1. Blogging
It’s been quiet on the blog lately, and that’s partly due to the change in living situation and partly to the fact that I’m trying to write a good amount — a month’s worth, ideally — of posts before I start blogging regularly again. That could be going better. I have plenty of ideas, some outlines, a list on a notebook, photos ready for a couple of the posts, and I even put some titles into my WordPress editorial calendar, but the grand total of actual finished, scheduled posts is one (1).
I also have this ridiculous idea of making a series of short videos about my anxiety, which is both exciting and falls into that defeatist category of “am I ever actually going to do this or am I just going to talk about it and be lazy?” I made a list of potential videos and I want to outline each video so I don’t go off on tangents, which shouldn’t be that hard since I broke the whole topic into tiny pieces, and I figured out a way to prop up my phone so I can film with it, but you never know with me.
Besides, I can’t get started now because I have a horrid zit on top of my lip. It is ugly as fuck. I don’t know how that happened.
2. Faulty Electronics
My external hard drive isn’t working as of yesterday evening, when I plugged it in at the same time as my sister’s and my Mac stopped recognizing it. It worked once after that, and hasn’t since. It’s not recognized by my super old MacBook or the super old and shitty desktop PC, either. It’s not a massive loss as long as I manage to retrieve all the RAW photo files I don’t have anywhere else, I haven’t even used it in a few days so I don’t need it right now, and I’m hoping I can get it fixed anyway, but none of the troubleshooting I’ve tried has worked, I can’t go even see if it can be fixed until Tuesday, and I’m terrible at letting things go.
Half an hour ago I gave it to my sister to hide from me, because I couldn’t keep checking every five minutes if it might just work now.
3. Mental Health
Overall, I’m doing better. Much better. I still take lorazepam every other day and the days I don’t I’m practically useless, but they hurt less lately. I started escitalopram two weeks ago, and after all the side effects — nausea, lethargy, I’m still dealing with very low appetite and also the pills are disgusting because they’re uncoated and I usually accidentally taste them when I take them, which makes me sick — faded, I found I — wasn’t feeling any difference. But it takes a while. And this week I feel slightly more motivated, more willing to get out of bed in the morning, have an easier time going to sleep at night. My reaction to the external not working is also really unusually laid-back for me. So I’m thinking the escitalopram may just be worth continuing after these first four weeks are up.
I’ve been chronicling my experience with it a bit on Twitter, and I think I need to learn how to create collections because I tweet a lot of shit I’d kind of like to be able to access and link. Apparently you need TweetDeck? Oh yeah:
There we go. All the mental health tweets since I started escitalopram.
4. Work
Work is also going better. I’m still behind on a lot of things, but I revamped my design services page with new packages, and at one point even put a CV together in two hours — after a year of struggling to write one. I have contracts now. I started my Chroma Stationery notebook and am using it to do to-do lists the way I did back in 2012 and before then — very small tasks, including absolutely everything, crossing things off by checking boxes with a √, highlighting in yellow and vertically joining checked boxes with blue highlighter. I haven’t managed to stick to any other system since.
My biggest issue — well, my biggest issue is motivation; we’ve been over this. My second biggest issue is situational/circumstantial, i.e.: working in my patio is subject to 1) a charged battery and b) the elements. I can handle (a) okay, but I can’t make it stop raining when it does or stop being hot when the sun is covering every inch of my patio, and in those cases, I need an indoor workspace. And my indoor workspace is subject to my sister not being in it, because it’s her room. Our room.
But! My workload is progressively getting smaller/more manageable, which is a miracle in and of itself. I just have to not think about all the non-client work I also want to do, like rebrand and redesign my blog (I do think about this), design and develop a photography portfolio, edit my photography for said portfolio (including some that’s only on my external…), start a print and stock photography shop, design some premade stuff, write up an e-book or an e-course too (not talking about the YA novels of my heart), start a podcast, pitch guest posts to other bloggers, pitch articles to publications, and so on and so forth blah blah forever.
In conclusion: