Sounds really rough, but also relatable, friend! That thing with things just piling up year after year and you not catching a friggin break ever.

If I may play the world’s smallest violin for a sec: I had a period of 8 years - between 2015 and to 2023 - where my life finally went in the right direction for the first time ever in my life. Spent four years getting my degree and making genuinely good friends for the first time. After I graduated I teamed up with a former classmate and made a company and we had so many jobs and things were friggin awesome for another three years and then that stupid fucking war in Ukraine happened and inflation happened and no one would pay extra for our work so we went from having pretty okay incomes to struggling a tiny bit. And then 2023 happened and some changes occurred that meant I would have to work alone and work for two people by myself for a year. Didn’t get to have days off or hobbies or a social life for a year. Spent all my time and energy to keep this thing afloat alone and then when the year had passed all our clients dropped like flies because they couldn’t afford our services and had to cut their budgets, which was completely understandable. My partner came back and we limped along for awhile. Then we caught a major client who would secure us financially and the job was big so we had to say no to other smaller jobs in order to keep our autumn open. We barely got any income in the first half of 2025 because we had to prepare for the job and there was a ton of legal stuff we needed to learn about to not get screwed over. We were set to start working the first week of August or something like that and the weekend before, literally two days before we started, the company pulled out of the deal with no explanation. That killed our company because we had no jobs now. Lol. We managed, because we always do, to get a few smaller jobs to pay our company bills but we barely got any paychecks for ourselves.

Btw, I had suffered with stress since the end of 2023 and had gone from being an optimistic, social and creative person to being the opposite. When this final blow to our company happened I barely cared, tbh.

Also, meanwhile all this stuff with my company had been going on from autumn 2023 to now spring of 2026, my stupid mother also decided to destroy the family with narcissistic drama and got all of us involved in her bs so I had to basically take care of my elderly parents’ stupid divorce at some point and one of my best friends was cheated on so I had to be her support for most of 2024 while falling apart myself. In my company, we started the process of dissolving it in the beginning of this year. Meanwhile, my siblings started telling me they had cut contact with both our parents because it was revealed that they had systematically been manipulating and lying to us our whole lives, which didn’t surprise me, but what did, was the scope of the lies. Went from thinking my mother was just a bit of a narcissistic loser to genuinely wondering if she had tried to kill some pf us over the years by dripping poison in our ears to destroy our wills to live. Also, in one case, tampering with food to deliberately hurt one of my siblings who has an allergy. And then by June I was tested for breast cancer and I had the pre-stages to it and had my breast cut off entirely in July and in August, I officially “broke up” with my parents.

I dunno what the hell the future holds for me, and I don’t expect much at this point, but I always comfort myself with the knowledge that none of this shit really matters and I get to define and prioritize what matters. I have a garden that my spouse and I sow and plant all kinds of things in to help the insects. My cancer scare brought my siblings back together and we are going to hang out for the first time ever this weekend. Just the five of us. I have work still, and now that I’m back in the hamster wheel, I keep pace with the deadlines. All good stuff. I have days where I feel hopeless. I still don’t have my creative spark back and I’m still not social, but I have found a bit of optimism again and am accepting that things just take time.

I don’t know your situation, of course, but I recognize the feelings of having nonstop adversity. For three years I have had nothing but bad news. Literally, the only good thing that happened up until I got almost-cancer, was that my boyfriend and I moved out of our shitty apartment where we were surrounded by noisy and inconsiderate drunks and moved closer to the countryside and into a little house with a garden. That silly little garden has been the only bright spot in my life for months, right up until I had my breast removed and got my siblings back. Let me tell you how much this silly little garden could brighten my day in early spring when my life was a perpetual chaos and the first little spring flowers escaped the soil! Man, that was the entire reason to live! Listening to woodpeckers and owls and blackbirds singing to their mates. Wonderful. I think it’s the small things that can keep you from going mad, when you’re in the bad karma stretches of life. But yeah, I’m sure you know this. I just hope you have the option to find your little oasis of peace while you struggle your way through these hard times! End of my tiny violin.

What made it impossible to recover the lost work? I’m curious, because I’m sure you would have recovered it if you could have, so it must be pretty bad Dx sending you a digital hug. It’s not much, but I really feel for you! I cannot remotely imagine how absolutely devastated I would feel if I lost four years of work and had no way to get my money until next year 🫠 urgh. Do you have enough savings to get by until then? Sorry if I’m a bit too prodding. You don’t have to answer in case it’s too personal! 🤗🤗🤗