I know I shouldn’t, but I have been using one of my AI systems for Therapy. I have not prompted it to react in a therapist way, but instead told it that I needed to just express somethings without getting solutions.
I was not expecting much but it did help to get things off my mind. I know I should have checked if my Insurance covered therapy, but when your in a slump, you really don’t want to call and check these things. And you really don’t want to go out to do more, it’s exhausting as it is.

I am not back to 100%, maybe not even 75%, but it has been good to get my mind moving again.

I have started (and stopped) writing again multiple times. Sometimes I want to work on my second Sisak book, and sometimes I want to work on my Gateways Book. For a couple of months I found some mindless numeric work to do, readjusting monsters for a game I am making. It all depended on how much energy and focus I was able to muster up at the time.

I reread and rewrote certain chapters multiple times. Because now it can be harder to focus on reading without editing. Most days I can’t just look at text and stay awake. I have to be actively editing something to keep the focus.

Good news is I am writing again. Slowly but surely, and this should help a bit. Hopefully I will become more regular about this.

For those not in the know my Writing projects include:

• Second Sisak book (Temporarily named “The Wax Seal“) a direct sequel to The Sisak Tower, my first book.
• Gateways, a complete rewrite of something I wrote when I was in Highschool. It involves an autistic protagonist, and deals with mental health in a modern fantasy setting.
• This Blog
• Baldwin Games; My blog on historical and fantasy tabletop and board games.
• My School newspaper, the SAIS Bullseye. This year I have some student journalists to help alleviate the workload.

And, yes all of them went on hiatus due to both my arm and my own mental health after my father’s passing.

What I have been feeling:

I wouldn’t describe it as depression so much. In my mind depression is very negative and self-depreciating. “I hate myself, and the world would be better without me” kind of thoughts. I have never felt that, though I know in my youth my mother feared I did.

I used to get sad about things alot. Mostly about why I was different, saw things differently, or didn’t understand other kids. But never really depressed.

What I have been feeling lately is more numbness. I know I should be having strong feelings, and they do pop up, but mostly, I just needed to stare at something and shut off my brain for weeks at a time. Which can be hard to do when you are responsible for the mental and physical wellbeing of four other human beings under your roof.

So I would find ways to vegetate. My Youtube feed became quite political, which made things harder to deal with. I tried to fight back by searching up religion, or old style cartoon shows or really anything but politics. I failed to replace the algorithms choices completely, there is still a lot of negativity showing up there (A lot of hate towards D&D lately, and still American politics)

So I am going to continue to pluck away at what is helping, even if it is slow.