4 AM

I write to you from 5:55 AM, nearly two hours since I woke up. I didn’t go to sleep until 1AM though. I think I was just hyped up and excited for today. I’m going to a home for at risk youth to work with them on their literacy through a writing workshop. I’m looking forward to it. I didn’t do as much prep as I’d wanted but I have a midterm on Thursday that I have been studying for.

I should explain a little. After many years of wandering the world trying on different hats, I have decided to try on the social work hat. So I went back to school for an MSW in Social Work at NYU. Before that I tried post-bac psychology, post-bac premed, I almost finished my medieval studies’ master’s. I opted out of the final thesis because I realized that there were no jobs and I was really bored. Why waste more money and time? In college I majored in English and History, with a focus on medieval studies. My work has mostly been in retail selling jewelry of different types. My favorite was working at Beadworks in Cambridge, MA teaching people how to make jewelry and doing repairs and stuff.

My mental health got in the way a lot. In college I took 2 different semesters off, not in a row, because my mental health was so bad. I only ended up inpatient twice during my college years, which I think is impressive considering how fucked up I was at the time. I had a great therapist though. I was really not near my psychiatrist so it was hard to be appropriately medicated, I think.

Ok so, I have, among other things, bipolar nos (not otherwise specified). This took me years to figure out. When I was 14 I got a bipolar 1 diagnosis and we operated under that assumption for a couple of years until my psychiatrist decided I wasn’t bipolar at all. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college, after reading “An Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jamison, a memoir about living with bipolar, that I went back to my psych and said, “Ok for real, this is definitely bipolar.” I made my case, she agreed, and I walked out with a bipolar 2 diagnosis. Years later they changed it back to 1 and then finally I recently found out that my psych has been writing it as bipolar nos, which is kind of not either 1 or 2 but its own beast. Bipolar is a spectrum much like Autism, ranging from the most mild bipolar 2 to the most intense bipolar 1. I guess I don’t really know where I fall. I was told that that’s pretty rare. I don’t know the statistics but yay me for being unique!

I sleep like Benjamin Franklin. I go to bed early and then I wake up for a few hours in the middle of the night. The server knows you can most likely find me awake at 4AM and lurking in the Lounge. This is kind of a good thing since we are short staffed at night. Most of our mods are in EST/EDT, so when 12am EST hits everyone starts dropping off. It’s hard to find people to fill all the timezones, but we’re trying and have a pretty good spread of people right now.

If members only knew how much background work goes into The Haven they would be shocked. Shocked. We do so much. Everything is a thought out process, discussed and researched. We try to take care of everyone as best we can, and that takes time and energy. It’s amazing I get as many wonderful volunteers as I do (past and present). I consider myself very lucky. And I can trust them with the server while I’m off doing my work in school, or at my internship. They are very capable people. We have a good crowd.

We recently hit 6k users. That is a lot of people. I am terrified to @everyone. It causes such a shitstorm. I avoid it if at all possible. Like the time we wanted to shift to ID Verification…omg that was insane. Everyone literally went nuts in protest. It was too the point that the admins and the mods were so overwhelmed that we decided to close the server for 24 hours to give everyone a break. People criticized us for this but in the 2 year history of The Haven we had never closed, so I thought we could afford to do it at least once.

On the one hand it’s annoying when people attack and protest the way that they did. One person told me I would be responsible for someone’s murder if they were stalked because of someone stealing their personal info from our database. I mean, I can’t make that shit up. On the other hand, it shows that people are really passionate about the server, and that is actually heartening in a way. Shrug.

Anyway, those are my early morning thoughts today. Thanks for reading. :))