How I am REALLY doing...

**A Year of Sorrow and Isolation**

For me, every year has been incredibly sad since my friend went missing. The loss still feels like it happened yesterday, and I've learned to cope with it by focusing on the good times we shared together. I annually submit his case to crime junkies, hoping that they'll cover it and help uncover what happened to him. But this year, with everything going on in my life and during a close time period, it's been overwhelming and hard to cope.

I've been having dreams of my friend every night, like memories of our times together. It's haunting me, and I can only imagine how he would have reacted to the situation I'm in now. One of my best friends of 13 years just moved out of state, leaving me feeling really alone. Everyone from our group has either moved or is busy with their own family. Even though we still see each other when they come into town, it's not the same as having a close-knit group like I used to.

I'm struggling to adjust to this new reality. My friend who just moved away was engaged to someone I've never met, and now she lives in a different state with them. It's hard for me because I didn't even know her fiancé before, and now they're starting a new life together without me being a part of it. All of a sudden, I feel like I'm losing touch with my friend all over again.

**Feeling Overwhelmed**

I've been feeling overwhelmed lately, and it's hard for me to cope with the situation. I've tried to focus on the positive aspects of my life, but everything feels like too much right now. I've been releasing a lot of emotions and trying to verbalize them, which has helped me feel better.

But even releasing all of this feels like a weight lifted off my shoulders. I'm choosing to let go of those things and move forward with the rest of the week. Tomorrow is the 4th of July, and I'm going to be kicking off a new vlog that will help me get back on track with my regular upload schedule.

