I often feel that as I've gained perspective, sanity, and self-directed compassion, the world's been steadily getting harder to live in, so I usually don't feel like I'm able to catch a break. Even though I can idealize the late 90s as a time with relative prosperity, I was still REALLY mired in my bullshit and REALLY miserable as a result.

If there's a point where me gaining emotional health and the world not turning to shit intersected, it would have been around 2011-2015. The Bush years were finally past and we weren't descending into this current horror. I'd made some big steps forward emotional health wise, and felt hopeful about art, and housing was finally okay, I was living in a rent controlled place in the nicest part of NorCal before NorCal really started sliding downhill. Even though there were definitely triggers, shit jobs and other emotional disasters, I had enough buffering me that I can look back on that time period as the last time I was really doing well.

It took me this long to realize why I was looking back on that so fondly.