Sick Days and High Roads

Hello there, Standing on the Ledge. How are we all today?

Uh… doing fine, I suppose. Sick as a dog. I have succumbed to the plague.

Normally I’m immune to this. This year, I don’t know—maybe with the health issues, the stress, and everything stacked on top of everything else, my immune system is running at less than optimal capacity.

You may see one—possibly two—posts a day for the next little while. I’ve got a fair number of posts lined up and ready to go. I scheduled them so I can keep a steady pace—at least one per day—instead of dumping everything in one burst. If something happens that’s relevant to the day, you might get that plus whatever was already scheduled.

Yesterday I got an email from the billing department. The kind of “end of month” automated reminder that goes out to contractors telling them to submit invoices.

And I’ll be honest: I wanted to fire back a nasty response.

What are you doing? I don’t work for you anymore. Why are you sending me this?

But instead, I took the high road. I politely asked to be removed from that email list. No explosion. No scorched earth. Just a boundary—clean, clear, and calm.

I’m hoping to hear something this week from the lawyer about my case so we can finally start moving forward.

Personally, I’ve been kind of all over the place. My sleep is royally messed up. It had been good for a while… and now it’s not. Stress plus money pressure will do that. I’m trying to weather the storm and not lose everything—including the kitchen sink.

I’ve got plans. I’ve just got no money.

If you really want to help me out, take a look on Amazon. A book purchase would be a real help right now. The title is Standing on the Ledge: Field Notes — Rebuilding from the Rubble. There are two editions out there. The third is in progress, but it’s going to take time—I want more detail, a lot more me in it, and that means compiling a lot more real-world material.

Standing on the Ledge: Field Notes — Rebuilding from the Rubble (Amazon)

My school course is kind of… sort of… going. It’s a conflict management course, and I’m finding it’s presenting a lot of conflict, which is honestly hilarious. Maybe that’s part of the point. Maybe that’s part of how the professor is assessing skill sets in real time. We’ll see.

I guess that’s all I have to say today.

Godspeed.

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A Sociological & Psychological Lens

There’s a weird kind of stress that shows up when systems treat you like you’re still “in role” after you’ve already left it. That billing email wasn’t personal—just automation doing what automation does—but it still landed like a reminder that, to the machine, you’re a checkbox, not a human being.

That’s one of the quiet realities of precarious work: you can exit a relationship, but the bureaucracy keeps reaching for you anyway. It’s not just annoying—it’s destabilizing. It pokes at identity (“Do I still belong to this?”), security (“Am I still at risk here?”), and dignity (“Do they even see me?”).

Psychologically, when you’re already run down—sick, tired, financially squeezed—your emotional bandwidth shrinks. That’s not a character flaw; it’s cognitive load. Stress doesn’t just make you feel bad. It makes self-control more expensive.

So the “high road” moment matters. Not because it makes you a saint, but because it’s a small act of self-regulation: choosing boundaries over blowups, choosing the future over the temporary relief of a sharp reply. It’s also a signal to your nervous system: I’m not powerless here. I can respond, not just react.

And yes—sleep gets hit first. When the body is fighting illness and the mind is fighting uncertainty, bedtime becomes a battleground. The goal in this phase isn’t perfection. The goal is traction: small stabilizing moves, repeated consistently, until the system starts to calm down again.