neet's deets

a big catch up! *edited 6 nov

hii here is my first neet's deets entry on my website! i've been pretty busy the last couple of months, and i've posted a few micro neet's deets to my bluesky account but i haven't done a long-form post since i first came up with the idea a heckin year ago! so buckle up and here we go:

life

the past couple months have been a rollercoaster for me emotionally honestly, i've definitely had some ups and downs and i've been having a quarter life crisis every other week lol.

a few months ago i made a list of my current life goals and wrote down as many steps to achieving them as i could. my main and longest-term goals are to move out with my partner and get top surgery. from these i also included prerequisite main goals to achieve them: get a job, get my probationary driver's license (aka P's), declutter my belongings and improve my physical wellbeing.

as someone who grew up struggling with adhd without even knowing it, i fell into the habit of always procrastinating everything, including important stuff for my future. i never really learned how to set reasonable goals or how to follow through with them so when i tried to meet neurotypical expectations (from myself or others), i would always fail. the lack of trust in myself and my negative self talk because of it has haunted me for my entire life and i'm finally trying to move past it now that i'm getting older and have real adulting shit to do. also because i hate working in retail and living with my parents and it's time for me to change both things lol

so i have been working towards these goals: i job hunted for a couple months and got a casual retail job, unfortunately i'm too old and therefore expensive to actually be rostered so for the past 6 weeks (!) i haven't worked. i've been trying to use my time productively on my other goals and hobbies...

and i have been driving a lot! i found a local instructor and i've been driving with her quite a bit and i'm getting really confident in my driving skills by practising with her every other week - i'm really glad because this is one of my goals that means a lot to me to work on, it's actually 10 years this year since i became old enough to get my learner's permit (aka L's) and start driving, but i had such an intense emotional barrier and anxiety keep me from learning to drive until now. my instructor is a mum and she definitely gives off a calm motherly vibe but we also talk shit about stuff together while i'm driving which helped ease my anxiety around driving so much! i still get really sweaty hands and probably grip the wheel too tight sometimes but at this point i'm more worried about not being able to practise as often as i'd like to and i really enjoy driving a lot!

i've also enrolled in a course to get into the mental health field as a lived experience peer worker next year, so i'll be busy studying full time the whole year and luckily i'm able to get government payments as income because there's absolutely no way i would be able to keep a job and study full time simultaneously... i'm definitely not built for that and i actually know that now after my burnout! i'm hoping that i'll be able to afford to move out with my partner mitch with his full time income and mine from studying, and i just have to wait and see how soon i can start getting paid since it's already november and classes start in february.

i'm really excited and it feels nice to have something meaningful and worthwhile on the horizon, working in retail has only been good for me to 1. exercise, and 2. get exposure therapy for my social anxiety. i love helping people and i actually do enjoy talking to people if they're nice! but working in retail is so stressful and demanding of your emotional and physical energy and your time as well. i have respect for people who can do well and handle it (my partner works retail-adjacent) but i've just learned over the last couple years trying and getting burnt out that i'm better off pursuing a career that will i be fulfilled and feel useful/important in.

as part of my quest to live with my adhd and not fight it every day, i went back to the bullet journal method book i've had for... a while... and i used a blank dot grid notebook i've also... had for a while... to make my own bullet journaling system! it's also inspired by the hobonichi weeks planner which i used in 2020 when i was at university and it kept me sane throughout my deadlines and is now a time capsule of the first year of the pandemic...

my current weekly planner is a double page spread that shows the days of the week with room for weekly goals, brain dumping space, a habit tracker on the left and a weekly reflection and diary/journaling space alongside mini future logs for the upcoming week as well as anything further ahead than that on the right. i find that it's helping me to be aware of time passing and what i'm actually doing each day, because i tend to forget as soon as the day's over where i spent my time if i don't keep track somehow. i have been using notion for a few years now to do this, and this year i started to use a written out bullet list for each month to keep track of events, with seperate sections for recurring things like bills, medical appointments, and so on (also organised by time!)

