What can I say except that chaos suits me?

Every time I make concrete future plans, my life falls to pieces and I start again from scratch. Sometimes it's my fault, sometimes it's not, and often it's a combination of the two. If you've read from the beginning, you were there for the first to disintegrations of my adult life. I'll give a brief rundown and move onto the third. Like Edith Pilaf, I regret nothing.

 
Coming of Age with a Bang 

In 5th grade, I won a prize for an essay about how I was going to be a veterinarian when I grew up. Over the years, this ambition shifted, but I always wanted to be a biologist or doctor of some kind. In 2006, I graduated high school having taken every biology course available and happily started pre-medical school at Michigan State University. 

In the fall of 2008, I cracked. My favorite grandmother had passed away over the summer, I was working too much, my coursework was burying me alive, and I had friends but felt deeply alone. Something had to give, and I abandoned my lifelong goal. I was already working on my third foreign language, so I changed my major to International Studies, which is basically anthropology and sociology. This was easier for me, but I was still falling apart at the seams. 

Something new had taken hold of my very being and was there to stay. It was like a swirling ball of primal, desperate rage and frustration embedded both at the back of my brain and behind my ribcage. I now call it emotional tinnitus or the silent scream. I sought help but accidentally fooled the guidance counselor into calling me extremely well-balanced. This is quite common with bipolar patients and one of the reasons most people, like me, go years without a proper diagnosis. 

Not knowing what I wanted to do but feeling like I might die if I kept going the way I was going, I chose to run away to the most distracting place I could think of: an opposite culture. At the time, I was fluent in French, functional in Japanese, and had one semester of Korean under my belt. I chose Korea for the food and the people, and stayed nearly 4 years. 

If you want details about how I managed to emigrate and also finish my degree on time (a Bachelor of Science in a Liberal Arts subject thanks to the aborted pre-med), feel free to read this blog's early posts. 

A Sinking Lifeboat 

I found it much easier to update this blog regularly than to explain the same things to different people back home, so March 2009 to December 2012 are very well documented here. It was all going well. At my most stable, I was 23, married to a Korean man, and working at Samsung world headquarters with my eye on a future in marketing. 

But that marriage turned sour and ended badly. I stayed technically married for half a year after leaving my ex so that I could keep the visa and therefore my job while figuring out a work visa. I ultimately failed to do so, and at the end of January 2012, I lost my marriage, visa, and job all at once. I was back to taking trips to Japan every three months to reset the clock on my 90-day travel visa. I managed to get another job in April at a pharmaceutical company, and they applied for a marketing visa for me. 

It was around this time that I realized with my psychology minor knowledge that I was a textbook bipolar case, and I started treatment. If you're counting, that was 4 or 5 years from onset to diagnosis, which is pretty average. 

Anyway, I loved this pharmaceutical company job and started making long term plans in my mind. And then the visa application was rejected. That was it. The only way to stay in the country was to teach English to children, but I've always hated teaching children. I'm good at it, but I hate it. 

So I came back to the United States with my tail between my legs and practically no money because I'd blown it all during my hypomanic half a year and subsequent two months of unemployment in 2011-2012. I moved in with my brother in Silicon Valley and started applying for jobs. Hundreds of them. Silicon Valley wanted nothing to do with me, and I was barely scraping by with family help when I met my second husband in July 2013. 

Everything Dies, Even Dogs and Marriages 

This is about the point where I more or less let this blog start gathering dust. I moved in with Mr. Engineer a month after we met for two reasons: we had seen each other every day since we met anyway, and my mom was cutting me off after generously paying my rent for half a year. 

I'd like to take a moment to say how grateful I am that I have a safety net, because I could easily have been dead by now without my family. And not just on that occasion. My mother even bought my plane ticket to Korea in 2009 because while she didn't like it, she understood. I probably would have killed myself if I'd stayed in Michigan. Wow. I've never actually put that into words. I wonder if that's what she meant. If you don't have a safety net but sorely need one, please open a new tab and look up organizations and programs that can help you. The internet is a beautiful place for all its ugliness. 

I was with Mr. Engineer for 6 1/2 years total. I loved him for a few years, tried to love him for a couple more, then waited for the scales to dip just enough to be sure it was worth it to leave for the last year. I thought I was going to have to start from scratch again. Silicon Valley killed my career. I tried a lot of different things, which makes for an interesting but useless resume, but the best I could do was a part time job running an after school math center. Again, I hate teaching kids. 

In November 2019, I signed up for the New Zealand Immigration email newsletter. I had done my research and decided that was my best bet. I hadn't even decided to file for divorce yet, but I was planning for it. Mr. Engineer and I had three retired racing greyhounds around whom my world revolved. Greyhounds are excellent pets and usually live 8-12 years. I highly recommend looking up rescues near you. 

Falcon, our first and youngest, was an aggressively affectionate diva. Clara was the middle child and highly anxious. Pierre, the third and oldest, was an easygoing doof. Around Halloween 2019, Pierre got bone cancer, and we scheduled his in-home euthanasia for the third week of November. He was more my ex's dog than mine, but watching him die was heartbreaking. He had just turned 7. 

 I still had my girls anchoring me to Mr. Engineer, but the problems in our marriage were becoming frightening. Falcon had been struggling with Cushing's disease for a year when she started acting extra sick. I took her to the vet on Valentine's Day 2020, where they told us she would die on her own within a week. So we had her put to sleep in our laps at the vet's office that day. She was 5. 

Now I'd held two of my babies for their last breaths just months apart, and the only one left was so anxious without siblings that we had to get her a new sibling or get her a new home. There was no way I was making that kind of new commitment to Mr. Engineer, so as I kissed Falcon's head for the last time, I knew I was losing both girls. 

A couple of weeks before Falcon passed, I had told Mr. Engineer that I wanted to leave even though it meant leaving Falcon and Clara. He'd begged me for one last chance, and I agreed to give him until the end of March to change my mind. Falcon's passing shattered me but made the decision infinitely easier. I'd rather be lost again than stay with him. I reluctantly gave him until the end of March before hiring a lawyer. I filed for divorce in April 2020. 

False Starts 

While I was giving Mr. Engineer his futile last chance, New Zealand locked down on my birthday, March 25th. As we sold the house and gave Clara to her new family, the rest of the world locked down. I kept thinking I'd be able to follow through with my plan as soon as New Zealand opened up again. I even made a New Zealand style CV and learned some slang. 

I moved in with my brother again, this time in the desert east of Los Angeles, thinking it would be just until the world opened up. We all know how that turned out. Luckily for me, California is a community property state, which means that half of the house sale, savings, and Mr. Engineer's stocks went to me in the divorce. I waited for the world in the desert for a year, living off savings, before going a bit crazy from the weather. 

I applied to the Icelandic Film School after going to see the active volcano in Spring 2021, but they were not communicating well, so I gave up and moved to Los Angeles in September 2021. I did some remote editing for a blogger and some biotech patents, but other than that I haven't done any substantial paid work yet. 

I'm exploring art or the film industry as a career and avoiding education at all costs. I've been trying to get out of teaching since I started in 2006, but I always fall back to it because that's what my resume says I can do. I'm applying to a variety of real jobs, finding my voice in art, doing stand up comedy for fun sometimes, and making friends. As I write this, my two brand new retired racing greyhounds are napping nearby. Jeannie (I Dream of Jean Greyhound the Dark Phoenix) and Leia (Cirque du Solieia Organa) are both lovey dovey little tiger striped princesses. 

But wait, you say, this heading says false starts, plural. Yes, friends. Oh yes. I'm living in a one bedroom apartment that I moved into in January 2022, but I got to LA in September 2021. It all started with Clubhouse, a social media app that's like Twitter but with voices. I got to know a girl who was in LA and looking for a new place with a new roommate. I had just decided to move to LA because clearly I wasn't getting out of the country again anytime soon. So we moved in together. 

I have since learned it's common knowledge here that LA roommates are almost all unfathomably terrible, and anybody sane lives alone. I wish I'd known this before signing a lease with Lauren. Lauren was on the verge of success but in a bad place. She was a district manager with Arbonne, a skincare and supplements company, and was sure she'd be making bank by November. If she wasn't, she promised to bartend like she used to. And if she couldn't pay rent by the end of December, she'd kick herself out. I'm writing this in a way that makes it obvious to you, the reader, that she was a manipulative liar and a con artist. 

There may or may not be a class action lawsuit building against her. I honestly don't know because the lawyer who reached out to me got a bunch of information and then went silent. I am still on the lease for that apartment for which Lauren hasn't paid rent in months, but if I think about it too much, I get physically ill. Which is why you're not getting any more details. Maybe I'll write about it later when reliving the psychological abuse doesn't put me into a two week depression. 

But Kristin, aren't you a highly intelligent human being who has interacted closely with people from all over the world and many walks of life? How did you get pulled in by a con artist? Thanks for the compliment, astute reader, and good question. I operate with an innocent until proven guilty mindset. I trust everyone and believe we are all worthy of care and multiple chances. Remember what I wrote earlier about being lucky to have a safety net? I volunteered to be Lauren's safety net to pay it forward. 

My dumb ass did it again in this new apartment with a young struggling actor when I realized that after three days at my place he was making no attempt to go home. I tried to help him get back on his feet, but he squandered the opportunity, and I kicked him out after a month or two. I am a prime target for the con artists of Los Angeles, and I need to toughen up. 

Final Thoughts 

So here I am, yet again, in a new and surprisingly foreign city unlike anywhere I've lived before. No plan, no job, no idea of the strange dangers lurking in plain sight. I'm 34 years old now and trying something completely new. Too old for an internship, too inexperienced in the field for any of the jobs I'm applying to to take me seriously. I'm already failing at a couple of volunteer commitments I made that stress me out, and I've been ready to take the final step toward selling my art for like a month now but can't make myself do it. 

I'm off to an excellent start here in Los Angeles, obviously. Maybe I'll keep writing. If you've actually read this far, you might be interested in supporting my insanity by buying a t-shirt or mug with my art on it here. It's likely that all the comments will be weird spam, but, as always, I will read them. Over the years, people have expressed to me through comments in many ways that they believe in me, and it's meant a lot. I believe in you, too.