busybee fluffy rambles

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?