...But I'm pretty darn surprisingly close.
I'm taking the day off of mafia stuff (as I normally do on Saturdays), and health stuff continues to not be the best of things, but I am mostly on top of my life right now, because I just felt inspired today. It sounds weird to say, but it honestly feels like a mixture of simultaneous mania and depression coexisting for different areas.

Maybe a touch of autism/adhd in there as well.

Basically.

I started the day working on the civ 3 mod--the most worthless of the worthless thing to do. I made very very good progress there, but I got burned out from working on it so much so I didn't want to work on it more today.

But the usual timekillers aside from it I felt apathetic about. I don't feel like playing League tonight, or TFT tonight, or Epic Battle Fantasy 5, or offline Chrono Trigger, or Stardew Valley, or offline minecraft work. That leaves precious little on the list of timekillers.

So what came to mind that was left?

Two things. Neither a waste. Both which I should be trying to do more of anyway. Not mutually exclusive, either, as one is better later at night when my family is asleep and the other can be done before then.

I basically...came up with streaming (probably building minecraft), or...working on Phyrra and Cyrus. I was thinking of things to do, and the folder with my Phyrra and Cyrus stuff just...caught my eye. I kept staring at it, going back to it, and the inspiration just...struck me. Because it called out to me.

I don't even know what I am going to do there, yet. I think it'll be script-work though because it all starts somewhere and there is a very good place to begin.

​Wish me luck.

I'm surviving, but not thriving. Still doing only the bare minimum and continuing to fail to progress.

Depression has somewhat gotten the better of me today.
I've kept on top of job search stuff, but I've still not done medical stuff.
I've again slacked on mafia stuff. (This is becoming a recurring issue.)
I'm only somewhat managing daily self-care stuff.
I'm also not progressing productive projects like the card game idea I have.

It's not a total collapse, so depression hasn't completely consumed me.

But the depression is still there, strongly enough to be crippling in effect.

I'll take the little win that it hasn't consumed me entirely but I'm worried that if it's this bad now, it could get worse if I don't get better at staying on top of things.

On the bright side tho.
I have maybe figured out how to make a proper drawbridge. Maybe. I've not tried out the science behind it, but if I can figure out how it works, what makes it tick, then I might be able to incorporate that into castle 4-0 for the castle gates. Probably not for the multi-leveled keep, unless I can make it compact.

Still though, castle 4-0 is coming along quite nicely. I'm most of the way towards completing one of the four walls in its entirety. I still need to do one side's tower, and I'm working on chiseling out the archery level and the cannon level, and I haven't done the outsides yet (the moat, the palisade, etc.), but completing that will give me the template for completing the rest of the walls and once I finish the walls, I can get a gate, and from the gate, build the moat and palisade and barbican and after that, I can create the contents within the castle.

Well, I'll probably be making the keep once I finish this wall (as my mental map of castle 4-0 has the keep be on the wall I am making right now), but most of the interior of the castle I want to craft after the exterior. Castle first, interior of the castle second as it's not much of a castle if there's no walls in the first place.

It's literally nine fifteen in the morning and I've yet to go to sleep...because I legitimately genuinely didn't realize what time it was.

I still thought it was like three am in the morning.

Maybe six am at the latest.

In my defense, my family never turned out the lights or said goodnight to me so I was under the impression it was still much earlier than it actually was.

Butstill.

I was already suffering from depression.

​And now I'm going to have one HELL of a time trying to recover.

I haven't failed-failed but I've definitely fallen to depression again in that I am not progressing my life at all today and doing the bare minimum, if that.

I have utterly failed to do anything in spite of having ample opportunity for it.

No true blog. No job stuff. No life stuff. Nothing. Not even mafia stuff. Heck I'm delaying a shower from the scheduled today to tomorrow!

I suck right now.

I need to do better.

Amazing what one day of, so to speak (and I do ask for a pardon on the language, I don't usually cuss especially on here but it's an expression), "getting your shit together", can do to make your life less of a hot mess.

Now, granted.

I had very strong incentive to do so.

I needed to catch up on my emails in order to get into my online health stuff, which I needed to access in order to schedule my endocrinology appointment, which is how I start a physical transition.

And I did so (well, mostly; still have some work-related emails from my mom I should read, whoops, forgot about them), meaning that I will be starting my physical transition a little less than a month from now if all things go well.

I still have a long ways to go before I get everything more or less on top of. There's still a bunch of things that I need to accomplish and it's a long list--but I have started it and I am making very good progress on it. I am actually close to being where I need to be, and that's better than I've been in literally months.

I am slowly retaking control of my life, and that is a goal I have had all year long.

It's slow progress. Two steps forward, one step back. The step back each time being rather costly, not insignificant, not something trivial, but the two steps forward also being the same, being important steps towards the future I want to build for me.

I have to keep moving forward.

Tho I should also note.

In spite of the need to look forward, I am doing work towards looking to the past--via slowly updating the blog's archives with tags. I had to revisit the first month of my blog because I realized I had use for a 'food' tag and this may continue to happen if, when I am doing tagging work in the archives, I realize "okay this is a tag that I actually need" and new tags mean that even after I get to blogs that have tags, I need to add any new tags that weren't there that would've been there had I had the tag earlier.

Examples of this include my The Descended tag (the tag used for the webcomic I have the most work on aside from Red Hood Rider) and the Pets tag (why tf did I not already HAVE that tag and only think of it a few days ago???), but also this is the whole reason I want to embark on this endeavor, as it also covers the birth of Phyrra and Cyrus.

Phyrra and Cyrus were not tagged with that tag, because at the time I didn't know how much of the blog would have them in it--it was only later, after much much work was done, that I added the tag and did not apply it retroactively. I want to have, via the Phyrra and Cyrus tag, an easy to access list of every blog entry I made there.

This, while technically a look at the past, is still a look towards the future.
Because if I have an ease of access for all the Phyrra and Cyrus content, that makes it easier for me to work on that project in the future.

Which I still have an ambition of doing.

I've got other things right now that are higher priority and I don't know how I will actually pull off Phyrra and Cyrus. But I want to make them real.

I don't think anyone really thinks I will make them real. For a start, thinking I will make the colliniverse real requires you to know I have thought up the colliniverse (the name of the universe for Phyrra and Cyrus since INFINIverse and variants thereof are sadly already taken) in the first place, which only a select few do.

And even if you did know, do you believe that someone with no experience, no credentials, and no money, with zero experience or real ability to edit or animate can, with their amateurish scriptwriting (which is a form of writing they have zero real experience with), manage to make an entire Animated Series from scratch?

You'd have to be delusional to think it could be done.

And realistically speaking, most of the time I am not delusional. Meaning most of the time, I don't believe I can actually do it. After all, I've got nothing. No connections in the industry. No education in any aspect of the industry. No manager to help me manage things. No clue how to make it happen. No idea how to get the funds necessary, no idea how to present a project that can be funded and to get the funds without having gotten the project done, leading to a loop of "can't fund the project without showing it to the world, can't show the project without funding".

How could I believe in me to be able to do that? I can't, most of the time. And if I can't, why should someone else? Why should someone else believe in me when I don't believe in myself?

But I still want to try. You fail every shot you don't take, so a shot at success is better than no shot at success from having not tried at all.

And right now I am, perhaps due to the euphoria of the chance to start transitioning: feeling rather delusional. So I think I can do it. I can have it all: transition, and make my work a reality for everyone to see. Are the chances of this high? No, but they're not nonexistent, either.

It can be done, smartly, methodically.

I don't have a plan yet because, again: I have some more important, bigger things on my mind at the moment, understandably so.

But sooner rather than later, when I have a better hold on my life and future, I want to steer that future towards making a difference, in a big way rather than a small way. Being parts of communities and spreading positivity within them is nothing to be laughed at; it's nothing to brush off, it's something significant, but it is in the grand scheme of things still smallscale.

And there's nothing wrong with making a difference on the smallscale, is better than not making a difference at all and is better than making things worse.

But I still have the ambition to make things better in a big way.

It all starts with taking control of my life.

And that starts with me transitioning.

Which I am getting closer to, now that I've booked that endocrinologist appointment.

At times that I can't do things, I have in mind that I need to do the things; at the times that I can do the things, I can't muster up the willpower to actually do them and am constantly actively distracting myself from them.

Like, today was a monumental day. I got a referral for an endocrinologist today. That's a big big step towards transition!

...But a referral is not an appointment and I need to take control with this momentum before it slips away.

​It's very, very, very hard though.

I am aware of the irony, in that some of my best brain days as of late have been blogless whereas on my worst brain day I am blogging but, *shrug*, is just how it happened to pan out.

