Hey everyone,

Well, its been a while since I've been on here, there's been a lot of stuff going on. Eric and I are going through the process of buying a house in North Jersey and before then, we were going house hunting all the time, trying to get the hell out of my dad's basement where we've been for almost a year now.

I am really excited and happy about us getting a house and starting our lives together, even though we still havn't had the wedding yet, but I still have a lot of anxiety and even depression. I'm not paying ANYTHING for this house right now because I have NO money and I still can't find a job. Eric knows that I've been trying (or so he says) and wants to go through with buying the house anyway, but I'm still really scared and ashamed that I'm pretty much a nobody right now. I got my BFA degree in Illustration, but to make money by illustrating work takes a long time. Artist have to spend a lot of time making a name for themselves, getting known, and getting attention before they start making any money, but that's all I've got right now.

I thought I could find a teaching job somewhere, but New Jersey is totally screwed out of art teachers since our freakin governor decided to cut the education budgets. Now there are even less art and music teachers than there used to be, so the chances of me getting a real teaching job are slim to none and that was my only real idea of what I would do when I got out of school. I can't go back for my masters for a while, so this means that until I start making money from my art, I'm going to have to get a job that I'm really not going to like for God knows how long. I feel ashamed and scared that I'll be working in a staples for the rest of my life and while that might be ok for some people, I really HATE retail and I HATE customer service and working for big corporations…I'm trying to see if I can get a job at a florists, but florists seem to be just as screwed as art teachers. I'm really scared and I don;t knwo what I'm going to end up doing with my life. I used to work at the deli at Kings supermarket (which is the most snobby place I've ever worked at) and it was the WORST job I ever had…I worked with people in their 50's who had that full-time job during the day and then another full-time job during the nights. Im really scared that's what Im going to become and the fear of that sometimes is too much to handle. Eric tells me to just keep working on my art and that I'll get somewhere at some point, but I'm afraid he thinks that I'm a loser and so does his family. I havn't heard anyone in his family say anything like that about me, but what if they say things like that about me to Eric? He wouldn't tell me.

I started working on this little business idea with my mother (even though there's a bad history with her from last year, we seemed to have patched things up). It was going really well when we started last week, but her boyfriend was away on a 2 week business trip. He wasnt supposed to come home till the end of next week, but told her he was coming home tomorrow, and she was supposed to stay here at my dad's house this weekend so taht we could work together on our business…then she tells me "Oh, he's coming home tomorrow so I have to leave tonight." My mother up until 2 years ago had always been my sole support with everything and I lost that when she left my father and moved in with her boyfriend last year…but then I thought that the selfishness that grew in her during that time was going away and she was back to normal, but this just kinda tells me otherwise. This is a very scary time for me. I don't know what the hell I can do with my life, I need to make money so that Eric doesn't feel all this weight and stress on his own, and right now my mother was all I really had to lean on. Now, I just feel alone again. I cant stress Eric out with any more stress…I feel guilty that he's buying this house and I'm contributing nothing financially. I told him not to go through with this if he felt like it was too much, but he's still doing it. I'm really scared and I was feeling better last week

I stopped going to that one doctor who screwed me up royally with those f'ing meds, and I stopped going to that one shrink who was working under him, who I think was also making me worse and instead I went back to my previous shrink. I stopped seeing him because I wanted to give someone else a try, but I think it made me appreciate him more. So I saw him and my spirits raised up a bit and I had faith in myself that I can become someone and that things were going to be ok as long as I tried. I stopped crying every day, I was making myself wake up at 9:30 (which is big for me), and I've been producing art…I havn't been able to do any art for the past 7 months. With my mother helping me out, I felt that there was hope…but now I'm starting to feel myself back-sliding. I'm getting scared again, althought I am happy that Eric and I can move on together