I had therapy today, and I came out of it with an uncomfortable realization: I'm already doing everything I'm supposed to do.

I go to therapy. I apply for jobs. I look into every kind of financial assistance I can find. I try to keep a routine, move my body, and make time for things I love. And at the end of the day, I'm still facing the same financial insecurity I was facing yesterday.

Nobody tells you this part. You can do all the things people recommend for your mental health, and none of them will pay the rent or buy food for your cats. I don't need better coping mechanisms. I need material security. Being told to keep working on myself while I'm already putting everything I have into surviving is its own special kind of exhausting.

Needing help is a circumstance, not a verdict

I'm 34, and I've had to ask my parents for money. For a long time I've described myself as a woman with no future, no savings, no money, and no friends.

I'm trying to learn to separate two things. "I need financial support right now" is a description of my circumstances. It isn't a measure of my worth. It doesn't erase the years I spent studying and working, and it doesn't mean I failed to become an adult. It means I'm in a hard place. I don't have to believe in a wonderful future tonight to deserve one.

When everything becomes a test

Somewhere along the way, even the things I love became things I could fail at.

I want to grow my hair out and dye it ash-blue because I have an image of myself I really like. But anxiety makes me pull at my hair, so now even that feels out of reach. I want to write my fic, but when I'm too tired to write, I start deciding it's mediocre and nobody cares. I want to try making videos, and before I've made a single one, I'm already bracing for disappointment. Even Stardew Valley, the one place I feel happy right now, has started to feel suspicious, as if I'm only escaping.

I've been leaving myself almost no room to enjoy anything without justifying it.

So I'm trying to remember this. My fic doesn't have to become a success to have mattered. It already has readers who told me it meant something to them, and even if it didn't, the joy I got from writing it wouldn't retroactively become worthless. A channel doesn't have to become a career. I don't have to be anyone famous to make a video about a weird little game I found. And I can want blue hair simply because I think it would look pretty on me. That's enough of a reason.

Not having the energy for something right now isn't the same as failing at it.

I miss the silence

This is the sentence I keep coming back to.

I'm not asking for an extraordinary life. I want to wake up without immediately worrying about how I'm going to survive. I want to drink coffee without doing math in my head, and read a book without feeling like I should be job hunting. I want to play Stardew Valley because I feel like it, not because it's the only place the noise stops. And I want to go to bed and actually rest.

I don't think I want to stop living. I want to stop having to fight this hard just to live.

When I was a kid living with my parents, I could close my bedroom door, put on a game, and just exist. I think what I miss isn't childhood itself. It's being able to enjoy something without being responsible for keeping my entire life afloat. Maybe that's why my little virtual farmhouse feels so comforting. There are things to do, but I get to decide whether to do them today, and tomorrow the world is still there.

I've been tired for a very long time. Thirty years of anxiety and depression is a lot of years. It makes sense that imagining ten more feels unbearable. But being tired doesn't mean I've lost my ambition. It means I'm tired. And I'm allowed to rest before I've solved the things that are exhausting me.

The person missing from the picture

Here's the thought that hurt most: that my girlfriend would be better off with someone else. Someone with a good job and savings, who could take her to musicals and on trips and give her the wedding she dreams of.

But there's someone missing from that imagined future, and it's her.

She's choosing to be with me. She knows me, including the hard parts, in a way nobody else does. I can admit that my situation affects her without deciding, on her behalf, what would make her happy. She deserves a voice in that. So do I.

I'm part of a difficult situation, but I'm not the difficult situation itself. We're both living with financial constraints. I am not the constraints.

And I want to marry her. That's worth holding onto, even if we can't afford the wedding right now. I can want a future without having the means to build it today.

The dark part

I'll be honest. That night got bad. I caught myself thinking that everyone would eventually realize they were better off without me, and that if something happened to me, I wouldn't really mind.

I didn't hurt myself, and my girlfriend was with me. But I've learned that those thoughts deserve to be taken seriously before they get worse, not after. So I told the people who needed to know. Being supported through a hard time doesn't make me a burden. The answer to feeling like a weight on everyone isn't to disappear. It's to have more support.

If you're in Spain and feeling this way, 024 is free, confidential, and open 24/7. If you're reading this from somewhere else, findahelpline.com lists crisis lines by country.

An ordinary Saturday

This is what I'm holding onto. It's not a miracle, and it's not a movie ending where everything resolves at once. Just a Saturday.

I wake up next to my girlfriend. The cats are yelling for breakfast. I feed them, make coffee, check my phone, and there's nothing urgent. The bills are paid and there's food in the kitchen. Maybe I write a few paragraphs, or maybe I don't. Maybe I sit down to play something and lose four hours. At some point, with a cat curled up beside me, I realize I haven't thought about money in hours. Not because I was distracting myself, but because I didn't need to.

There's nothing extraordinary about that afternoon, and that's exactly what makes it precious.

I don't know when I'll get one like it. But I don't think it's an absurd thing to want, and I don't think I've missed my chance because I'm 34. I don't have to become a different person to deserve it. I can be exactly who I am now: a woman who loves retro games, writes a ridiculously long K-ON! romance, wants blue hair, loves her girlfriend and her cats, and sometimes just wants to spend an afternoon doing nothing at all.

She deserves a peaceful life too.