quiet misdreavus microblog

i'm at the combination funemployment and quarantine

2020-07-28

(apologies for making this one a Lowercase Aesthetic post. i kinda just wanted to write things and didn’t care about proper capitalization.)

so i’m in a somewhat okay spot right now. the past year or so has been a bit of a whirlwind. since moving to Denver back in December, i feel like i’ve continued to reinvent myself in new ways. i started therapy. i started antidepressants and ADHD medications. i gradually regained the ability to work on personal coding projects.

it doesn’t feel 100% sunshiny yet, though. the therapy has been slow going, though i do feel like it’s starting to close in on interesting things. (also it’s responsible for the ADHD diagnosis, so i can’t totally discount it.) the meds i’ve started haven’t been home runs; i recently switched antidepressants and i think it’s backfired some, and the ADHD med hasn’t had a huge effect. while working on egg-mode has given me something quote-and-quote “productive” to spend my days on, it’s not like it’s as practical as “looking for a job”¹ or “writing something more flashy as a demo project”. also it’s become the yardstick i measure my executive function by, and sometimes that comes at the exclusion of other things, and it makes the days where i don’t do code feel worse.

the last couple weeks have seemed pretty low-energy, to be frank. while the last few months have felt like a bit of a gradual climb out of burnout into a headspace where i feel like i can start to come back to some of my old haunts, i’ve recently felt like i’ve been in a bit of a backslide.² i know i’m in a decent enough position where i can keep coasting a little bit longer, though. i know i have a lot of blessings to count, even from where i feel like i’m sitting.

anyway, that’s where i’m at. here’s some of what i’ve been doing to keep my head above water:

• i’ve fallen back in with idle games. my current squeeze is NGU Idle, though it seems to be sucking my attention a lot with its active play. it also sucks a whole core on my (admittedly under-powered) desktop, so i try not to have it active all the time.
• i keep buying some music occasionally. i’ve recently been in a metal kick; the band Haken released a new album recently which i’ve enjoyed. before that i got into the japanese bands Cross Vein and Mary’s Blood. i really enjoy having something energetic and emotional to listen to sometimes.
• sometimes when i try to poke at egg-mode i instead get distracted with customizing my vim configuration more and more. there’s something about making a thoroughly personal computing environment that really attracts me. i’ve gotten really into making small personal scripts or other kinds of custom tweaks to my various configurations recently, which was previously something i avoided but i feel like i’ve reached a point where i can recognize my customizations if i need to use a different computer without my config on it. i still like to keep my things “light” for that reason.
• my partner and i have been taking short walks through our neighborhood. it’s been nice seeing things that you don’t really notice while driving. Denver gets kinda warm in the summer, but honestly my impression of the weather up here is “like my hometown but with less tornadoes and more snow”. it feels like home, in a way.
• my partner and i have also gotten into cooking at home. we have an account on PlateJoy, which has been pretty helpful for picking out recipes to try. i feel like i’m eating way better than i was a year ago, lol.

where was i going with this? i guess i wanted to post a data point under the heading “getting better takes time”. and also “i get sad/depressed sometimes, like right now”. like i said, i’m thankful for where i’m at, but sometimes i also need to consciously remind myself of that.