Well, might as well make my reply in public. I think I've kept to myself for too long, and for some reason, the knowledge that this reply is out in public makes it feel like whatever I say will be the definitive version of my the thoughts I have. Careful, wall of text.

I'm glad to hear things have turned around, at least when you replied. Do your days have clear distinctions, like "good day", "bad day"? I believe I've chained together a string of bad days, but I'm not sure how long it's been. Last night I decided to stay up all night to shake up the dice of my mental state towards getting a chunk of work done. It's a bad habit from when I used to take adderall a year ago. I think I'm going to stay all night a second night in a row. Yes, I know there's negative effects to it. But in all seriousness, this seems like the best idea, at least until I can get prescribed again.

I've come back to my hometown to start my own web design business, but for the last month, it's really felt like I have no job. I know that this is how my family sees my moving back, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that I'm trying to rationalize away. I can't bring myself to get work done (especially, web work), because I'm too distracted on my laptop, going through all sorts of feeds, finding new content, hell, I picked up chess online again to further procrastinate.

I read a great nautilus article today about anxiety in animals, and there was a particular paragraph:

"In one chronic stress experiment, mice were restrained, shaken, isolated, held under a hot hairdryer, kept under bright lights overnight, or had their cages tilted at a 45 degree angle. In the end—and just like humans who live under chronic stress—the mice became severely anxious and lost any appetite for “exploratory behavior,” like depressed teenagers hiding out in bed."

Working as a freelancer for the last 2 years has really destroyed me. The nature of my work is exploratory, every client is different, and it's easy for me to get into these procrastination cycles which snowball into even more stress.

Welp, I have two degrees as well (psychology and political science). I also have bad ADHD, an inability to wake up before noon, and an inability to start working before coming up with a creative solution to keeping myself focused. It's a hilarious cycle where I have two notebooks, 4 to-do lists, 3 email address cycles, and a corpus of self-betterment advice that I can tell myself without practicing it. This is what happens when you pride yourself on your ability to come up with clever solutions - you are always up against a version of you who wants to keep dicking around on the internet who is more motivated to not work, and he's just as clever.

I have a weird addiction to pinball now. I won 2nd place at a local tournament. I don't feel good about it, because it feels like an addiction. At the same time, I love it, because it's meditation for me. Do I self-love it, or do I avoid it?

My battle plan: Finish current client within the next two weeks. Get a part-time job. Priority if I wake up after 9am is to get into the shower. Compare myself to no one, not even the versions of myself imagined from how I actually wanted today to go. Create a kinder mind that isn't a piece of shit.