welcome to the azalea garden!

I want to start keeping up with this blog more, but if I forget to do something for too long or don’t get an opportunity to for a while then it kind of ceases to exist as a thing to do. That might be the ADHD but I really need to get better about trying to break that habit, because it’s a really bad one. There’s certainly been plenty happening. Maybe two posts a month? Three? We’ll have to see. I also want to start writing about writing, but I don’t know if I’d ever have much to say in that regard. I’ll end the post with more specific blog-related goals.

The year started pretty well. I’ve begun prioritizing making medical appointments instead of ignoring things as much as possible. It’s difficult to internalize that, now that I live in the UK, I don’t have to to worry about whether I can afford to see a doctor or not. This has actually been one of the biggest culture shocks for me, since even with insurance through my mother’s nursing job, I couldn’t afford to see doctors more than absolutely necessary. But I’ve had all kinds of appointment over the past few months!

I saw a physiologist about my shoulder, because I suddenly started experiencing severe pain; when it first manifested, I could barely move my head in any direction for two days, and the pain continued. It turned out that my last job was awful on my shoulder muscles, due to the absence of any training on how to properly maneuver or lift very heavy things despite that being the majority of what I did, and I needed five deep tissue massage sessions (£65 per session; having the financial security to afford that is insane) to resolve the issue. A doctor referred me to dermatology due to a nail issue, though the clinic was abruptly shut down without warning so who knows when the referral will get processed elsewhere. I got a blood test to check on my vitamins (inexplicably very vitamin D deficient), and will need another soon to check on my cholesterol levels and liver. I had a cervical screening, which hurt so badly for so long after it finally prompted me to make an appointment for the awful symptoms I’ve had pertaining to my reproductive system since I was a teen, and after an ultrasound that showed nothing, I was referred to gynecology for further examination. My vitamin D supplements don’t seem to be working, it honestly looks like I’ve just been pissing all of it right back out, and I’ve been developing a ton of new symptoms, many of which are in line with osteomalacia; I have an appointment for that in a few hours. In the US, if I did see a doctor for any of this, it would’ve only been after allowing the symptoms to persist and worsen over several months.

I almost certainly have endometriosis, which doesn’t surprise me, but it has to be confirmed through surgery. I have this fear that surgical examination will find that there’s no problem after all, and therefore no treatment. Like, what if the best I’ve got forever is the mix of Buscopan and prescription codeine I’m on now? I love my opioid/anti-spasmodic mix, it works well and causes a mild, comfortable high, but it’s really not much of a forever solution.

I keep forgetting I got married at the end of December because nothing’s changed. Our lives are now intertwined in a government-recognized way and we received a certificate and paperwork to prove it, but I don’t think of those things on an average day. It’s just legalities. It’s not like I thought anything would change or feel different, but it’s nice to be proven right. It was like when our relationship officially started—nothing changed. I’ve never been in any kind of romantic relationship without it seeming like something had shifted significantly once we were officially together, which in retrospect should’ve been a bad sign. I’m sure it works for a lot of people but I guess it’s become impossible to entertain the kind of relationship that doesn’t feel like a direct and seamless extension of the existing friendship.

The weather has warmed up a lot, so we’re no long spending money on heating, thank god. We’ve been having to spend a lot over the past few months; I’ve needed multiple deep tissue massages to fix the way my job fucked my shoulder, and we needed to take overnight trips in March and April. We also needed to take a trip in January.

In January, my husband and I had to go into London for his occupational health appointment, because requiring a disabled person to navigate a huge and ungodly busy city is always a good idea. I hate London so it was fucking abysmal, but we went to visit an online friend afterward! They picked us up from a bus stop and took us to the place we were staying for the night. It was an extremely cute yurt and I hope we can stay there again this year or next, but a lot of the wood and fire starter was slightly damp and didn’t burn well; even when there was fire, the fan meant to distribute heat didn’t work, so it was freezing most of the night. But it was worth it to visit a close friend in person for the first time after about seven years! They stayed until pretty late, and picked us up to go to their house the following morning. We spent most of our time there hanging out in the living room. Their mother sat with us and chatted, and she was really nice. We planned to go to a cat cafe and got tickets, but our friend had their mom go in their place since they weren’t feeling well but wanted us to go anyway. It was my first time at a cat cafe, and I had fun. Their mother drove my husband and I to the train station and apparently talked about how much she like us once she got home, which is really sweet. It’s kind of surreal to live close enough to them to realistically be able to visit them, after how long we’ve talked about meeting up eventually one day.

I submitted my application for a spouse visa in February, two or three days before my at-the-time current visa expired. Between struggling to decipher phrasing so selectively unspecific and obtuse that it gives the impression that it’s difficult to understand on purpose (fortunately there are no marginalized groups who would be disproportionately affected, right?), writing my own statement and gathering statements from others to support the legitimacy of my relationship, compiling documents, and signing forms, it took me several hours across multiple days to complete. There were things I didn’t realize I needed until the application was nearly complete which was extremely annoying. The whole ordeal was so fucking draining. I had to travel multiple hours to get to the biometrics appointment in March, which was incredibly stupid since I had to provide my biometric data less than a year ago to get marriage visa; but we made a whole trip of it and had an overall nice time—went bowling (I got very drunk), saw Project Hail Mary (great movie, can’t wait to read the book like I meant to about a year ago), walked around some shops, visited a farm, and went to a goat sanctuary. I wish we’d spent more time walking around but that’s a minor complaint. Despite the estimated 8-week spouse visa processing time for applications submitted within the UK, I received mine in less than two weeks.

