January 2019: Week 3

Here's my check-in for this week!

Here's January Week Three! I'll follow up with a blog post in a bit but yeah, a good part of last week got eaten by family drama h...hah... still, I managed to pull myself out of it! pic.twitter.com/wD2qtmAnql

— they're definitely vampires (@AWildSassaApprs) January 22, 2019

So, I kinda lost a significant portion of the first four days of the week to family drama and the resulting depression. While I can get anxiety attacks out of nowhere, generally a depressive episode is linked to something external like this (I know it's not that way for everyone).

I kind of just had to ride this one out - my partner is also going through some rough times at the moment so we kinda huddled together under a blanket on the couch and tried not to succumb to the void. Eventually I was able to pull myself together, and spent all Friday doing as much as possible to make my environment comfortable and good for mental health - because over the four days of depression I didn't do a heck of a lot of cleaning etc so the dishes, laundry had all piled up.

But once I made it through that, and got the apartment looking good again, I was able to get back on track. The family drama isn't exactly over, but hopefully I can avoid getting eaten by it against for at least a little while. And I'll try to get ahead on all my writing targets so that if they do come back to drag me down again, at least it won't be such a hit to my goals.

Still, I think I did pretty well considering the week I had. And while I'm now behind my writing targets, I've made a lot of progress over the last few days so I think I'll be back where I wanted to be with my drafts within another 3-4 days or so.

I had to miss out on seeing my RL best friend last week because of the depression - but we rescheduled for this week, hopefully nothing will get in the way this time! I could definitely use some friendly RL human interaction.

Gonna continue to try to sleep before midnight, because while in a void I'd absolutely sleep days and work nights, it's too incompatible with being there for my partner and my friends with daytime work, and much as I love late nights, there's definitely something to be said for getting all your most important tasks done by lunchtime. So. I'll keep trying. The biggest problem I face is that it's easiest for me to write at night. There's no distractions from the outside world, it's quiet and dark: absolutely perfect for me to focus. Writing during the daytime comes with a host of issues by comparison. But, I'm gonna try to do that more anyway...

I'm definitely going to need to think about getting some more paid work/commissions lined up post-March, but I'm doing okay for now... so I probably won't do much towards finding more writing work until mid-February. That still gives me six weeks to find something!