Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
Getting back on my “listen to music to calm my shitty brain” thing, because it was helping and then I started to forget to do it again.
I might add more as the day goes on.
Ah yes, lots of frustrating stuff happening all at once, so much so that I’ve wrapped around to not caring about any of it.
I feel like I’m trapped in a gravity well and am having difficulty motivating myself to do anything at all. I’ve been sleeping way too much, and it isn’t actually helping with anything. I have a severe case of anhedonia when it comes to actually doing things I care about. I’m pretty much just hanging out at home with my cats and occasionally getting on VRChat and plinking away at the same trivial things I usually do, and I’m having trouble keeping up with my chores or my gardening. I’m barely getting out of the house except to go grocery shopping.
It sucks and I hate it.
I used to be a voracious consumer of music. I would listen to as much music as I could, in as many different genres, from as many different bands, as I could handle, for nearly every waking moment of every day. My music collection has over 53,000 songs with a total duration of over 130 days. My choices in listening devices and methodologies have always been informed by how I can enable myself to listen to as much variety as I could, without needing to actually choose what to listen to at any given time.
Music also helped me to focus what I was working on, and was possibly a big part of my self-medication regime for my ADHD and executive dysfunction. Having music playing made it so much easier for me to focus on what I was doing.
I also developed a peculiar habit: every time I came across a song I really liked, I’d buy the entire discography of the artist as a “surprise gift for my future self.” It’s a big part of why my music library is so big, and it’s given me a lot of delight from always having something new to listen to.
But yet, over the last few years I have barely listened to any music at all, aside from the stuff I’ve been working on myself. Most of my day has been full of silence, pretty much only listening to music when I drive — and I hardly ever drive. And the silence has been overwhelming, maddening, and is possibly a big part of why my brain’s been in vice grips as of late.
How did this happen?
So, yesterday I had a major panic attack while driving, for the first time in several years, and the worst one I’d had in over a decade. So, that was fun.
Right now I’m in this weird split mindset, where on the one hand I feel like I need a day job to be motivated, but on the other hand, every time I find out about a job that I’d be qualified for, I have no interest whatsoever in doing it, like at all.
I decided to start an experimental meditation podcast after thinking about the concept for the past few weeks. I have a few episodes planned already and am working on a topic/prompt generator that will hopefully give me unlimited possibilities for where to take it. It’s still an experiment, though.
Hopefully it’s something I can keep going, because I love the idea, at least.
Hopefully I can also get it listed on the various podcast directories and apps. Right now the big one that’s missing is Apple, because their podcast directory account signup thing is broken EDIT: it’s working now, and I’m just waiting for them to process the submission, yay EDIT2: it’s available on Apple now. But it should already be on Amazon/Audible, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Stitcher, and I can see about adding it to other directories if people want them.
Also, eventually the public podcast will be monetized, but I’ll always have ad-free versions over on my Patreon, and I hope to get a few more episodes done by the end of February, in which case they’ll be over on the itch.io page that exists for Reasons.
Right now I seem to be in a situation where my brain is fired up about a whole bunch of different things, and I’m trying to figure out how to get myself actually working on any of it in a nontrivial capacity.
First, I was inspired to rewrite/flesh out the next little chunk of Lewi, and I’d like to get to drawing it.
Second, yesterday I had a great idea for a pair of VRChat avatars, which I have a lot of fun ideas for how to do them (especially with how the facial animation systems are going to work).
Recently a couple of folks have asked me if I’ve made any progress on my VRChat avatar, and no, I haven’t. There’s a bunch of reasons for that, but a big one is that I just don’t really feel like the amount of time/energy it’d take is worth it in the end.
In particular, VRChat’s avatar system requires a lot of fiddly work to go into it, and a lot of very hyper-domain-specific knowledge, because a lot of things in VRC are very shoddy hacks on top of the “expression” system which was clearly built for entirely different purposes than what it’s being used for.
The more I work on modifying the Winterpaw mouse for my needs, the more I learn about just how… weird VRC is, and given that the future of the platform itself is easy to doubt, I’d rather focus on building stuff that’s a bit more transferable between systems. So for now I’m just modifying the mouse.
With the current state of the world, everyone is on edge and quick to anger. Approach situations from a perspective of kindness. You never know what someone else is going through at the time, and responding with a default of anger to what seems like a personal slight is only going to make things worse.
Lots of people around you are struggling with mental health, anxiety, loss, grief, and more. If someone does something thoughtless, it’s best to just let it go. If it’s egregious enough to require correction, start out by asking them if they understand what they were supposed to do (in a kind way) rather than assuming that they were purposefully being malicious. They almost certainly weren’t doing it on purpose, and even if they were, is it really worth getting into a fight over it?
It’s also worth remembering that other people aren’t necessarily in a space for the same reason as you, and they might be inexperienced with the use of that space. Something that seems obvious and straightforward to you might be a confusing mess to other people.
And the inverse also applies; if you’re the one who has caused other people to blow up at you, regardless of intention, you don’t know what they’ve been going through either, or how many microaggressions may have led to them boiling over.
tl;dr: Assume good faith in others.
well I just had a lousy experience that has me depressed and frustrated and withdrawn and just hating everyone around me
My therapist was trying to convince me to come out to an art gallery opening on Vashon Island and I wasn’t feeling up to it but I decided I was wallowing and I should get out and do something nice.
So I start driving to the ferry, and I follow the GPS instructions for getting there, and there’s a long line of cars so I go a few blocks up to try to not cut into the line, and I guess I didn’t go far up enough because when I got in line, the person who pulled up behind me ran up to my window and started yelling at me for cutting in line, and acted like I was being a jerk on purpose. And then when I didn’t immediately get out of the line (which runs parallel to a busy street and it’s difficult to tell when it’s safe to pull out) she ran up to the person in front of me and told him what I’d done and then he started yelling at me too.
This was too much for me and I had a meltdown and had to head home.
And now I just want to wallow some more.
From her point of view it probably did seem that I’d cut in line and I understand her being upset but I didn’t know, and if I’d been told nicely that “hey the line starts up at such-and-such street” and not gotten other people mad at me too, things would have gone very differently. But now I just like. never want to take the ferry every again because now I"m worried I’ll get people mad at me again.
It sure would be great if people didn’t assume malicious intent. I absolutely wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, I was just confused about where to go while having a bad mental health day already. Being yelled at and berated for an honest mistake, by multiple people who immediately assumed I was out to be a jerk, is not what I’d call a good time.
The worst part of this is that the people who yelled at me probably feel like victorious defenders of justice, and they’ll never know the actual end result of their actions.
