Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

This book is of course the children's classic by Lewis Carroll - & I'm not going to talk here about the literary impacts of nonsense writing, nor the many & myriad cultural spinoffs or references strewn across Western book/screenwriting like flecks of shit out of a hippo's arse aimed across the wasteland of post-Victorian Anglophone normativity, nor even the whole paedophilia question; because this YouTuber has already done a better job talking about these things than I could be bothered to do.

   One thing I will talk about instead is that recently, and I forget the context exactly of how or why or if this revelation was prompted, but smack-bang in the middle of my inner angstful dithering over whether & when to come out as non-binary, my dad told me that had I been born without my Y chromosome my name would've been Alice - and this was - a lot, as discerning empathic readers will probably long have realised that I've been well on my way down a variety of rabbit-holes anyway and my life is even to me somewhat topsy-turvy nonsensical at the best of times.

   I can't think of an appropriate segue for this but I'm mentioning it anyway - I've been fired.* Yes, from my dream job that I was really quite good at and had foreseen as being as close to a lifelong fruitful career as someone like me was likely to find - without moving to London, which is still very much fuck that. I don't know what the next chapter is apart from it definitely entails moving out of my flat that I can't afford anymore. I can't say however that I don't know why this happened. It happened because my mental health has been All Over the Damn Place recently and I've been too irregularly unreliably missing days at work given this, and have consistently failed to develop means of communicating with the rest of my team in mitigating any inconveniences this causes to our work. I got my first formal disciplinary warning less than a month ago, and my head being where it is at the moment, I think part of me just went "okay this is happening, fuck it" and I've got the second and third-final within an impressively neat time-frame.** It sucks. I will miss that job, that whole office, like anything, and I really hope that in time God will help me to work through my shit enough to even get a handle on why it all happened the way it did. But for now, I can only press onwards, through the mystical horrible wonderland that is my life, in the hope that things will get - if not easier or better - then at least clearer.

* I mean, not like right now, I'm on holiday with my family at the moment. But last week.

** As I don't want to run any sort of risk of people thinking I'm bitter or trying to slate the Church Army folks or their HR personnel here, let me state that they've handled things with incredible patience, generous kindness and proper formality.
   The first warning only came in after the problems kept manifesting when they'd already given me several sessions of counselling, which weren't much help, and repeatedly asking me what if anything they could do to help my situation, which I could only say I didn't know, as I don't. Tim, Faye, Mark, Des, Andy, Neil - you have my utmost apologies, thanks, and sincerest reassurance that I hold nothing against anyone and you made the right call. If I wasn't as mental as I obviously must be I'd have fired me too.