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Please don't fight over me like this. It's a bit weird and uncomfortable, and I don't ask people to be my stewards or secretaries and speak for me, and I am more than capable of using my own voice to speak for myself (but you wouldn't be able to stop me from yapping anyways because I love the sound of my own keyboard and at this point rambling verbosity and snarky wit are my stress responses).

I'm not going to be rude to people for expressing concern over my medical health even if it comes from a place of partial ignorance because I've got a whole really complicated and hard to understand mess of health issues of various rarity and severity. I appreciate the gesture of kindness that comes with stating concern for my health, so long as it doesn't come off as a hollow platitude said for the person talking to me to feel better about the raw magnitude of how bad that health is so they can escape that uncomfortable topic with a pat on their back for doing nothing but highlighting how they don't and can't understand what I go through.

Yes, I drink too much coffee, and I know it's exacerbating my anxiety issues. But I'm really pressed for options when I'm still struggling to even get out of bed with the inconsistent echoes of mononucleosis exhaustion I've been fighting, to say nothing of how much CBS already gives me an extra dimension of fatigue separate from muscular overexertion and tiredness from poor sleep. I'm racing a clock in a pretty morbid way, and the idea of staying in bed and wasting away genuinely terrifies me enough to burn the candle at both ends with a flamethrower.

Do I like being a jittery mess to make sure I can spend a whole day out of bed? Eh... kinda? It gives me tunnel vision that for all its banes comes with a zen-like coffee fugue state where I tap into my extremely detailed-oriented side where I can both make the writing I'm working on have that exacting precision of wording I demand from it and make my runaway internal monologue into a storm of good ideas coming from that place of being so deeply immersed in what I am writing that I might forget reality exists. Is that worth the tradeoff of worsened anxiety and detachment reality from when I already have OCD and a dissociative disorder masquerading as a gender identity? It depends, but I can tell you I've gotten some of the best writing of my life done in a caffeinated haze and I truly think this brings the peaks out of my own style of writing. Do I wish I didn't have to drink like half a pot of coffee a day if I want to guarantee being up for at least 16 hours? Yes, but I'm an embarrassingly oversharing writer who doesn't let facts or the realities of my situation interfere with telling a good story about it, and, like, I'm never not going to be the STEM-brained tinkerer I would've been if my OCD didn't obliterate my ability to do math more complicated than a tip. I truly never expected writing would ever be my career (let alone this type of writing), but now that I'm here, and now that I'm a weird bohemian auteur of an author, I kind of just embrace the insanity and the stereotype of being a tragic artist/writer, and I have an almost blithe pride in how I drink way, way too much coffee.

Like, it's enough of a joke that I drink stupid amounts of coffee that my friend Cai drew this art of my "authorial mascot" based on this art by melonenbrot. I might not be a hot mess of a redheaded anime chick, but I sure do feel like I'm more "me" the more coffee I drink a day.