Where am I today? Currently wracked with anxiety. My heart feels like an electric ball behind my sternum and it is all I can do to stay upright and not weep. But I have three year old twins and a husband who needs time for his desperately necessary teaching job, so upright I am. The day after election day we found out that we do in fact qualify for health insurance under Obamacare, and are covered until the end of this month by state insurance and at the beginning of the next month by an associated HMO. The bad news is that only hospitals take the state insurance, so, tonight, to get prescriptions for very necessary medications, I will go the ER and wait as a very low priority patient to be sorted through the system and possibly be turned down as one of my necessary medications is easily abused and trying to get and fill a prescription is to be suspected of a crime. I have an appointment with a regular doctor, but they couldn't schedule me until the beginning of next month (which works out anyway for the insurance), but I have exhausted all the refills I can get from my Alabama doctor without seeing him again, so the ER is my only option. I called the people with whom I have an appointment and they told me that was my only option. I understand that I DO have an option. This is not a complaint. I just think that a lot of people don't understand the constant paper cuts to your dignity that a basic lack of financial resources entails. And it is constant. Every time you mention the state service that your family uses, you open yourself up to judgment from anyone who can overhear you. I have been lucky to avoid horrible experiences, so far, mostly because I am white. But you get nervous every time. Is this the time someone feels the need to unburden themselves about their feelings about "the poors"? And that wears you down. When you live with family members and spend time every evening minimizing your presence in the place where you live so you burn through the goodwill that much slower, it wears you down. When your plan, executed over a dozen years, to pursue schooling for a career plan that literally does not exist anymore, what comes next? I wish I knew.