I've decided to focus on being happy and positive from now on. I know it's not always easy, but I'm determined to make the most of this situation. If you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel below and give me a big thumbs up. Your support means everything to me, and I appreciate your willingness to listen to my story.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys welcome back to my Channel or if you're new here welcome I'm Brooke and today we're kicking off a sit down video so I haven't done a sit down video in literal months but we are due for one because um I have not been vlogging the past like week and a half so I did miss the last upload date and I was just thinking to myself that I've been vlogging for 5 years I've been keeping you guys up to date on pretty much everything in my life and I feel like I owe you guys an update on what is going on so basically the past few weeks I have been um we'll say not feeling it so there are a few um very personal things that I'm going through that I'm not comfortable sharing but that's what's been weighing the most on me and then there have also been a number of like hard challenging or like inconvenient things that have also been happening in my life pretty much every other day for the past like 2 weeks so I've started four five Vlogs in the past like week and a half and then um I'm like okay we are getting the energy back we are getting our mood back everything's going to be fine and then like something else happens and I'm just like I do not have the emotional capacity to handle this right now so I stopped vlogging and then I like try again I try again I try again and then I was like I I'm done like I just I can't do it so um that's what's going on and I'm hoping that I can like snap out of that very soon um I am going to try to to Vlog tomorrow cuz tomorrow's 4th of July so I'm hoping that that's going to be able to like get my energy and mood up enough that it can help me like ease back into it because I really want to Vlog I just have not been in the right head space so um I did want to tell you guys a bit about what's going on in my life again I'm not getting into like the deeply personal stuff um but I definitely can tell you about some of the other unfortunate things that have been um just causing additional frustration in my life that I really don't need this like the next portion is going to be kind of negative because I'm telling about all the challenging things that have been happening so um if like negativity or sharing like some annoying things that have been happening in someone's life is like triggering to you um this might not be the video for you and if this is the first video you're watching of mine um usually my Vlogs are very upbeat happy so uh maybe check out some of the other ones first um but this is more so for the people that just kind of want to know what is going on or just want a real honest look at someone's life because um I feel like YouTube and Instagram is a highlight reel when really there are some like negative things happening in that person's life they're just not always sharing it so not all of these are in order of like what happened but all of this has happened in the past I don't even want to say two weeks honestly I think all this happened in the past 10 days okay so one of the first things that happened I got fraud on my credit card now this is my primary credit card so this is the one that all of my auto pays are tied to this is the one that like in all of my online like shopping cards and stuff when you go to check out and you sign in this is the card that saved for like all my payment methods so so um yeah I got fraud on it so um it has been very frustrating trying to update all of the card information and unfortunately like the first week of the month is when literally everything is due like my phone bill is due my insurance thing is due like all like the storage for all of our stuff is due like literally all of my bills happen the first week of the month so when I got the fraud it literally like shut down the car days before everything was due so it was like turbo mode trying to like update everything I missed some so then I was getting some like um like penalty charges because the charge didn't go through and calling them trying to reverse that it's just been very very frustrating like not the end of the world of course but just an extra thing that I really did not want to have to deal with so that's been very frustrating um also the card should have already arrived by now and it hasn't so I had to reset everything up on my debit card and then once the new credit card comes in I have to then set reset everything up on the credit card so that I can get the points for it so yeah it's just it's just annoying then um yesterday I got a speeding ticket now I got the speeding ticket in a really roll area uh an hour and a half away from where I live and it's like this these like windy roads the cop is going the other way way he is speeding he flips around immediately pulls me over and he's like I got you going 77 in a 55 bro no I wasn't if I was going 77 I would have flown off the road like there is literally no way I was going 77 and so obviously very respectfully I was like there's no way I was going 77 I know that for sure I definitely was nowhere in the 70s and he's like you know what I'm just I clocked you at that so um you were going that speed but I will do you a favor and I'll just write it for 65 and a 55 that's like the lowest cost bracket for you for like a ticket and I mean I guess thank you but like I wasn't speeding so like I shouldn't have gotten one anyway like you clocked me going that like you were speeding the other direction how on Earth did you clock me not to mention he was coming around like a mountain and then clocked me how there is no way you had even more than 2 to 3 seconds to clock my speed not to mention you were speeding the other direction like so I'm definitely going to be going to traffic court to try to fight that and so hopefully he doesn't show up so I can just get it dropped um if I have to pay it very annoying and then I'll do like traffic school so it doesn't get added to my insurance but just really frustrating because I literally wasn't speeding and also when I have to go fight it it's an hour and a half from my house and in the middle of nowhere so I'm just overall like very frustrated about that then we had a a meeting with my company and we recently got purchased by a bigger company so they are slowly like changing all of our policies to the bigger company's policies and the bigger company is a lot more like strict and a lot less generous so um they're changing a bunch of our policies and doing away with a number of like our employee perks and some of them you know just annoying but some of them are really inconvenient for example um we have company cars and they would let us use company cars for personal use we just found out no personal use on the company car anymore so now um a bunch of my team members are going out and buying personal cars which obviously is a huge additional expense so um that basically brings us down to one car because we got rid of the other car when this car was like I could use it for personal as well because there was no point in having extra cars like you know filling up the driveway and also paying for an additional car when we wouldn't be using it so um yeah that's really frustrating so basically um personal wise if Darren's ever gone like I no longer have transportation so that's really frustrating and I just I don't want to have to buy a new car right now so uh that's definitely something we're going to have to figure out and see if it's a big enough deal that we have to get a new car but that was just definitely like an unforeseen like significant expense next um I dropped my phone and cracked my phone screen and so now when like I swipe up um I somehow cracked the top corner and like the bottom so when I swipe up I'm getting these like minor little cuts on my finger so every time I use my phone I'm basically being punished it's like physically hurting me so basically that's really frustrating because you know it hurts every time I use my phone and obviously it's unattractive so that has been also very frustrating then I've been getting this recommendation from many of my friends about this Flow app so apparently you can like track how you're feeling you can track like your cycle all these different things like just for like health and like know what's going on with your body it's really great so I've been getting all these recommendations so I was like okay I'll try it so I got the Flow app now this app is I'm over it I am so done with this app every day it pushes notifications to my phone and it's never something positive so it's always like you may notice um headaches today you may notice feeling bloated today you may notice um you're extra irritable today you may notice mood swings today like it's always something negative it's never like you may notice a clear mind you may notice a positive like like Outlook or something no it's always something negative and I realized that I am very very like susceptible to the power of suggestion so I haven't had a headache in months but according to this thing I was going to have a headache give me 5 to 10 minutes I have a headache um I was feeling fine and dandy get the notification you'll probably be um noticing you're extra irritable today I was like no I'm actually feeling fine give me 5 to 10 minutes the slightest inconvenience now I'm irritable and it's like honestly my life was fine until you sent that notification like suggesting that I'll probably be feeling this negative thing and then it's like like the placebo effect when like you're told that you're going to like I guess it's a mixture of like the placebo effect and like the power suggestion but it is like creating these negative experiences in my life so I'm over the Flow app it's like ruining my days cuz everything's fine until I find out how supposedly I should be feeling and then I'm feeling it so the Flow app is now my enemy and it's been thrown off my week and it's really ruining my mood then the next thing is that I've been like going through some of my camera stuff and I recently came across um it's like a little like memory card holder and it's all the memory cards from middle school and high school like I've always loved cameras I was always the person I brought a camera to school every single day I was documenting every hangout every party every school day and I was just taking photos of everything my door was a collage of photos my room was like a collage of photos I was just always taking pictures and documenting and like just creating memories from every day which also I mean foreshadowing for vlogging and everything right so um I found memory cards from back then finding those memory cards was like really triggering because um it made me like realize and remember that in 2 weeks it is the six year anniversary of one of my friends going missing and like they never found him they don't know what happened to him and those memory cards like those have so many photos of him um and so many memories and so just finding those memory cards just like really brought him and like the loss of him to top of mind and I just I feel like every year of course I'm like incredibly sad but I am able to cope with it by just focusing on like the good times and just hoping that he will be found I annually submit his case to like crime junkies and I'm just hoping they're going to cover it and help uncover what happened to him and um this year though with just everything going on in my life and in this close time period it was just really overwhelming and I didn't feel like I don't feel like I'm able to cope as well as I usually do so now it's like I feel like I'm having dreams of him like most nights and it's just like a memory like real of like our friend group and all the things we would do together and like the funny things he would say and it's just it's just been kind of I guess like haunting me if you will and then the last thing is that um one of my best friends of 13 years just moved um out of state I have a a really tight group of friends and everyone just keeps moving um one moved to New York one moved to Spain one moved to Miami one moved to Texas one moved to SoCal and I think that might be all of it uh and then I have three more that are local one who is a mom and is the primary caretaker for her kid so she's like very busy and then the other two one is 8 months pregnant and one is 9 months pregnant so basically everyone has moved away or is incredibly busy with their own family and so um I'm just all of a sudden feeling like really really alone uh I still see all the friends that have moved but only when they come into town and stuff so it's like a couple times a year so I feel like I had this incredible tribe of people around me and now it's just dwindled down and even the people here are incredibly yeah now just like busy with their own lives so I'm also just feeling like very alone and when she moved um which now I think was two weeks ago it was just kind of also like the final straw of really feeling alone and then also she is engaged but um her fiance they were like long distance so and he doesn't have very much PTO so she was always going to him which basically means I have never met him so it's also like such a weird situation where a best friend of yours of 13 years is now engaged and you don't even know their significant other so like no one in our friend group has has met him um obviously heard incredible things and I'm sure he's great and I'm so happy for her she's so happy with him so obious viously incredibly supportive but it's just personally hard for me because all of a sudden she lives in a different state and is starting this new life with this person I don't even know so it's you go from knowing everything about a person's life for 13 years to now they're starting a new life somewhere else and you know nothing about it it's just a really strange isolating feeling and um yeah it's just it has been a lot and I feel like each of these things individually um I feel like I could have like coped with but it has just been like everything and again literally the past I think like 10 days on top of some personal things as well so um I've just been feeling like really overwhelmed and um yeah it's been a lot to deal with so okay I have like I've released it I've caught you guys up that is the real that is the honest that's like what is going on in my life it's not always a highlight reel and just like cooking and doing fun things it's a lot of things like going on in the background and yeah I just wanted to be really honest with you guys about what's happening in my life so that honestly felt like a therapist session because uh just to like verbally release it is it's doing a lot for me and so I appreciate you guys listening and I am now choosing to let go of those things and help move like forward with the rest of the week tomorrow is 4th of July so I'm going to be kicking off a a vlog tomorrow I am determined to get back on my regular 2day a week upload schedule and it's going to be it's going to be happy and positive from here I'm just going to go ahead and end the video here kick off another one tomorrow so thank you guys so much for watching if you haven't already don't forget subscribe below and give you a big thumbs up and uh thanks again for listening to uh kind of a drama dump so thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye guys\n"