#(Then again I don't know if any of that affects Hyperthyroidism much or if I even changed levels AGAIN yet but we'll see!!1!)

[dzpenumbra]

12/14/22

All my frustrations and anxieties about getting my cat's blood drawn... well... I got the results today. She doesn't have hyperthyroidism anymore. She has hypothyroidism. And kidney disease. The med was too high a dosage, or she didn't reaaaally need it or something... I'm still kinda emotionally processing the news. I don't really know how serious it is. So, despite freaking out about this medication and paying a premium to get it airmailed to me, and spending the entire day pacing around trying to track the shipment and kept getting error messages, and checking the package room over and over... despite all that... now she is 100% off the hyperthyroid meds. Done-so.

Here's the catch. Now she's going on a prescription diet. And she can eat only that food. I feel for her. No more treats. No more variety to her diet. We just started spicing up her diet the past few months, she was so happy about it, it was a fun thing for us. Now... that's gone. So tomorrow I'm going to go pick up the prescription food from the vet and get her started. And no meds tonight. Or... likely ever again. And some day later this week I'm going to pick up a package from the mailroom of hyperthyroid med cream that will never be opened.

After the call, I talked to my mom. For 4 hours. Not kidding. I just kept talking, I feel bad. I mean, she was engaged, but by the end... she seemed completely exhausted. I feel guilty. But like... what else am I going to do? And I really can't help it. The first bit was once again about work and career shit, and how pissed I am that no one is like... talking about how people can actively support my work, or helping me connect with people who can. You know, the shit that I always get super upset about. I need to start saying "I don't want to talk about that, it makes me really upset to talk about it." But I feel like I have no choice, because, you know... it's my career.

We got past that, got dinner and talked about ADHD stuff. And she helped me get my impostor syndrome inner skeptic to chill a bit. She helped me replay the story so far, the diagnosis in highschool, the 504 plan, the diagnosis in college, the brain scan confirmation. Like... I have gotten maybe... one therapist saying "yeah, you have PTSD" and I made a nice little seat on the bench for it. But... something that's like... a genetic condition? I feel like... if I go around saying I have ADHD and I don't actually have it, it does real damage to people who do have it. I feel like it's on par (obviously not the same, but on par) with saying you're autistic, but don't have an official diagnosis. I'm just... yeah. I've said this like 20 billion times, I don't need to do it again. This is the impostor syndrome inner skeptic, by the way, hi.

My mom seemed much more understanding of how hellish my life is, how... different my perception of life as a whole is. Like, she described coming over to my house with a pizza for my birthday and getting to my old place and I didn't even have a place for her to sit. Like the tornado of thoughts in my brain is so constantly rampaging that any thought of even remotely preparing for that just... didn't show up on the radar. It just... doesn't occur to me. And I never would have even thought of that example because, again... it just... doesn't occur to me. I just don't notice stuff like that, it's just... normal life. That's just my day-to-day.

So the theme I tried to stress again was that I really really really really just want to stop fighting myself. I feel like the only support I get is "hey, go do this thing that completely changes your life overnight and gives you a shit ton more responsibilities and accountability that affect other people." Instead of... trying to get what I'm already doing to work better. To generate income. To be more... orderly, more streamlined. In ways that work for me. To optimize, not to complicate or reset. I do not want a new life. I do not want a new career. I just want to make what I've been doing for years... work better. Function better. Produce better results.

I want my music arrangements that I make to actually turn into finished and released products, that are available for the public. I want my art projects to have a home where they are publicly available for people to see, purchase and where people can follow the journey. Here's the path I jumped on in January 2020. I wanted to do livestreams and videos that documented my artistic processes. Whether it's narrating an unfolding story in Rimworld, or recording music, or carving wood, or doing nature illustration in colored pencil (my profile picture on here was drawn entirely on livestream, over 40 hours). I wanted to share the process of my art's creation, so you could see how it goes from blank page to final product, see the progression and growth. I'm all about growth, obsessed with it. It's what life's all about, isn't it? I mean, if you're not growing... what the fuck are you doing? Stagnating? Rotting? Fuck that, growing is awesome. Whether that's learning something new or polishing something refined, keep trying new shit, keep improving, keep innovating. That's creation, right? Rather than just, repetition?

So... why am I not still doing that? I couldn't build a following. Social media, I'm too emotionally charged for it. I sink into it for hours and then I inevitably read shit that makes me lose hope for humanity and that shit just puts a giant thundercloud over my whole day. Every time. So I really struggle to keep up with it. And it just stresses me out, and I absolutely hate ads and social media is just polluted with them. Streams... no one would show up. Those that did didn't really give a fuck about what I was doing, they'd use it like an AIM or Discord chatroom or something. Most of the time it was people talking about shit that had nothing to do with my narration, which just kinda makes new people feel really out of the loop, and is hard for me to like... riff off of. It makes me feel like... why am I live? They're not even reacting to what's on their screen, why am I presenting this in live form? I could just record it offline, watch whatever the fuck I want while I'm playing (aka listen to copyrighted music), then voiceover in post and just put it on YouTube. And probably hit a bigger audience. It was just... yeah. Plus, live performance is incredibly emotionally demanding, and focus-demanding, just demanding in general. So if I had a fight with my family earlier that day? Like most days had been back then... The stream was... likely to be called off. I just didn't have the emotional stamina to entertain teens after being yelled at for 2 hours, and I was afraid one day I would just start telling people off or banning a few of my like... 6 viewers. And all that shit is being recorded so... yeah. Didn't take the chance.

So you take a few days off to recover. The fights keep going. A few days turns into a few weeks, then you realize you haven't streamed since... late summer. And it's almost Christmas. And you just go... "remember when I was a streamer?"

So... maybe I need a mentor or something. Or maybe I just need to stick to YouTube videos and Patreon? Just cut the whole live shit out of the picture. The only reason I did it was because... I felt like I could do like an... open-studio kinda thing. Like you can just drop by the studio and see what I'm working on real-time. And it makes my studio time more social, which is always super welcome, I love social studio time, I miss it dearly. But yeah... I don't know. I need to think about it, I guess. The consistency is the problem, with the emotional and psychological turbulence that comes with my life, the waves of inspiration and hard work vs. recovery.

Am I overthinking this? Probably. I should probably just start streaming again. I'm just nervous. And I can't really put my finger on why. Maybe it's having to face the music with people from the past, having to explain where I've been. To teens who don't actually care. Who aren't even paying customers, who have never subbed, never donated, never bought a piece, never asked for a lesson, just got free entertainment for months... years, even, now.

Ugh. Talking about work shit is so draining. I really just need someone to bounce ideas off of, who has some fucking idea what this business is like and what my emotional and psychological limitations can be at times. How my overwhelm works, and how that conflicts with these bullshit algorithms that are literally programmed to reward and promote people who do inhuman amounts of labor for extended periods of time with no breaks.

Spring 2020 I was doing 2x 10-15 minute YouTube videos a week, curated and edited from 3-4 hour livestreams every day. It consumed so much of my life that I barely had daylight to walk my dog. If I'm in the zone, that's doable. If I'm not, and I'm not inspired, and I'm just doing it to "keep an audience"? That's how I go down a dark path.

I don't want to talk about this anymore. I need a mentor or something, who is familiar with how all this works, and what it's like to... be me. I think that would be life changing. I have no idea where to even start looking.

So yeah. Big day. Lots of huge concepts. And I'm reluctantly accepting my ADHD again. Kinda. Me and Skeptic Me are kinda... in a Mexican Standoff of sorts. Baby steps, I guess.

I'm exhausted, going to bed.

Oh yeah, fun addition. I didn't do my sleep ritual last night. No smoking, nothing, just essential oil diffuser, brushed teeth and went to bed. I slept fine. The world didn't end. So it's good to know that, while it brings me comfort and structure... it's not a dependency, that shit is in my head. That means the structure is mutable, and I can adjust it freely to make it more fitting for my current life. And structure is in dire need right now. So, with all the chaos and difficult news, there's some good in there.

#diary #journal #online journal #stream of consciousness #stream of thoughts