i'm trying to keep organising doctor's appointments to help my physical health, and i found out that i have mild scoliosis and kyphosis (rounded back, just another reason why i want to get top surgery) which is why i wake up with body aches and pains and get sore really easily from standing/bad posture. it was really funny actually when i went to my GP and told her i have been struggling with back pain for a while, she was like "i don't mean to be rude or blunt, but you do have a really large chest... i would recommend a breast reduction" and i replied "funny you should say that, i actually want them completely removed please" lmfao.

so hopefully i can keep the ball rolling, but it's a bit tricky considering it's so close to the end of the year and it's also quite expensive even with medicare rebates to have to see so many specialists (psychologist, dietitian, exercise physiologist, getting x-rays, getting hypothyroidism and adhd meds, having to remember to organise doing all of them...)

playing

i've actually finally got back into playing games recently, i was struggling (and still kind of am) with content creator guilt and anhedonia for a while and it was especially bad this year because i was unemployed for so long and trying to work with my adhd to get things done for myself and around the house but at some point nothing felt enjoyable. i'd previously curbed my impulsive spending on a lot of things including new videogames because i knew i had too many collecting dust and it lead to me not being excited about games and my combination of burnout and content creator guilt meant i didn't start new games when i wanted to because i was too drained or guilted myself out of it.

over time with some acceptance, mental processing as well as listening to audiobooks and doing research i let go of my guilt with not making content every time i wanted to play something, and i started playing games that weren't just world of warcraft (my task completing simulator heh) like eastward: octopia*, potion craft, fields of mistria, and now dragon age: inquisition again!

*eastward: octopia and later on fields of mistria have pretty much healed my problems with enjoying playing (new) games. octopia is the farming/life sim dlc for eastward and it's in a similar vein to stardew valley like fields of mistria is too, and i really love the slow living and studio ghibli inspired vibes of octopia. i got it and potion craft while on sale months ago and i allowed myself to play it for an hour or so when i wanted to hang out with friends but not always playing high energy games like overwatch or league of legends. it's such a lovely standalone game set in a slightly different universe to the main game (which i actually haven't played at all, i just got eastward to play the octopia dlc hehe). it's got such a unique pixel art style with lovely muted colours set in a near-future post apocalyptic world overrun by nature, and the characters are really charming, it actually also reminds me of the professor layton games with the wacky character and environment designs!! i also love how they combine pixel and 2D art with their 3D lighting, it's got great game feel for my eyes and soul (and cooking inspired by breath of the wild too!!)

for fields of mistria, it's been really refreshing to play something so familiar to stardew but so different, i love that the characters react to your activites in the game like donating to the museum or completing requests/events. it's a lovely game all around honestly, i want to play it more but i'm also keen for updates as it only released a couple months ago in early access.

lately i've also been playing dragon age: inquisiton for the first time in 9 years! i originally played it on my PS4 during highschool and i would play it sooo much. i've always loved rpgs and this game was my introduction to the series. i spent 80+ hours on my first (and only fully completed) playthrough on a female qunari mage who romanced josephine. this time around i'm preparing for veilguard by playing a character i designed way back when named dracona who is an elf mage that i always planned to romance solas with but never got around to actually playing (because i was finishing highschool and barely scraping by). it's been really fun and it's actually what inspired me to hyperfocus on my website today (it's now 1:44am on the next day, the hyperfocus is REAL) because i wanted to document my playthrough somewhere and i've been split between a bluesky thread, my friend group's discord server and my own mind and i figured it would be a better idea to just keep it all in one place and make that place on my own website hahah. here i am hyperfocusing on everything else on the website and then spending hours writing up a diary entry though instead! i opened the title screen for like 15 minutes today before i closed the game and let 6 months of charging up neocities inspiration and ideas take over!

