving him.

I didn’t really sleep that night, or the night after, or the night after that. I ate a handful of times that week. And only a handful more times the week following. I was either irreconcilably upset or I felt nothing. I had frequent anxiety spikes and couldn’t drive my car because it felt like literally everything was out to get me. Luckily, I have a great support system of friends and all of them banded together to help me through it. If I didn’t have them, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know how I would’ve survived. But, then came new problems.

My stepmom couldn’t live here anymore. She couldn’t even be in the house that she’d shared with her husband for over 20 years without feeling immense grief. She moved in with her daughter, and that left me floundering to figure out what the fuck I was going to do and how I was going to survive, because there was no way I could pay that mortgage myself. Luckily, I had a friend willing to move in for a discounted rent cost. Unluckily… I started to find out just how much of a handyman my dad wasn’t, despite his best efforts to portray himself as a guy who wore many hats.

The house was not in great shape. The plumbing was fucked, the electrical was fucked, the floor was fucked, and the master bathroom was ESPECIALLY fucked. The new roof that dad had been proud of because he got a fellow ‘handyman’ to do it was not done well. Surprise, surprise. My dad had not left a will, and while my stepmom would not humor the idea of anyone else taking the property (not that they could, because my name was already on the deed with my dads), everything else was free game. Things I could’ve used were taken, and I was left with the broken remnants of my childhood home. At the time, I felt cheated, a little by other people, but mostly by my dad. I still had my place to live, but there was nothing to help me with repairs.

Then, my stepmom calls me about a life insurance policy my dad had… But she wasn’t the beneficiary. My mom was. At that point, my mom and dad had been divorced for a long time. Like, almost decades a long time. I told her I’d look into it, and once I spoke to them, I KNEW dad had forgotten about this policy too, because my mom was the original beneficiary and my mom’s sister was the second beneficiary, not me. Likely this had been a small, lump sum policy from one of his old jobs. I’d asked them about if my mom still had a claim to it since they’d been divorced for so long, and because of the state they were divorced in, she did not. So, I said nothing to her and instead went to my aunt.

I did this because I knew my mom. My mom is an alcoholic and drug addict. Her demons took over a long time ago, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been acquainted with the woman behind them. My aunt, however, is more or less my spirit mom. I know without a shadow of a doubt she’d do anything for me, and the same could be said vice versa. I love her and my uncle more than anyone else in my family now that dad’s passed. Both of them worked tirelessly to help me get the money, which by the way was a measly $650. Not even enough to cover my mortgage payment, but certainly enough to help. She’d asked them, adamantly, to leave my mom out of it and not inform her.

Before this, my mom had made a paltry effort to reconcile with me. We rarely talked, and I knew in my heart of hearts it wouldn’t go anywhere when she sent me that first text. “you only get one mom.” is part of what she said. I hadn’t corrected her at the time, but I knew she was wrong then.

Unfortunately, the life insurance company did inform her of the policy. To summarize the series of events in a less painful way, she’d messaged my aunt and told her she had hit the jackpot related to her ex husband. She thought that the policy was a 30k life insurance policy (to this day we have no idea why she thought this), and she was already making plans to buy a car and split the rest with her OTHER sister (the shitty sister, lest you think my other aunt on my mother’s side is some kind of saint). She specifically told my (good) aunt not to tell me and wanted her to help with the paperwork. And, because my aunt loves me, she sent me the text.

At that time, on top of everything else I’ve already told you, I’d just found out I was being manipulated by someone I thought was a close friend, and ended up being a narcissist. That particular can of worms I won’t get into, but… I don’t know how to explain those feelings adequately via words. I guess it was like feeling as if the world itself had seen my tiny existence and said to its friend: “Hey, you wanna see something really funny?” and then mean girl’d the shit out of me. I’d lost my dad, and the woman who was supposed to be my mom was dancing on his grave and flipping me off behind my back, all while pretending to be interested in my well-being to my face.

I sat on what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to have a knee jerk reaction and I wanted to be sure that what I said would not affect anyone else negatively. My aunt and I talked about it, and I found out that my aunt had been hiding the fact that my mom harassed her almost constantly. For money, and for the fact that my aunt actually acted more like a parent than she did. She hadn’t said anything before because she wanted me to have a chance at a relationship with my mother. She didn’t feel right encroaching on that. But, I wish she had.

Through my dad’s death, I learned what kind of monster my mom was. Up to that point, I’d had so much animosity towards him over the state of things that I’d flipped all the pictures of with dad face down in my house. I know it wasn’t necessarily on purpose that he did this, but the events felt almost divine in nature. Synchronistic, I’d call them. I will not tell you what I eventually texted her, but the words came from steadied, thoughtful hands. More or less, I told her I knew what she’d done, revealed to her that she had ruined multiple relationships for less than $700, and told her that if she ever spoke to me again, I would make her regret it. And, I will! I will claim no other certainty in life than this.

But, all of that brings me to now. We’re in the cold months again. The days are shorter, and I see my dad everywhere. Certainly the results of the election didn’t help, but it is simply a piece in this ugly puzzle. My finances are not stable, and my grief still feels fresh. Some days, I struggle just to be a person. But, I can still write. I can still make myself a grilled cheese sandwich when there’s bread in the cabinet. I can still count on my amazing friends when I’m in a pinch. I say this, not to make light of anyone else’s tragedies, but to let you know that, whatever you’re struggling with, you’ll get through it too. Life is hard. It’s meant to be. Through hardship, we are taught what matters most to us, and what we can cling to. Sometimes, what we can cling to is simply ourselves and our resilience.

If you have no one else to tell you this, let me tell you right now: you’ll be okay. You will find a place of stability, even if it’s not stable all the time. There will be others you’ll meet who help you through those dark, dark times.

You’ll be okay, and I will be too.