The trip in April was actually the world’s biggest waste of time ever. My husband had a GIC appointment, and because traveling into London is absolutely godawful, we decided to arrive the day before, stay overnight, and head home shortly after the appointment. But the appointment was canceled with a grand total of 18 hours of notice with no explanation at all, and it took them a month to reschedule it for next month. It’s going be done via video, which begs the question: why force patients to spend hundreds of pounds in travel and accommodations when you can just conduct the appointments remotely? (Simple, this is a transphobic as fuck country. The fewer people with access to gender-affirming care, the better, apparently.)

After seven months of violating the law, the lettings agency has finally quit fucking around with me. The Home Office’s guide to right to rent checks, which exists as a free, easily accessible resource to tell landlords exactly how to rent to immigration without violating the law, states that (a) an immigrant can’t be required to share their eVisa if they provide their physical visa, (b) the eligibility period of a document is a minimum of 12 months if it expires within the year, and (c) expired visas are valid if another application put in before the expiry date is being processed. These things are explained clearly. Despite being informed of point A multiple times since September, they’ve declined to follow the law and went as far as to like a webpage affirming that I was right as “evidence” that they “required” the eVisa the Home Office told me I wouldn’t be getting (the manager received faulty legal advice, can you really expect her to care what a primary source says when someone’s giving her incorrect info?). I was allowed as a permitted occupier until the expiration of my visa, but insisted that I needed to be subjected to another right to rent check with an unexpired document because, by her own admission, she’s apparently just too fucking stupid to understand that “minimum of 12 months” means, well, at least 12 months but maybe longer. In fact, maybe I’m being prejudiced against her for expecting her to be capable of comprehending extremely basic, straightforward things directly pertaining to her entire job. She even insinuated that I wouldn’t be covered by Section 3C because an on-time application would need to be put in 28 days prior to my visa’s expiration, but either she made that number up or her dogshit lawyers did.

Anyway, I contacted Citizens Advice, who assured me that, yes, I’m entirely correct about the law, but people responsible for renting properties love to disregard the law as far as they can get away with. When I informed the lettings agency that I had been advised by someone whose job is to know the law that they’d been breaking it for seven months (and, at that point, counting), and that I’d be receiving assistance in legal escalation, they stopped attempting to convince me that I was acting in a discriminatory fashion against them (by… um, articulating how their conduct with regard to me was illegal, and accidentally rolling my eyes when the manager, no younger than late 40s, kept going on about how she was soooo scared of going to prison, she could literally go to prison, she’s too pretty to go to prison, etc.?) and, with no apology or further elaboration, requested in a single-sentence email that my husband call to arrange a time to sign an addendum to the tenancy agreement. LOL. I’m a permitted occupier for the duration of my husband’s tenancy. Funny. I’d make a joke, like, “I guess she really is too pretty to go to prison,” but to tell you the truth she’s maybe one of the most generic middle-aged fake tanned white women with a little I’ve ever seen. I can’t even remember what her face looks like, but it evoked the impression of WhiteWomanFakeTanStockPhoto.jpg, so now you know what she looks like too. Actually, every employee there looks like a generic fake tanned white lady. It’s kind of crazy. (To be honest, the fact that it’s all white women who look basically the same and are all content to break anti-discrimination laws meant to protect immigrants, well, one might start to suspect that only a white person would be hired there. Of course, I can’t prove this, maybe they just happen to employ exclusively white women who look as white as possible, maybe they do hire people of color but, for whatever reason, they don’t stick around, maybe people of color aren’t completely coincidentally uninterested in working there. Lots of possibilities. I’d never insinuate anything.)

So that’s all of that. I want to use this blog more, like I’ve said already, and I have a general idea of what I want to be doing. First, summaries of my monthly reading, obviously. Second, dumping my daily life, probably monthly; if I don’t have enough going on for that kind of frequency, maybe it’ll be a post every 2-3 months. Third, reflections on things that have happened in my life or beliefs I used to hold, and beliefs, thoughts, and opinions I don’t otherwise have reason to articulate in their full, complete totality. Fourth, stories about terrible people I’ve had the displeasure of knowing.

With the last thing, I guess I’m a little concerned about giving the impression that I have nothing but negative things to say about people and have made connections exclusively with people who have been toxic; that’s absolutely not the case, most people I’ve interacted with and had some degree of connection with in my life have ranged from basically fine to, most often, very positive. I don’t maintain friendships well and have few friends, but that’s because my mental health issues cause me to have trouble “properly” connecting with others or consistently socialize. It’s been largely a series of short-lived bonds that dissolved over time, but were still valuable and important to me. But all that said, “I enjoyed spending time with this person, having long conversations with them, and mutually sharing hobbies with them for the three months we were friends, and the connection naturally dissolved as we spent less and less time together; there was no disagreement or resentment, it’s just something that happened” is too interesting and mundane to make into a whole story; but “I dated a guy who faked DID to excuse his poor behavior and faked an ED to artificially connect with me better tried to kill me when I finally realized that he was, in fact fucking with me” or “I got groomed by a freak who pretended to think incest and pedophilia is bad, stole my trauma, and probably faked most of their kinks” or “My ex killed my pets, made up a story about me buying benzos illegally at work (who deals benzos at a gym?), and threatened me with homelessness because they were upset I had friends and didn’t rely on them to fulfill all my emotional needs” can make worthwhile stories.