This year seems particularly bad when it comes to this, but this is the first winter that I have been off my antidepressants. Couple that with not being able to enjoy my motorcycle thanks to the temperatures, I get very unenthusiastic with a lot of things. I think my friends are picking up on that but they haven’t said anything. The weather is warming up, and I hope that since I’m not working Sundays again for a bit that I will be able to go out and just ride again. I use my motorcycle as a way to block out everything else in the world and focus on the road; it was therapeutic and helped me. It wouldn’t hurt to gain some of my confidence back, either.

Cyrus has been helping, with us delving into Conan: Exiles on our private server. Redh is probably going to tweak some of the XP requirements today if there’s no objections. For me, it means that levelling will be a steady pace even though I’m about halfway through the levels now. Having bought ARK through Humble Monthly, but never really able to sit down and enjoy it because I didn’t ‘get’ it, Conan was the first in a new genre to me (aside from Minecraft), and playing it on the new PC is awesome. Most of the games that I was playing before it were optimised for less powerful specs as well as top-end machines so I didn’t really see the benefit, like Warframe or Rocket League. But Conan puts my PC through it’s paces and the end result is gorgeous. It, along with DOOM, has sold me on the fact that I made the right decision in getting a high-end machine. I also put the SSD from my old machine into the new one to give it more space for games. I remember when 250MB was enough, let alone 250GB!

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I’ve been quiet on the blog front for a couple of reasons. First, is that I’m having to buckle down hard on the job. Doing nearly fifty hours a week in five days is not a pretty thought, nor is what it does to me a pretty sight. The main issue that has stopped me being creative lies about fifteen paces from where I sit and type now; my neighbours.

I’ve been dealing with a noise issue since the 9th of October, and things are finally starting to settle back down. I don’t know who is doing it, but I know what the source of the sound is and hearing it for (on some days) fifteen hours makes it a problem. It’s that really bad, chavvy music that just makes me want to punch the wall. If it was melodic dubstep, or metal, or anything that doesn’t feel like techno or garage then I wouldn’t be so aggravated by it. By feel, by the way, I mean feel the bass throughout my flat to the other damn side of it. It really got me down, and it’s really easy to get me to that place now that the days are getting shorter.

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(I fully expect a lot of people to be rather venomous after reading this. Go ahead; I have a thick skin.)

It should be a surprise to no-one (read: a previous entry) that I suffer with mental health problems; more specifically depression, anxiety and SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder, or winter depression). I’m glad I can talk about it to people who are in my life, and those that can talk about their coping techniques to get through the day. I’m far from unique in my issues, but once again I find myself at the point where I just look at the world and get a little bit angrier at it.

World Mental Health Day is supposed to be a day when we bring mental health to the forefront of the public mind, talking about the stigmas surrounding it and the ways those that suffer with mental issues can get treatment. It’s supposed to be something that just sits in the back of all our minds after we see it, and  for those that are undiagnosed to possibly use it as a crutch to get over the mogul of suffering in silence and actually ask for help. But what I don’t like is seeing everyone trying to celebrate mental health issues, that they’re completely normal to have. Mental disorders are not normal. Mental disorders are anomalies that, were we an animal species, would be taken care of by Darwinism.

What I’m specifically talking about here is the tumblr-centred SJWsphere where everyone is a special snowflake just because they diagnosed themselves on WebMD, or are going to a therapist without having been referred there by a medical professional. It honestly infuriates me, because I know several people who have been diagnosed and are awaiting treatment because their local health services can’t deal with the influx of people who are waiting (I personally had to wait three months just to talk to someone after my evaluation, without being triaged based on severity). In fact what they’re really missing is a solid upbringing and a moral centre that has any gravitational pull beyond the self-centred ‘me too!’ culture that has enveloped some of my generation, some of the generations prior, and most of the generations henceforth. The ones that truly need help are the quiet ones, because in the big picture they’ve made themselves quiet to make sure that nobody will miss them, or they are too incapacitated from said mental health issue to speak up. It is their signals that are lost in that white noise of ignorance and narcissism.

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I have been having issues with my body for quite some time. I’ve almost always had an issue with my weight, and of course recently I’ve had issues with depression that have been diagnosed and worked on. Well, neither of them seem to have made any recent progress so I’m trying different ways of dealing with them this time.

My weight has always been an issue for me, apart from when I was doing a paper round and I was exercising hard for about an hour each day while earning next to nothing. When a certain someone (1 million Kinah, I know [it’s an inside joke]) says behind your back that you look like you’re “pregnant with triplets” it tends to stick, regardless of the source. I’ve been watching what I eat, and writing it down. That daily routine of checking my weight means that I’m constantly on it, though I am slipping just as regularly. Eventually it will stick, though without exercise I’ll constantly be fighting this battle. I don’t want to be fighting this forever, I want to get fit and in the last week and a half I have lost 11lbs. I reckon most of that was just weight from my stomach being a literal conveyer belt of food, but progress is progress.

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