well shit!! here we are. oersonal rambling time. yes bestie. lemme just jump into it, ripping off my friend uuupah. i'm sure they wont mind.
i got diagnosed, bros
it is official. i have adhd. this is something i've suspected for a while, but really came to a head in my last relationship. as someone with adhd, they delighted in pointing out all the little symptoms. the assessment was fuckin scary. if you’re unaware, they tend to focus on your childhood symptoms and reports from like parents or whatever. however!!! unfortunately for me, i actually did pretty okay in school. my atar was below any selection rank due to scaling my subjects (i did all arts and humanities), but my grades were pretty good and my gpa was fuckin mint. i was exceedingly good at pacing myself. additionally, as much as i love my mum to death, she wanted to believe that i was ‘normal’ so she has blocked out a lot of the symptoms i have. so when it came round to talking about how i acted as a kid, i had to pray to fucking christ that they would listen to me when i talked about how it affects me as an adult. i mean, they did, thankfully, but still.
i think the biggest thing for me is how deadlines work for me. if i’m confronted with a task that has an immutable deadline with consequences, i’m on that shit like a motherfucker. hyperfunctional. meth behaviour. the moment i set myself a task however which has no deadline or nebulous consequences, i absolutely fail. this to me is personified in how little music i actually make. it’s been torturous. my brain is so active i’m able to just imagine full on songs or orchestral arrangements, but the moment it comes time to actually sit down and work on anything, i’m out.
i’m going to be taking ritalin (dexys scare me beyond belief, i lived with someone who od’d on them multiple times) which i hope won’t stifle my brain’s ability to create. maybe the meta is taking them only after i’ve written down a core idea. who knows. i hope this gives me the strength to restructure my life.
i am single!
on the topic of that relationship, i’m currently single now. i unfortunately realised my relationship (which was 1.5 years) had reached a rubicon. we had a lot of issues i wanted to believe would be smoothed out, and lord knows we both put everything we could into it, but i feel like our long term compatibility was diminishing with no sight of return. it was probably the hardest thing i ever had to do, i broke it off despite knowing she genuinely did care about me. it did not go well. i still catch myself pondering what i could’ve done, but i’m continually reaffirmed by my friends and indeed how much better my mental health is not stressing about an intimate relationship in freefall.
i told a friend a month after it happened that i still had moments of immeasurable sadness, they seemed to think that was ‘wrong’ for feeling that way. i feel kind off about that. missing someone like this is completely normal to me, and i would gladly throw myself into those feelings if for nothing else, the emotional exercise. of course i don’t want to dwell on things for years and years into the future, and i’m doing better now already, but i can’t help but feel this friend has developed a certain attitude to these things that is completely respectable and functional for them, but not for me, and they struggle to understand that. i really appreciate them and their perspective, but i don’t appreciate being told i am wrong for keeping my heart open instead of closing it off.
i think this relationship taught me more than anything the difference between self-awareness and actionable growth, and also the significance of emotional support systems, as well as lifestyle compatibility. like, i knew about these things before, but even more so now.
we ended up sending each other letters after a month of no contact. it smoothed some stuff over, but not everything. eh. what can you do.. i started going to gym, got some new clothes, started seeing my friends more, cried like a bitch while watching eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, new job, all the cornerstones of any heartbreaking event, but honestly? i’m okay, and i know i made the right call.
“hell is other people” - jean-paul sartre
re-entering the various friendships i struggled to maintain in a relationship has been deeply, deeply stressful. i don’t really like who i’ve been recently, truth be told. manic. extroverted in the most strained capacity. very obviously looking for reassurance that yes, people still want me around, and they see something in me worth engaging with. not fun for anyone! if you’ve met me or interacted with me over the past 3ish months, i do apologise. my best foot hasn’t been forward. i met a really cool mutual in the club a few weeks ago, and 15 drinks and a whiff of poppers deep i made the most immaculate freudian slip and called them babe. i am ready for god to rain down lightning, fire, brimstone and much stepping on legos before taking me off this mortal coil, i tell ya. deeply shamed and lamentful. you know who you are. that was… certainly something. cannot overstate my apologetics.
for the past few years, my social life has been semi-dedicated to rectifying the mistakes of my early 20s. i will very openly admit that i was not a well-adjusted or mature individual. i’d argue that nothing irredeemable happened, but enough that i had a particularly painful period of growth at around 20. it was the most mentally unwell i have ever been, nothing comedic about it. life or death situations daily. ever since then i’ve been haunted both emotionally and relationally by a lot of my worst moments, which isn’t unfair generally, even if i’ve put in an enviable amount of work to be better. in particular, at the minute, there’s a mutual who i know probably wants nothing to do with me, but i continually, repeatedly fear that this person has been isolating me from both new and old friends. i have no idea if they do, but my brain is just too unwell at the minute to not have schizo-affective paranoia. it’s probably in my best interest to stay tight-lipped about that. i want to handle the situation with grace and move with devout intention, but that’s been particularly stressful on top of the general sense of trying to re-find my place in these friendships.
