It’s the end of the year and I wanted to ramble a little bit about this year and the different realisations I had over the past few months. This is less of a post that I’ve thought through plenty and more of a post that I just wanted to make at the end of the year and that I only wrote up last Monday. The post that I originally scheduled for today will come out at some point in the new year, so… yeah. This post will mainly talk about my mental health over the last few months and how blogging helped me get through some things.
2021 has been more of the same for me. Zoom-Meetings and Social Distancing coined 2020 and I thought that with this year it would come to an end… but it didn’t. While I originally wanted to be less cynical, I ended up thinking a lot about how nothing’s changing and how there are still too many QIdiots out there. Those idiots are the ones that cause the biggest issues right now. They’re the minority that doesn’t want to get vaccinated – which is fine as nobody should be forced to if they don’t want to… But they also don’t want to distance themselves from other people and they still don’t want to wear masks; it’s just incredibly frustrating. Eventually, the situation got better in the summer and with this latest semester, our university opened up and I had classes again that were not tied to a screen or anything. That was nice… but then classes started returning to the online format again and it started to wear me down again more and more.
So, 2021 was the year that I took care of myself. I took time off from things or I’d say “no” to people. The year was draining me a lot and I just felt exhausted. I had to cut ties with one person that was incredibly toxic for me. As a result, our common friends had to “pick sides” which made things difficult. I nearly lost one friend that is very dear to me because of how fucked my headspace was when he came over and we luckily did make it work. At the same time, two people that I’ve known for ages broke off all communication with me, effectively ghosting me, and it hurt me quite a lot actually. Communication is really important to me; and only recently I noticed how they didn’t communicate at all, then messaged me once to throw out some accusations before going completely silent again. And I still have to work through that emotionally but now I also have to deal with my family issues and honestly, the last few days have been difficult. One evening I was on the brink of a mental breakdown and the other day, I had a lot of issues with some family members but in the end, it’s only temporary. I wasn’t in a good place but the resources in that Christmas post I made helped, as always. I took a walk to get away from the situation and cleared my head while listening to The Last Whole Earth Catalog (who are an amazing band I only recently discovered btw). As mentioned above, though, I’m taking care of myself. I know how it feels when I’m about to completely break down or how it feels when I get an anxiety attack or even a panic attack. All of these terms, btw, are just names I gave to specific things that happened before. I don’t know if that one thing I had a while ago was a panic attack but giving it a name makes it less scary. The thing that happens more often that is less bad is something I call an anxiety attack. No idea if it has an official name but, again, giving it a name and being able to describe it makes it less scary and I can deal better with it. Taking care of yourself is important and this year I actually went to the doctor when I went blind for an hour and I’m now getting checked up on because “turning blind” even if temporary isn’t “normal”. I’m looking forward to my neurologist’s appointment on the 6th of January. I hope that they can find out why I’m having migraines and these headaches and why I turned blind.
And well, for the mental health stuff, I decided to not think too much about it. None of my problems will be solved by overthinking. Hence, I tried burying myself in blogging and streaming this year and it honestly really helped. I get to do something that I truly enjoy as a hobby and my mental health improved. When I felt bad, I’d write reviews or read posts by online friends. Streaming has been amazing as well as I was able to play games that I really enjoy for people that I really care about. In the end, my mental health improved because I’m blogging and the sense of fulfilment I get from writing and publishing or scheduling a post at the end of the day is great. I’m glad that I get to do this as a hobby and I hope I get to keep doing this. I also hope that my blog posts and streams may make people’s days when they’re having a shitty time, just like other people’s streams and blog posts helped me when I was in a bad place.
When it comes to streaming, I stopped doing Art Streams and I did a lot less Chatting over the past couple of months but I realised how much I actually enjoyed those things… when I stopped doing them. I came to that realisation kind of near the end of the year in my last two streams or so, so I want to maybe do more Just Chatting streams this upcoming year and potentially dabble in more Art again. If I really do start taking commissions, I’ll end up drawing and designing more emotes anyway, so I might as well work on it on-stream? But I also want to chat more with people and work on my style as a streamer if that makes sense? Again, these last few streams I did on Twitch before the winter break have been eye-opening to me and I really enjoyed chatting with people. Now that I’m on a break until the 4th, I have a lot of time to think about things I want to do in the new year and it’s been inspirational. It truly has been. I’m looking forward to it! If you wanna stop by and say hi, you can do so right here. Would be great to see ya there once I’m back!
Either way, this has been my rambling post at the end of the year. While it has been really difficult over the past few months, I’d like to think that it has been a good year. I was able to take pride in my work here on the blog and I was able to even write four reviews in a single week at one point. I’d love to try going for an “only reviews” month during the next Blaugust, although I’d probably find that incredibly difficult to pull off… I found my groove when it comes to all things blogging as well and I tried out new things. I wasn’t too successful with Bumble BFF but I still tried it out. I found cool people to play games with on Noobly. I got to try out plenty of new games thanks to developers and publishers that sent in games. I even gave the XBOX Game Pass a try and had some good experiences with it. Now that I think about it, those three have been somewhat recently but in the end, I also went out of my comfort zone and reviewed games that I wouldn’t normally play and I tried myself at writing about art while also hosting #theJCS for October! I participated in Blaugust again and got to meet new people! I also had a blast discovering new blogs, picking up running as a hobby, listening to new music, finding new streams, getting better at Digital Art, getting back into League of Legends and even Dead By Daylight (post on that soon) and overall doing a lot of different things. Honestly, it was a great year. I had my rough patches mentally and I had some unfortunate moments here and there but it was fine in the end. We made it to the end.
Cheers to the new year!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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