Last Week Was Rough
My life is difficult. I’m blessed in many aspects of my life. I have a wonderful family and a career that I’m proud of, but at the risk of stating the obvious, being the neurodivergent father of two neurodivergent boys is hard. I live life with the difficulty level perpetually set at 10. I don’t want it that way. I pine for an easier, less stressful existence. I don’t necessarily want or expect things to be easy. I just wish they weren’t so goddamn hard.
I’ve been doing better since I got my dental implants and stopped drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. I still have many of the same problems that I did before, but I feel more confident in my ability to face them without the need to numb the pain and confusion I feel every day.
Last week was a motherfucker. I had all the same intense stressors I usually do, but fate, in its infinite cruelty, threw two big curveballs my way.
The first involved the Patreon account for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place being suspended for suspicious activity. I got an email saying there was suspicious activity on my account, but I ignored it because it looked like a phishing scam.
For starters, it was not addressed specifically to me, a hallmark of online grifts.
It turns out that it was not a phishing endeavor. Patreon suspended my account. Why? I don’t know. They didn’t tell me, and they didn’t warn me. I just woke up one morning and discovered that I don’t have a creator account on Patreon anymore.
This was very frustrating fot me because Patreon is my primary form of income. It’s one thing to have an exceedingly modest monthly tally that never increases no matter what I try. It’s another to have it disappear mysteriously for no discernible reason and have no idea how to get back.
I contacted Patreon through their website. They don’t have a phone number or where you can talk to a human being about your primary source of income mysteriously disappearing. They don't even have an email address.
That’s not surprising. It is very frustrating. Patreon says they’ll get back to you within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but I contacted them on Monday, and they still haven’t gotten back to me. It’s a good thing my wife makes a good living, or this would really fuck us over.
I’ve contacted Patreon several times now, but they haven’t gotten back to me. I even did the thing where I tried to publicly shame them by complaining on Twitter but that did not work. Turns out I am at a “Patreon confidently ignoring my problems” level of popularity and power.
The whole situation feels very Kafkaesque. I hope that it is resolved soon, but I don’t know why it happened in the first place or how I can fix it.
Patreon still hasn’t gotten back to me. If you’d like to help, you can donate to GoFundMe for my dental implants or become a paid subscriber to my Substack, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, which has undergone surprising and very welcome growth over the last two months or so.
Then, late Wednesday night, I was looking after my boys. I lay in bed with my nine-year-old son Declan until he fell asleep, a process that can take hours. I thought he was asleep, so I went into my bedroom to take a shower.
I heard my son's anguished cries calling out for me. Intellectually and rationally, I knew that it was no big deal and that my son freaks out if he wakes up and I’m not there, but the lizard part of my brain thought I needed to assure him I’m there so he wouldn’t freak out and have a heart attack.
I lost my balance, tumbled backward, and fell into my toilet with so much force and impact that I shattered it.
I’m honestly not sure how that happened. I’m about 170 pounds these days, and there’s a fair amount of distance between the center of the shower and the toilet, but I slipped hard. In trying to grab the side of the tub to break my fall, I ventured too far and broke the toilet instead.
As you might imagine, falling backward and hitting a toilet with your spine with so much force that the cold, hard porcelain shatters in several different places is extremely painful.
But the intense physical pain was nothing compared to the incredible shame and guilt I felt for being so mindlessly, if accidentally, destructive.
Water poured out of the shattered toilet as I tried and failed to put everything back together again, Humpty Dumpty-style.
If you had asked me what my poor wife fears most in the world the day before I shattered the toilet, I would have said without hesitation that it was plumbing disasters that result in water coming down from the ceiling in a way that makes her feel like the whole second floor will come tumbling down. It’s happened too often and has cost us a small fortune.
not the actual toilet bowl I shattered.
That’s literally what my wife is most terrified of. It’s also what happened after I broke the toilet with my torso. Thankfully we were able to get an emergency plumber that late at night. We replaced the shattered toilet with a new one, but the whole experience was expensive, stressful, and extremely painful in just about every way: physically, financially, and emotionally.
That shit isn’t just tough; it’s traumatic. Life is hard enough as it is. I don’t need fate to make things harder.
I get it, Lord. You can stop humbling me at some point.
I hope this week will be easier or at least less horrible. You’d think that would set the bar pretty low, but life has taught me not to take anything for granted.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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