i think the problem i face is that, while i don’t look for approval from absolutely everyone (a stark difference from my teenage years), i take threats to the approval of those i actually care about seriously. as deadly as possible. i’ve unfortunately been traumatised by people suddenly exiting my life without communication and feeling like all my friendships are a day away from being over with no discernable reason or conversation preceding it. i guess i feel like for the most part, the mistakes i made haven’t always warranted such a response. but then again, very few people have been willing to tell me what mistakes they're reacting to, so i have no idea. such a thing absolutely destroys one’s sense of self and trust. it’s fucked, would not reccommend.
so uh, yeah. outside this, my life is pretty okay, but the current state of affairs socially leaves me feeling deeply unwell at the minute. sorry.
uhh what else is there to talk about? *sounds of mental rummaging* oh!
consooming, yes yes
i’ve been reading tatami galaxy. uuupah got me the original japanese copy while they were over in the land of the rising sun, between fucking up their shoulder and getting me twin fantasy on cd. thanks g. i’ve been a fan of the show for fucking ages. used to watch a questionable amount of amvs and pick out the most visually appealing shows to watch. it’s my favourite anime, probably next to aku no hana, your lie in april and sonny boy. the writing style is incredibly intimate, and conveys many sentiments familiar to an unfulfilled college student. it’s incredibly fucking good and nostalgic and funny and thoughtful and mature and- i also got the time machine blues, but i want to wait until i’m through the first one.
i’m playing final fantasy x-2 at the minute! love it so far. also recently waded through the saboteur, which was janky beyond belief. my backlog is insane, so i’ve had to straight up make a list of games i’m playing in order. also recently was we love katamari (one of god’s greatest gifts to humanity) and kingdom hearts re:com, which was…. interesting. next is yakuza ishin, then kh2. i have a weird nostalgia for both kingdom hearts and final fantasy. growing up i saw the art and music completely plastered all over the internet, and i played the absolute shit out of kh 365/2 days when i was like 11, completely contextless from the rest of the series. funny, cause i only played kh1 recently and final fantasy 7 three years ago. anyway. i’m trying to move away from gaming at the minute as my primary past-time. doesn’t represent what i’m about nor does it let me engage with the beauty of life in the way that i want to.
i saw the colours within with wok and huey the other day. felt a part of myself reattach, like seeing my younger self before i went through some truly awful shit and the light faded from my eyes. i was scared for my life when i told wok i’d give it a 4.5 on lettrboxd, this is their fucking favourite piece of media. they took it graciously though. i absolutely frothed the musical gear in the film, and how accurate the mixes and compositions were to being an amateur musician. we all crammed into a busy loft bar afterwards, wok got faded off 1 beer and we all waxed cultural analysis of all sorts until i headed out to a metal show (not my kind of music), and eventually a fringe show of a man in a gorilla suit rocking in a (surprise) rocking chair for an hour. good fucking times. if nothing else, i highly recommend you check out wok’s 3 part commentary on the movie.
as mentioned, i watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind after breaking up. ill advisable, some might say. but i’ve always been one to, against my better judgement, put myself in situations that force me to feel and reckon with my emotions. i once dropped acid and listened to blonde in a dark room right after getting out of a situationship i was very attached to and hopeful about, much to the chagrin of the people i was tripping with. worth every minute. i first heard about this one during that same situationship, actually. the person i was seeing at the time said they couldn’t watch it in fear of provoking some deeply sad and uncomfortable thoughts. i get that. i think for me it speaks to the near-universal truth of every relationship, no matter how bitter at its tail, came from a place of love and joy. boy don’t i know that feeling. some truly moving moments. sincerely funny and human.
i was chillaxing (hello 2011!!) at this creative commune that a few of my friends live at, and someone chucked on something by marco castello. first i heard of them. it wasn’t a complex work, but i kept coming back to it because of the simplicity and execution of concept. few weeks later, i saw a meme that had another one of their songs in it. i listened to that late at night, being in awe of the groove and funk my ears were witness to. it was great. they were both off the album pezzi della sera. very vibey. no, i don’t speak a lick of portuguese or spanish, nor can i typically tell the difference (as evidenced by this sentence). apologies for being white.
i’ve been following eden (fka the eden project) for a decade. seeing their growth has been mesmerising. i even have a photo album they put out with a bunch of demos. more recently however, i stumbled onto a few demos they put on their youtube that i must’ve missed at the time due to them not being on spotify, which has been a wonderful joy. nothing about them i haven’t said about eden’s music in general, just that it’s moar of my favourite artist. neat.
other tidbits
i’ve been able to write a few beginnings of demos recently. i’m hoping the ritalin will help me start churning out stuff. i’ve also got into djing a little bit. it’s been fun to just run sets off my laptop in my room for the minute. the gym has been fun, although it’s had its struggles. got a new job at a diy electronics store. gloriously nerdy. made a joke the other day that i am neither queer nor autistic enough to get into magic the gathering, which seemed to go over well with the coworkers. did a musical comedy set about the break-up of death grips recently. i stumbled through it, skipping over half of my set which contained setup for the other half. someone came up to me after to inform me my set was their first hearing of the band ending. a dream come true for me, but i couldn’t help like that was an awful way to break the news. proud of the acapella rendition of the ending song of the bear in the big blue house i did on my way out.
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speaking of endings and ways out, this post is ending!! oh no!! don't cry because it's over, cry because it happened. see ya. take care all.