9 March 2024, 03:09
CONTENT WARNING: I talk about my mom and also things she said in P5, P6, P10,& P11. Also long entry is long, oops. Long time no see.
EDIT 10 March 2024: pictures added!
Before I get too into this doozy of an entry, I’m just gonna start by saying I’ve been attempting to make a blog entry for several days now, tacking onto it and ripping it up until you have what you see here. My brain has been more malfunctional than usual for reasons I’ll get into below, and due to this, I may even put the blog and perhaps the website at large on a soft hiatus until I get properly medicated and see how my upcoming schedule changes affect me. I’ve been finding it hard to put things into words lately, and it likely shows here, but it is what it is for the time being.
I had a med change, guanFACINE, and it sucked lol. I got muscle pains and headaches so bad I had to call in one day, in part because I was working double the hours on top of that, so I was straight up worn the fuck down. I tapered off though, and now I’m better pain wise I guess. I say that though today was actually pretty rough in that department, but I’ve had hot pad time aplenty, I’ll live another day. Anyway, my focus with no med is shot of course, but the fog is so much thicker than before it feels like. It’s so incredibly frustrating that attempting to write for this blog is just as much pulling teeth as it was to do math homework as a kid now, and it’s making me worried about my upcoming classes starting the 13th. What will I do with actual homework if doing fun shit feels impossible now? Can you tell I’m starting to panic a little?
The thing to do now, is to get myself re-diagnosed for ADHD proper with documentation, which is not something the psychiatrist does, funny enough. I gotta make an appointment at another place for that, and then I can try *shitty nervous drum roll* stimulant options. I'm a little nervous, but I have tried both Adderall and Vyvanse in the past, so I at least already have an idea of how they affect me if I get put on those. My main beef with them is that even Vyvanse is not really that long-lasting, but I only tried it one time each, so I realize that's not really a definitive experience.†
One thing I was able to accomplish, despite being sick, was felting the anniversary heart for our sixth year for the jar. A little late, but so are most of my gifts. I did at least make up for the late birthday gift the other day, haha. (I got him a little Lego dragon! It's very cute.) It's been hard to touch art besides things I've made for my husband. I find I don't mind that. Like with writing for the blog, I’ve been frustrated for a while that my hands just don't seem to know what to do, but I am glad that the few things I could create made my love happy, y’know? It makes it kinda worth it.
Aforementioned felt duck and also some love bugs I put in a shadowbox with a felt painting of us as a dog and cat. :3
I think I may have untangled some of said art crisis / art block I've been having as well while typing this up, and also talking to my therapist confirmed it I think. At therapy, however, I brought up how my mom would guilt-trip me into drawing things for her sometimes, usually it was just for this tattoo she wanted, sometimes it was portraits. I was okay with the tattoo at first, until she kept changing the design each time I got around to drawing it. And I got fed up and told her I didn't like that she just expected art out of me, like just because I could do it, I was obligated. She was real hurt about that, and she brought up that she quit drawing because no one supported her art growing up, and that she would share it with the world if she still could draw. This is of course not really, let's say, the best thing to say to a kid. It could be interpreted as manipulative, even narcissistic, my art is mine to enjoy first and her support shouldn't have looked like expectation. The way she went on, it was like if I wasn't always making gifts and giving my art away, it wasn't worth doing. I realize now this was her trying to enforce her own art philosophy on me, and her not understanding mine at all. Looking back, it didn't matter if it was crocheting or painting figurines, I don't think she ever kept anything she ever made, they were all gifts.
Now obviously, I eventually got the hype around gift giving, but I found it much easier with people that weren't expecting it, naturally. In fact, making art for my husband lately I have to say is probably the most fulfilled I’ve felt when going through the process of making a gift. Like it’s made of my love for him, every step of the way. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s true. So, like, I get why mom would’ve been hurt. Why is my form of communication (art) not communicating my love for her? It’s what she did, after all. I wasn’t “selfish” for this, as she said then, but I was hesitant to show my love to someone who constantly changed her opinion about me. Can’t blame little me for that.
