Life is rough

I’ve been struggling so bad lately.

I work from home and have a lot of flexibility at my job and no direct supervisor. I don’t have a schedule, if the work gets done that’s all my boss cares about.

I do try to keep a schedule for my own sanity and I like to work until 5ish during the week. Consequently, if I don’t have any urgent tasks to get done, I can go a day without doing any work and no one will notice or care.

This is a huge fucking problem. I have absolutely no self discipline. I spend a ridiculous amount of time fucking around on my phone and watching youtube videos when I should be working. I’ve been doing the bare minimum for weeks. And its not even like I spend the time that I should be working doing anything productive or fun. I barely hang out with my friends and I’m falling behind on wedding planning.

I had a really bad situation over the weekend. One of the services that my company uses has raised their prices, from an annual fee of $300 to $840. They sent me an email a month ago informing me of these changes and said that would go into effect on September 20th. What I wanted to do was find some alternatives and see what all of our options are before I told my boss about it. This was stressful and I didn’t want to do it and I had almost a month to do it so I put it at the top of my to do list and told myself I’d deal with it ‘soon’ (spoiler alert: I didn’t do it)

I wake up at 10am on Sunday, September 20th, and have an email that says ‘thanks for your payment of $840!” And I immediately spiral into a panic. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more angry at myself than I was that morning. I immediately emailed customer support

“We are a very small company who creates educational content for children and we really can’t afford this what are our options?”

I didn’t get a reply, which was expected especially since it was Sunday. By noon Carl had helped me calm myself down enough that I could call my boss. Thankfully my boss is a good man and said

“It’s ok we’ll figure something out. Next time please let me know sooner though”

I then spent a few hours looking into our alternate options (like I should have done a fucking month ago) and crying on the couch. Around 4pm I was checking my emails and I looked in my spam folder (I’ve had a handful of important emails end up in spam lately) and there in my spam folder is a response from customer support that said

“We understand this is a big jump so we will give you a $500 refund. But please know that next year your bill will be $840”

That email was sent at 10:17am. Just minutes after I emailed them in the first place. But it went to spam so I didn’t see it and instead had one of the worst days ever.

— I do just want to clarify that the original email I received said that our bill would be rising from $300 to $4800. Yeah, that isn’t a typo, it’s a 1500% increase. Absolutely absurd. So I emailed them and said hey this is pretty ridiculous, we’re a small company yada yada. And they said ok we have a different option you can do it’s $840/year. So I didn’t think to message them and ask for another price reduction. The email I sent that morning was more of a hail mary than anything, I did not expect them to help. —

After seeing this email I called my boss to tell him and he was obviously relieved and I don’t think he’s going to hold it against me or anything. This timing really is awful though because it’s almost time for my annual performance review – I know, yikes.

I can’t believe I let that happen. I got so very lucky. It could have turned out so much worse. I told myself that was a wakeup call and that I would do better this week. Well, it’s Tuesday evening and I haven’t done shit. I did nothing yesterday and nothing today and I absolutely hate myself for it. What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m miserable and I know how to fix it and I just, don’t. That is so fucking stupid.

I have so many things on my to do list and I just ignore them.

I feel like I’m drowning and I know that I have the strength to pull myself out of this but I just…can’t. I can’t fucking do it.