I am feeling very very depressed. I'm struggling to do anything...including sleep. I don't have the energy for daily tasks. I don't have the energy for streaming even though tonight would've been great to do so both due to the opportunity and due to momentum. I even considered streaming something other than Chrono Trigger, just in case it was burnout from playing too much Chrono Trigger--nope, just sheer flat-out depression-induced apathy.

Couldn't find myself playing Stardew Valley. Or Epic Battle Fantasy 5. Or League. Or ranked/hyperroll tft. (Did crush a Normal tho. One. Then even that felt pointless so I just...didn't do more.) I did grind a little in Chrono Trigger but couldn't find myself doing more.

I don't feel like doing art. I don't have it in me to write something right now. I couldn't find myself furthering my Minecraft work, either.

Nor could I find myself progressing rl stuff at all, like catching up on email stuff and such.

And I can't even, in spite of this total apathy/lethargy to everything, find myself sleeping, either.

I just...am empty inside. And I don't know why.

Well, I do. It's depression, the low half of my bipolar disorder. But I don't know what to do, how to handle it, how to manage it right now. I feel nothing. Just...a void. Emptiness. It's something I know I should fill with some form of productivity...but heck if I know what. I normally devolve to binge-reading during these times but finding something to read itself just feels like...a drag.

I'm just.

Lost, with no answer.

I would say "in my defense, I have been busy" doing a lot of things, which is true!
...But mostly the lack of blogs has been pure sheer nasty depression sticking its ugly face out and taking control of my life.

I am however, trying to fight back. It's not an overnight process where I will suddenly magically have a fix for everything, but I'm working on it, trying to get more and more on top of it. I've actually done a ton of stuff, gathering makeup supplies, shopping, etc. But I've got a lot more work to do.

I started with a list of activities, divided up into one-time things, daily/weekly things, and additional/optional things on top of those, and then added in a need to remember login information for various different important things.

So far, this is what I've got;


ONE-TIME THINGS:
-Catch up on emails
-Do tax stuff
-Regain access to any sites I need to (at least one but see below)
-Restart unemployment (I messed up by not doing it so need to restart it)
-Seek psychologist (so that I can begin transition)
-Pursue namechange
-Finish makeup collection

DAILY/WEEKLY THINGS:
-Shave (daily for face)
-Comb hair (do with shave)
-Makeup (daily once I've got the supplies)
-Shower 3-4x / week + change (Monday, Wednesday, Friday?)
-Dental Hygiene (2x/day)
-Unemployment once restarted (weekly?)
-Shave (chest Wed, legs Fri, arms Mon)
-Pills once gotten (at prescribed time/method/etc.)
-Checking email (daily+)

ADDITIONAL DAILY THINGS:
-Once on pills, exercise:
*Daily: jackknives/crunches alternating
(start 10, increase by 5/week up to 100)
*Knuckle Pushups Monday / Wednesday / Friday
(start 5, increase by 1/week up to 100)
(use corset or similar for back form)
*Squats Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday
(start 10, increase by 2/week up to 100)
*Walk/Jog/Run;
Walk 1 mile/day, increase by 1 mile/week;
After up to 5, add jog for 1 mile on top of walk (6 total);
After 5 jog + 5 walk, add 1 mile run;
Max out at 15 miles / day

BONUS ADDITIONAL/OPTIONAL ACTIVITIES IN A DAY (Possible activities):
-League of Legends
-Teamfight Tactics
-TFT Hyper-roll
-Chrono Trigger
-Stardew Valley
-Epic Battle Fantasy 5
-Minecraft
-Art
*Finish self-portrait
*Finish Elemental Ruby
-Phyrra and Cyrus (scriptwork, songwriting)
-Job Search

-Storywriting (the below are stories I have a recent desire to work on)
*Coat
*The Bandit Seven (supervillain/"hero")
*Vetra (superhero/villain)
*The supervillain trio story
*Threadripper and Kinesis (supervillain) story
*Requiem (supervillain)
*Projection (superhero + supervillain) story
*Heroes 4 Hire (superhero)



ACCOUNTS I NEED ACCESS TO:
(I probably should not list these publicly even on a blog nobody reads so, uh...there's a bunch here just not to be listed)

So that's what I've done.

It's not enough, but it's at least a good start.

Depression why do you do this to me.

I've been doing so good.

But in the last couple of days, I've been...considerably worse off.

I almost didn't blog today. In spite of still being awake and fully able to--that should give you an idea of where I'm at. Which is to say. I'm badly off. I'm surviving. Not thriving.

​Sorry.