unfortunately for my eyeballs and hands i've also just gotten back into two mobile games in the nintendo sphere as well: animal crossing: pocket camp and the new pokemon tcg pocket. i was one of the first people to play pocket camp when it came out (october 2017) because it released earlier in australia than anywhere else for some reason and i had graduated highschool and not yet started uni, i think i might have been working my first job in a laundromat around that time but idk. anyways my point is that i had a LOT of free time and i played it sooo much, i don't think i ever actually spent money on it because i was an unemployed 19 year old but i had to play it a lot every day to keep up because of fomo. i ended up quitting because i got burnt out and dropped it about a year later, but i just recently picked it up again to play in the final month of this version's lifespan. nintendo just announced recently that they will be continuing offline support by converting it to a one-off paid app, changing a lot of features to be less fomo-inducing which sounded pretty good to me. so i've been casually playing it throughout the day and trying to catch up with all of the features and such that they've added in the many years since i was playing last. to be honest i saw that they were putting out some really cute autumnal items and it convinced me to reinstall it and luckily i had already connected my nintendo account so i got my original save file back!

i've also just started playing pokemon tcg pocket, a much more bank account friendly alternative to the real life counterpart of buying booster packs impulsively... my partner is the one who does this tbh not me! i've always been a fan of the pokemon videogames (i'm going to make a page about my collections, including videogames) but i never really got into the card game, i think kids at school would bring their pokemon and yugioh cards out during breaks and trade them but i never saw people actually play either of the games, it was more just about collecting and showing off. my irl friend group are all big pokemon fans too and they pretty much all collect the cards themselves or were interested so we've all joined tcg pocket and started collecting together. i'm trying to get cards with really nice art on them, and i've seen that there's some really nice eevee cards (my favourite pokemon!) out there but i haven't got any yet.

listening

i'm always listening to music every day, for a while i wasn't feeling like singing along but i got back into listening to 2010's club songs, until i found out that there's a lot of controversy in the music industry around serious allegations and such... to be honest most of the songs i listen to i didn't realise how much sexism/misogyny was in these songs because i didn't process the lyrics fully, but i've been singing along with lyrics for the first time and being shocked like why are you talking about women like that T_T cmon

i've also been listening to podcasts a lot, i've had a large craft project that i was working on the past month so i had my noise cancelling on and i had to lock in to focus on it, which gave me plenty of time to get podcasts going again. i started listening to meat bus, a podcast by kay and alex (you might know kay from @ladymisskay_ on tiktok if you're cultured or chronically online like me) it's really funny and also makes me feel a bit smarter coz they use pretty big words that i haven't heard in a long time aka when i was in highschool and actually still felt somewhat intelligent hahaha. they do talk a lot about queer and specifically gay and trans culture and experiences and don't hold back with sexual topics which is really refreshing and interesting to me as an afab nonbinary person who only had crushes and barely any romantic experiences with people of any gender before i started dating my partner mitch in 2018. it's cool to hear them talk about anything from serious topics to weird and sexual ones too while they're also really funny and entertaining to listen to.

i also have been listening to adhd and narcissist parent related podcasts, the past week i've listened to and saved episodes on being in a relationship with adhd by wise squirrels, basically every episode of the thought spot, and a lot of episodes about emotionally immature/narcissist parents from various podcasts: calling home with whitney goodman, the episode "healing from emotional abuse and narcissism" from the adhd women's wellbeing podcast, which lead me to find the podcast called in sight hosted by katie mckenna and helen villiers. i've also been using youtube videos as podcasts with videos about autism and adhd by creators: chris and debby, caren magill, and how to adhd (of course!).

reading

summary: audhd books (the anti-planner, dirty laundry, unmasked, different, not less, keeping house while drowning, how to adhd, small talk, how not to fit in up next), rupi kaur's poetry, finished dungeon meshi manga, been reading howl's moving castle as well

watching

summary: agatha all along, shrinking, my hero academia, jujutsu kaisen + movie, the lord of the rings and the hobbit movies, the wild robot recently too

wrap up

tldr: they don't call me a professional yapper for nothing!