Thursday night. I'm in my office because I'm supporting an event with Sri at work at eight o'clock, in a few minutes. It won't take much for me to do. I might help him manage the F5 nodes. I might just sit here and watch it go down. He doesn't need me – I just said you know I'll be available.

So what I'll probably do is just gchat him at 8 and say hey I'm here, we can manage communication through chat unless there is some issue

Or I'll let him gchat me

I don't need to get on a web meeting right now.

I don't want to write but I have to write something because I make it a goal

jesus. anne lamont was right about writing every day. She said if you start every session with I don't want to write you will eventually get tired of doing that and you'll skip right to the writing.

Which takes a second. I have to recalibrate.

I saw my mother today. I'd been ignoring her for weeks. It isn't because I don't love her, of course, and it isn't that she's been overbearing – compared to a lot of mothers, she is not. It's because she takes energy from me and most of the time I don't want her to have it. I'm hoarding it to make sure I have enough for me.

But I feel guilty about not seeing her more even though it is totally my choice to not see her more and of course that is perhaps exactly why I feel guilty. I could be seeing her more.

That is the old way of thinking. The new way of thinking is to excuse yourself for not being available to anyone who robs you of energy. It is called "protecting yourself." I am protecting myself by not seeing my mom too much.

Here is a story I used to often tell other people: I went to the college to escape my family.

I don't really do this anymore because I know it is hurtful to my family and I don't want people to perceive my family as poor and low class. It reflects badly on me to say it. I worry more about how what I say reflects on me now than I did when I was twenty or twenty five and didn't give a shit about what people thought of my family. I felt I was telling other people something important about myself when I told them that my father was abusive and I couldn't wait to leave, or my brother tried to kill himself a few times and beat me up around the house until my mom kicked him out when he was sixteen.

Now I realize what I am really telling people is that I suffered and it made me angry. I wanted silent revenge. I wanted them out of my life.

But wanting people out of your life is like wanting to be thin. It hurts to change your patterns. You keep wanting to instinctually eat more of what you've always eaten. And without it you feel like a different person somehow – not you anymore. This is usually not a comfortable place to be.

I was right when I started this journal entry. I have nothing to say right now. Or maybe I just don't feel like going into family history.

Sri's deploy is running as we speak and I said I'd be on and available until around eight forty five and so I might as well stay here and keep typing if I'm not going to do anything else.

I spent a great deal of time today thinking about Identity Access Manager solutions for the entity that employs me. This simultaneously makes me feel good (because I think: Maybe I could tackle this project after all. I just need to get up to speed on the language) but also bad because I don't want to fill my brain with this shit.

This is the same attitude I had back when I was twenty two in San Francisco when I got hired. I don't want to get too deep into (technology set ABCD) because then what will be left of me?

Which makes me wonder if I've ever really wanted to work in my field at all. Sometimes I think it's been fine overall and sometimes I think it has turned me into something almost unrecognizable from my sixteen year old self. I think about risk management and business continuity plans and how to best leverage AI to solve problems in the organization.

This is absolute shit! I would have said at sixteen, when I was most interested in a) getting better at street fighter b) borrowing some low quality VHS copies of porn from my friend Anthony and c) doing whatever was necessary to get into a good school so I could flee the state and never see my family again, a task which included many subtasks, such as getting good grades and signing up for extracurriculars I didn't particularly want to engage in.

In fact, I was still saying a version of that in my twenties when I refused to let it completely take me over.

And then, eventually, I accepted it.

But in a way, I had already accepted it at sixteen. I wanted what I wanted, and part of what I wanted was the freedom to not see my family and that meant becoming autonomous both personally and professionally.

Which I more or less managed to do. But the point is that even at sixteen I was making compromises. I did some of a and some of b and maybe those were the more interesting parts of my day, parts of the highlight reel, but the thing I worked most conscientiously at was c) – and I knew that I had to do a whole lot of things that weren't my favorite thing to do in order to just have a fucking chance to leave the .. it sounds like a dick when I say it this way, this is what an adult would say: a chance to leave my socioeconomically disadvantaged household.

To me it didn't feel like a socioeconomically disadvantaged household. I didn't think too much about the socioeconomics. I thought about my overbearing parents, each completely overbearing in a completely different way, my father the more stereotypical, just commanding, I'm the father, you must obey me type patriarchal attitudes, but my mom does not get off – my mother always exclaiming that she just wanted me to be happy (offering me the illusion of her approval regardless of what path I chose) while constantly illustrating that what she really expected was for me to be a Really Great Person Who Tries To Change The World (conditional approval, based on monitored behaviors from me) and instead she got a stone cold pragmatist who often excludes her to save himself, or so he says.

But I wonder: How much longer can I accept it?

What I don't want to admit is that I have wondered that for ages and the answer always appears to be:

Longer. I can endure. There are reasons.

I think the new question is to question the reasons. I'm not completely sure they're valid anymore. If Penny and I cannot have a child – and it looks like the transfer from last week was unsuccessful, meaning we have literally one more egg to try transferring – if we can't if we can't if we can't --

Then it's the end of all of this IVF stuff.

Maybe it'll be like a dam bursting. Maybe it'll free some energy.

And I can plan to NOT have a kid which means the retirement numbers suddenly are real - I can plan for me, for Penny, and for a doggo or two. The huge unknown and essentially unknowable expense of a child will just disappear. This would be the silver lining in the failure of our IVF journey to produce a child.

Maybe I'd quit. And maybe I'd do something else with my life.

Or maybe I would just sit on my ass and do nothing, continue to play the new Zelda, then the new Mario, then the new Grand Theft Auto, until the end of fucking time.

But I don't really believe I would do that. I think I would still try to write. Maybe I'd do nothing more extensive than continue to post blog entries. Or maybe there would or could be more. I don't know. I do know I have always wanted to write a book. I think about it a million more times than I actually do anything about it. The yearning has become a quiet hum in the back of my brain like a florescent light that you've put a blanket over.

I don't think this, I know this: I will regret being seventy looking back and not having tried harder.