Susan

So today I realised that I might???? Have made work friends???? Like, I made a bag for one of my coworkers because she was just like "Susan. What. How do you have time to make all these things?" (The secret is ADHD and not giving a fuck if you're busted sewing at work!) and she counter-gifted me cute earrings and a little purse! ;______; And this is after we had a chat about how much I love cute earrings and keep a stash of stud earrings in my handbag because I always forget to put them in when I get dressed! So it feels really kind and thoughtful! And one of my other coworkers, who I keep showing my crafting stuff to, specifically brought in a cute little christmas tree she'd knitted and decorated so that I could see it! I THINK that means work friends!

I think my chill-out activity this afternoon is going to be hunting for a diary for next year, because I still don't want to take my filofax into work, but using my notebook as a diary flat-out isn't working. I know what I want! Just need to work out what format I want it to be in (bound, filofax, traveler's notebook, whatever) and see whether I can find it.

(I want an unlined diary/planner that's A6/B6 sized, starts weeks on Monday and has dates pre-printed, has a month on two page calendar, and ideally some form of week+notes. I'm giving myself a few days to just SUBMERGE myself in window shopping, should find some inspiration that way.)

[ETA: I HAVE FOUND A DIARY THAT I WANT! Courtesy of tambourine and marybethdecker making recs and showing me photos of a Muji B6 Monthly/Weekly diary which fits pretty much all of my criteria! And it even starts in December so that I can start using it as soon as it arrives!]

Hey loves, how are you all doing? I'm on my fifth attempt at writing a general update and I've not really made progress. Not much has been happening! Everything continues to be fine! I am very lethargic and trying to pull myself out of it, it's... Going.

• I did fail another will save against stationery; this time I bought shiny new pens, because obviously fiction is blue and I can't use my blue fineliners for this fic triage project because I've worn down the nibs. I have fancy pens now, we are going to be very happy together.


• ... Did I mention that I started with 297 drafts? Because that was a thing that I did.


• SHOULD I ADMIT TO HOW MANY OF THESE ARE KISSING FICS.


• It turns out that one of my tiny adorable notebooks will last me about two weeks as a diary. ... They're like forty pages long and I talk a lot. NO ONE IS SURPRISED.


• I need to find icons for my current fandoms, so if you've not turned that notification off I guess brace yourselves for the inevitable Untamed/Animal Crossing/My Next Life as a Villainess icon spam coming your way.


• SPEAKING OF MY CURRENT FANDOMS: I ended up doing my capslock about My Next Life as a Villainess in like two days, and I'm trying to work out whether it would be better to post one a week like I'm doing now, or post them all over about a week so it's finishing up within living memory of me watching the show. Which do you think would be less... I don't know, intrusive? Repetitive?


• LexGarrett found a game called Heart of Crowns, which is basically Dominion with anime-style princesses, and I'm here for it. I'm very bad at it so far, but that's because I'm playing the PC version and it will just let me sit there and build a deck almost entirely of cards that let me more draw cards, which is all I ask for in a card game. See also: my Blue's Clues Magic deck, which is 75% "I want to draw cards that let me draw more cards" and 25% "sometimes those cards are 10/10 cosmic horrors instead."


• Still hard to get my brain to focus on reading, but I am very tentatively trying to get back into crochet. I don't know if it's going to work, but I'm trying! And I theoretically have some cross-stitch kits coming in the post, so that might keep me out of trouble during RPG sessions if the crochet doesn't.


• I've lost any ability I had to count stitches and follow a subtitled show. Whoops.


• It rained today! I think that means Nottingham's had it's three mandated sunny days of the year and now we're back to business as usual. On the plus side, everything smells like wet tarmac and plants, which are the best smells.


• ... Yeah, as far as I can recall that's what I've been up to since the last time I posted. It's mostly been capslocked about My Next Life As a Villainess, having intense feelings about The Untamed, and... Kinda gazing into the void. Sometimes the void has stationery videos, sometimes it's zoning out while either LexGarrett is watching One Piece or sithe is playing the new One Piece/Dynasty Warriors fusion AU game. On the plus side, now I know that sithe can't play Dynasty Warriors clones at the same time as answering perfectly reasonably questions like "Is there a Fruit-Fruit Fruit?"

