Knowing it's physical and predictable doesn't help that much, really

[cimorene]

I know it's normal to feel like you will cry if one more thing happens or if you have to leave the house one more time in January, but I still get in a mental spiral about it.

There's just too much everything and it's exhausting and I feel like I need a whole extra day to recover between each day of going out and doing work (or other things).

Comments

[lilysea]

Is this a Winter Depression thing, or a Christmas Is Hard thing, or both?

Hope it gets easier soon

[cimorene]

It's definitely seasonal affective stuff. It's much worse here because of how little sunlight Finland gets in the winter.

[yvannairie]

I feel you :( the new year is invariably a very "the damn things overlap" kind of situation

[princessofgeeks]

HUGS

[devon]

I recently saw this doctor for chronic pain, and part of his "prescription" is volunteer work. I said I wasn't interested, and he's like, "It's one hour a week!"

No, nothing you have to leave the house for is one hour a week. It's getting up, showering, dressing, eating, commuting, doing the thing (usually around other people who expect you to be cheerful,) coming home from the thing, eating again, and recovering from the thing. I'm lucky if that only takes up ONE DAY.

Just saying that I 100% get where you are coming from.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I hate leaving the house. I do find that doing it in order to interact with people a limited amount of my time ultimately has mental health benefits that outweigh, I guess, the negatives, but that's not true anymore in January. Probably February too. I was just saying to Wax the other day that I think January and February should be fully work-from-home (or anything-else-from-home) months with just errands requiring me to leave it. I'm too tired just being out of my blanket cave at all so the exhaustion from having gone and done stuff outside has more negative effects than the positive effects of interacting with people in a limited way. And that huge threshold is the issue there, because anytime you have fewer spoons available (it could be illness, or chronic pain, although I don't know how much of it you have or how much anxiety etc, since everyone's levels will be different), it's easily possible for the expenditure to be greater than the benefit. It might be that regular small doses of socializing with other people in person, or that something else about volunteer work, would in itself provide a benefit for lots of people but that the threshold to it is so high to get there for various reasons that the ultimate math comes out against. Finding some way to lower the threshold can sometimes help, but you can't invite volunteer work to visit you for limited times instead the way you can with (for example) seeing your friends. Volunteer work in general isn't a particularly easy goal to adjust in that way.

[viggorlijah]

January! The month where you have to wonder is it the month or the world or me. By the way your lovely postcard arrived and is on my bulletin board in my room! Maggie is envious of your beautiful handwriting and I explained it's a fountain pen with green ink.

[cimorene]

Handwriting is practice, too! Although a fountain pen with green ink always looks beautiful regardless, there are lots of people who love fountain pens and don't worry about their handwriting.

Wax's niece who is 14 and undergoing her Silent Goth Phase has also recently gotten interested in handwriting (but not fountain pens), just practicing it, like. I remember having fleeting interest in it in my school years too. They taught us traditional cursive writing in grade 3 when I was 9-10 and I was mildly interested, but I was never really satisfied with how it looked which... is mainly because that style of cursive, which I think is mostly not taught in school anymore, only looks elegant after incredible amounts of practice. I mean, it's the simplified version of so-called Copperplate or Spencerian Script or Roundhand, right? The stuff you see on framed certificates and diplomas and vintage invitations.

When I found out about italic script calligraphy (aka Chancery cursive, aka cancellaresca corsiva) - that is to say, the hand calligraphy style that gave rise to so-called italic font styles and was invented in renaissance Italy and is most clearly seen in fonts like Monotype Corsiva or Lucida Calligraphy - I was really excited, and also really offended that it was abandoned in favor of the more modern roundhand cursive. (The reason for this evolution was the evolution of pens from quills to metal nibs and roundhand being faster, ultimately, and of course, italic script is mostly written with an italic pen or nib, that is, one that isn't pointed but ends in short flat line. Italic nibs are usually between 1.1 and 2 mm in length.)

Sorry if that was too much infodump. That's how it is when you trigger one of my hobbies I guess.

[vass]

*sad solidarity fistbump*

[cimorene]

I'm furious that it isn't easier to just abstain from everything for the month of January.

February is also on thin ice.