In that vein, looking over a lot of the past art I've made over the past few years has been difficult to come to terms with because even though I enjoyed what I made, it was also sort of a gift, a love language of sorts I'd use with my ex-partner. Naturally, no longer using that love language in the same way is difficult, and I'm still working through that. So, that’s why the gallery is taking so long. I can’t just pull new art out of my asshole to post, I have to face my history too, and my history was making me physically cringe.
I've also been doing a lot of separation from (and yet somehow even more projection upon) my characters in terms of like, they are parts of a story and not always purely tools to masturbate my brain in whatever way, if that makes sense. Because I do want the story to actually come together, even now that I'm talking about how hard it is to look at old art I made loosely based on it. Like, I think there’s still something there, I just have to go for it.
I have to tell myself every day though that what I'm doing is still worth doing. I know every story has been told before, but I fear coming across as unread, and maybe in some cases I am. It's a big part of why I immediately stopped my first draft and said I wanted this thing to cook longer. I needed to cook longer. Not to mention maybe getting more read in the meantime.
But back to therapy. I was/am facing some guilt over being resistant to giving in to my moms want for my art despite it all. So, I guess I've hit the guilt stage of grief. My therapist suggested making her something anyway and setting it by a photo of her, to give her a gift that way. Little does she know I already have some wooden flowers set up by a photo of her in the office to my right. I haven't painted them yet, so I guess I'll get on that next. As my therapist was talking, I did also get an illustration idea that I might try out too, we'll see. My mom was big into high fantasy, she even had a sprite familiar tattoo on her shoulder from when she told me she played D&D, so I was thinking something along those lines, maybe a bit of Amy Brown or Frazetta energy thrown in for good measure. I’ll keep you updated, of course.
My therapist also talked a lot about legacy in general and different ways to keep it, like her recipies and such. That's something we hope to get together at some point too, the trouble is well, most were never written down. In fact, one of her biscuit recipies only got written down because I used it for a school project. We are a very organized family.
Alright, I guess this is the part where I pinball and talk about The Sims, but this time it's just something cool I happened to learn because of it. So I was mod hunting, as you do, and found this set† which included a Minitel terminal. I read more about the Minitel here and here, but basically it was an early form of the internet organized by the French government in 1982. I thought it was wild to think I might've never learned about it otherwise. It's also so cool to me that because CC creators are from all over the globe, we can glean a bit of their lives sometimes. I mean it's usually a little fantastical or inspired by magazines in some cases, and that's great too of course, but the homely items are the most charming a lot of the time because I can learn something new and often niche from someone else I'll never know otherwise. The power of the internet, right?
Can you fucking believe it’s already March? I can’t. Every time I think to myself I want to be in the future already, I’m already there. Time is just really slipping by, and it’s kind of scary.
Well, I guess I’ll end here. It’s been a time and a half. I’m gonna do something kinda odd, because I’ve been dying to get literally anything up on the site, but it is also just past 3AM and I have to work tomorrow. I’m gonna attach pictures to this entry at a later date and just post the words for now. Cool? Cool.
Peace and love and all that.
EDIT BONUS 10 March 2024: I made buckwheat noodle curry with mango and it was so good. Just wanted to throw that on because cooking regularly has been a struggle for me, and curry is one of my favorite things to make.
† A sidenote about drugs: Taking prescription meds is only recommendedable by a doctor's prescription, don't do it without one just because I did it etc etc I'm not condoning anything.
† A sidenote about mods: I'm aware there is an issue as of late with Sims 4 mods in particular and potential viruses, so with that in mind, I have had no issues with this one myself, but always be careful of course if you yourself wish to download anything I post about. Especially since this "issue" in particular was CC creators whose accounts on The Sims Resource and Mod The Sims were compromised, and the mod file itself replaced with a virus. The link is NOT one that auto-downloads, I wouldn't do that to you, it's just for the pictures.