Update on the "feeling better" thing: I still find myself wanting to cry and not knowing why, but I'm reading again! I read two more volumes of What Did You Eat Yesterday, and Drowned Country, the sequel to Silver in the Wood. Somehow I'm feeling a bit more grounded in myself, which isn't what I expected to happen after reading a story that's explicitly about being unmoored from yourself and time itself, but what can I say. (Henry Silver is an unrepentant little shit who never deals with any of the consequences of his actions, and I don't know what it says about me that I still like him.) What Did You Eat Yesterday is turning out to be more of a recipe book with a few pages of manga around it than I was expecting, but it's fine.

So... Yeah, I'm feeling better. I'm still in the process of reassembling my diary, so I don't have that as a throughline yet, but honestly being able to read again feels like fucking magic so I'll take it. The diary reassembly is going... Weirdly? It's hard to work out what I need when its main purpose is "Give me an indication that time is passing" and helping me to do things is secondary. Also, turns out that living in a time of global crisis exacerbates my problem with judging what I'll have the action points for, who knew? My current plan is making lists and trying to bodge together what is basically going to be two plans, one for if I have all of my action points and one for if I have none. Kinda like giving myself stretch goals for each day? Like, I'm going for "Here is the one (1) thing that I want to get done today, and if I do either of these other things before I fall into a video game hole I have done AMAZINGLY," so wish me luck overthrowing my productivity-appeased anxiety!

Dear dreamwidth friends: as part of bringing the unfuckening round full-circle, I'm trying to get back into, like, actually existing in a community instead of just leaning out of the window and shouting about my opinions and problems. If you get necrocomments on stuff from a million years ago, or see me signal boosting something from the dawn of time: this is why!

Apart from that, current state of the Susan:
+ Went to the dentist and she didn't mention any damage from the teeth-grinding I'm apparently doing, AND I didn't get the inside of my face scraped!
- Accidentally stabbed myself in the gum with my toothbrush and now I can't stop poking at it, and I have to go back next week to get a filling. But it's a WHITE filling, which feels very weird and fancy.
+ Discovered the phrase "executive function halt state", which feels like the shorter and fancier way of describing that feeling of looking at the stuff you WANT to do and almost bursting into tears instead. Will naming the demon help me to defeat it? WE SHALL SEE. I am definitely in the stage where the thing I want to be doing the most is the thing that's hardest for me to get at, so I guess that's fun.
~ If anyone is waiting for anything from me, it's coming, I'm just trying to unstick myself. (Here is your metaphor: everything was flowing nicely down the river of my brain until one thing went sideways and jammed everything, so now I'm trying to pick out the smaller bits and pieces so I've got room to move the bigger pieces.)
+ Have set up my folding desk in my living room and I'm not only using it, but enjoying it? It's comfy and means that I can actually spread stuff out like I want to!
+ Went to see The Gentlemen with LexGarrett and my Pseudotwin this time, and they very kindly let me complain about toxic masculinity and violence against women as a fridging technique.
+ captainraz has finally managed to lure me into her bullet journal cult, in that I've gone "fuck it" and taken the actual diary inserts out of my filofax and am just going ham on some lined paper. I'm hit and miss on the bullet journal thing, because it feels a bit "tech bro invents to-do lists" (like, some of the stuff I read about is just like "The innovative part is INDEXING YOUR NOTEBOOKS" and I'm over here like "Mate, everyone indexes their notebooks, this isn't a new thing.") but I'm gonna give it a fair shake! It's easier to do in a filofax, because if I decide I don't like something or need to rearrange pages, I can, so I guess I'll see how flexible it is?
- Possibly coming down with the slowest-moving cold in history, in that my throat's been going "Nope, need more water, here is STABBING PAIN to remind you," for a while
+ I'm not doing that thing I was doing 2015-2018 where I'd just go flat out for months and then literally collapse as soon as I had a day off! Having a sore throat that isn't part of me getting a fever like a victorian urchin is honestly progress.
+ Just over a month to go till my NHS ADHD assessment! Excited and terrified, and I found out today that I don't need to work the time back or swap shifts to go because it counts as a hospital appointment. Yaaaaay!
+ Exam season ends on Saturday! Fewer stressed out students means fewer stressed out members of staff!
~ All that said, I'm fucking knackered mates, so I'm off to bed. Wish me luck with the fixing things, I'll see you on the other side of the war this mountain of shite I'm doing. Be good, be safe, be careful.