Good news!

The hospital has decided I don't get paid enough. I'm getting a market raise. It took them a little longer to get salary survey data for my position than the others, too, so they're going to backdate it to April 11th, and this next paycheque will be a little bigger as a result. That, coupled with the recent surprise raise (we didn't think we were going to have one at all) takes me from $13.37/hour to $14.05/hour.

Yeah, I know. It's really quite pathetic for a professional position, but hey, it's five dollars an hour more than when I took the position seven years ago. That's not too bad.

Meanwhile, it's payday at the station and when I opened my envelope today I found that I'd gotten a 5% raise, from $7.00/hour to $7.35. I can also increase my hours. I theoretically can work up to 100 hours per month, although I'm not sure there's enough work to support that much. But there's quite a bit that can be done on the web galleries, and once school starts back, there will be more modules to do. Maybe together I can make a living until I can find a full-time library job. I pretty much am at the end of my resources; my mom can't continue to help me financially, and my friends are as habitually poor as I am. But I do feel like I'm coming out of a very low spot in life. I'm just glad that it didn't hit me a couple of years ago, when I was depressed and at a breaking point. I have no doubt that I would have either been hospitalised or just tried to end it all if that had happen; as it was I had some scary, and thankfully, brief periods where I was suicidal. I'm glad I was able to recover the resiliency I needed before this happened. And at least now I have a wider network of emotional support and people willing to help.

This, coupled with the fact that I have a positive bank balance (thanks to my mom and two paydays) for the first time since March--I'm not exaggerating, and yes, a good part of that was my own part, although that's also when I lost the unemployment, is really quite a good thing. I'm being very careful with my spending to stretch things out, but maybe things are looking up. Just having the cheaper apartment is helping tremendously--that's a savings of nearly $150 a month, and it's hard to find a nice apartment in a quiet, safe area for $420/month around here, so I was lucky.

The more financially stable I am, the less stressed I am. I once had a therapist say my main problem was that I didn't make enough to live off of. Well, there were a lot of other issues, but part of it is that when I feel as if I literally won't have a meal/place to live/gas to drive, etc., I start to panic. If I don't feel threatened--even if I don't have much, but just enough--then I don't really spend any money and it starts to add up. Okay, it's a little psycho, but not all that unusual, I think. I've had some rather bad luck on top of my rocky learning curve, too--getting laid off when I finally reached a point where I was just above scraping by is an example.

But thank you all for your encouragement and listening to me bemoan my existence occasionally. I thought I'd share some happy news for a change.