TODAY WAS A BAD DAY

Like, a really, really fucking bad day.

One of those days I know I’ll remember as a low point. This is going to be a long, self-indulgent, primal scream of a post. I probably shouldn’t share any of this. It’s all very personal; it’s none of your business. But I process by writing, and writing stuff down changes the energy of things.

Yeah, I could keep it to myself… but if a tree falls in a forest, and doesn't crack anyone's skull... did it even happen? Y'know.

If you don’t want to read it, or you think this is a play for sympathy or self-pitying whatever, or you’re just here for the funny stuff, please just skip the rest of this post. Which will probably be a sweary, stream-of-consciousness, explosion of angst and anguished feelings.

Other Digi content is available.

So anyway.

I’ve been flat broke this past month, on account of this dreadful year making it near impossible for me to earn money. We’ve managed to just about hold on by our fingertips, but last month was an absolute bastard.

It kind of started going awry when I had a Fiverr buyer demand a refund from me – and then complained to Fiverr – because I canceled one meeting at short notice and was late to another meeting; both times because my mum had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

He didn’t care. I mean, that’s fine. Why would he? I could be a bullshitter for all he knows. But it was money I’d banked on, and it sort of started a downward trend of shittiness that has only escalated.

I know I’ve alluded to how ill my mum has been of late, but if anything I’ve probably downplayed it, because it probably all gets a bit too heavy to share on here. I doubt it’s anything anyone really wants to read about, and I never set up this Patreon just to dump on all of you.

DUMPING ON YOU ANYWAY

Since she first went into the nursing home in the spring, mum’s spent almost as much time in the hospital, with one infection after another, and a diagnosis of end-stage heart failure. We’ve been told she could go at any moment. Or… she could just keep on keeping on indefinitely.

They don't know. They're just pumping her full of pills and antibiotics, and seeing what happens.

What’s weird is that although she isn’t really eating, drinking, or sleeping, physically she has kind of bounced back every time (to a point; she’s still blind, half-deaf, can’t walk, has COPD, AF, a stoma bag, and pretty much everything else), while her mental state has deteriorated.

At first, it was the extreme mood swings, then gradually her grip on reality became more and more tenuous.

To be honest, we can now see she’s been heading that way since my dad died back in 2022, but over the past couple of months the deterioration has accelerated, seemingly getting worse with every hospital stay.

It's hard to even describe it, but she hallucinates, suffers paranoid delusions, has conversations with people who aren’t there… It’s partly a result of her blindness and being in unfamiliar locations, but it’s also – we suspect – vascular dementia, as a result of her heart failure constricting the flow of oxygen to her brain.

Earlier today, my sister sent me voice notes from the hospital of my mum just repeating, over and over, that nobody likes her. It was hard to hear, and it’s disturbing to see.

This latest hospital stay, we learned today, is due to a bout of sepsis. Her doctors and rest of us alike are amazed she has – incredibly – survived it, but it turns out she has a block in a bile duct that is causing the repeated infections.

The doctors have given us a choice: an operation to clear the blockage - that has a high likelihood of killing her (she’s 87 and has to take blood thinners, which means her blood kind of flows without clotting)…

Or: no operation, discharge her from the hospital, and wait for the next bout of sepsis… and the one after… and the one after, until at some point it kills her.

She has no quality of life. None at all. She’s just suffering. She’s depressed. She’s mental. She can’t do anything for herself. She has lost all of her control and power over her own life.

The toll it is taking on the rest of us isn’t to be underestimated either.

My sisters, Sanja, and I are all caught in this limbo where we’re trying to live, trying to enrich our lives as best we can for the sake of our mental health, but really we’re just waiting. Waiting for the next phone call with bad news, waiting for it to all be over, waiting for the next bombshell.

I keep thinking I’ve reached my limit… and then keep getting pushed over it.

ALSO!

So, I had that going on today, like pretty much every day, except with the extra wrinkle that the potentially-mother-ending operation is probably happening this coming Monday.

And, as I mentioned, because this has all been happening over the past month or two, I got hideously behind on work.

I had to ask for extensions of various deadlines, and it meant I barely earned anything last month. I used up my savings in the first year of Covid when TV production shut down, so I can't afford to have that happen.

Most people have been understanding. The money I did expect to earn either had to be refunded (see above) or has been held for an unspecified 7-21 days for… weird reasons I don’t really understand.

I was up until midnight last night finishing up rewriting another script so that I could deliver it today and get paid, which would cover the mortgage that’s coming out this weekend after it bounced at the start of the month because I failed to earn enough money in June, because I was either up at the hospital or too stressed/worried/anxious to work.

I planned to spend today writing the script for the Digi ep we’re filming this weekend.

Except… I delivered the polished script this morning and the guy refused to pay.

He said I’d changed too much of his masterpiece, which I wouldn’t have minded were it not for the fact that his masterpiece seemed to be a ChatGPT-addled mess, and he had sent it to me with the caveat that he knew some of it didn’t make sense.

I reminded him I was still going to do a revision, but he was refusing to pay me for delivery – standard per our contract – until he was happy with my work.

I have never – apart from one client from Korea, who sort of didn’t really speak English – had anyone say they weren’t happy with my work. I always go above and beyond. I underprice myself. I am a fucking delight to work with!!

THE ENTIRE DAY

I spent the entire day today – literally all day – going back and forth with the guy over email trying to convince him to pay what I’m owed, as per our agreed contract (this was for work outside of Fiverr; 50% on commencement of the work, 50% on delivery of the first draft). I couldn’t concentrate on anything else, just got angrier and angrier.

I couldn't afford for him not to pay this week.

After hours of him digging his heels in, and me digging my heels in, I ended up calling him, during which he said I’d delivered a “bad” script (I hadn’t) and didn’t trust me to fix it, despite the fact I’d already agreed when we started to do a revision. He was going to use the money owed to me to pay another writer to repair what I'd done.

Despite the fact that all writing is rewriting, despite the fact that this is how it goes with every script I ever work on, despite the fact I’d said I’d do another pass on it!!!

He still owed me money. He was still refusing to pay.

And because of everything, I bloody went and broke down on the call with this complete stranger and wailed: “I can’t believe you’re pulling this shit on me while my mother’s dying....!"

Reader, he paid.

THE WALL

So, I dunno. After a day where all the shit I've been dealing with kind of exploded at once - mum, her operation, money, work, hitting the bottom of my overdraft, - I just slammed into a wall this evening.

It feels like we’ve been struggling now for years. No – not feels like. We have been struggling for years. Struggling financially, struggling with my parents, struggling with grief, struggling for work.

I’m tired, y’know. So, so, so tired. Just emotionally drained and strung out. Pre-2020 everything was so much easier.

I know I’ve got so much to be grateful for; my kids, my wife, my grandsons, my health, my YouTube channel, you lot…. Even, most of the time, my day job work.

I was SO lucky to find Fiverr; it might not be big money, and it's pretty hand-to-mouth, but it has just about kept us afloat - and 99.9% of the people I work with on there are bloody lovely.

There’s so much I love about my life, but equally so much I utterly – and there’s no other word for it – hate. And I hate that I use the word hate.

But I do.

I don’t see any value in this constant struggle to try and rise up above the monumental stress of our life for the occasional whiff of fresh air. There are no lessons in it. It's shit for the sake of shit.

It feels like I never get to enjoy and appreciate any of the good stuff – not fully - because it’s all having to be squeezed into the gaps between the utter awfulness that just dominates almost every single fucking day.

The endless treadmill of trying to find the work to earn the money to pay the debts that we built up during the Covid years, and the TV industry’s apparent decision that it didn’t want to hire me anymore. I am tired of being poor and struggling to make ends meet. Tired of working my arse off only for it to disappear into a mountain of compound interest.

The endless cycle of stress in dealing with my mum; negotiating with the care home, negotiating with Social Services over whether we’re going to have to sell the house to pay for her care… her telling us she hates the care home and is lonely and we don’t visit enough… the hours spent up at A&E… the constant background worry, and waiting, waiting, waiting for another phone call with bad news.

Unless you’ve lived it, I think it’s hard to convey just how stressful and exhausting it is, caring for an elderly, sick parent.

It'd be more than enugh on its own, but it's not the only thing we've had to deal with.

IT ISN'T JUST HER!!

And before all this with my mum we had to deal with my lovely dad. He struggled with his mental health in the years before he caught Covid and went into the hospital. Breakdowns. Arguments with my mum. Having to console him because he couldn’t cope.

Every two weeks I had to go with him to the hospital for his catheter appointment – not including the middle-of-the-night phone calls from him asking me to take him to A&E because the catheter was blocked, which happened approximately every 10 days, like clockwork.

And then the appointments themselves; me having to be in there while the catheter was changed because my dad was too scared and deaf to be alone, and he would scream and punch himself in the head, and it was fucking traumatizing. I am traumatized. I witnessed him doing that again and again and again, and I’ve promised myself that when all this is over, and life improves, and I have money again, I’m getting myself the finest therapy known to humanity, and I’ll deal with all of this shit at once.

Because I’m pretty sure – once I’m on stable ground again – the last four years are going to hit me like a meteor.

So. Sorry for the essay. I needed to do that.

A lot of you, when I allude to this stuff or whinge, tell me to take my time with Digi, and put my needs first… but Digi is one of the absolute best things in my life right now. Making our videos is life-affirming. It’s an escape from, well, all of the above. It’s what I need to be doing.

I haven’t really got a conclusion to all this. There isn’t one yet, and probably won’t be for a while. But, if you did make it this far… I dunno. It seems unlikely you’ll have gotten anything out of this.

But I did.

So thank you for being my sounding board.

Paul

PS.

 I'll probably regret this tomorrow.