This is a legacy blog post, originally from my previous website, Mouse House Blog. To see more MHB posts, check out the MHB tag here on my blog.
I haven’t posted since December, and I feel badly about that. The bones of this post have been in my plan for several months, but getting things done has not been my strong suit lately.
As I talked about in my last post, my mental health has not been in its best place in the last year. I did drop a class second term and have an easier load, but things were still challenging. My sleep issues haven’t really improved, despite my best efforts. I’m still working on that and on a lot of other things. Most of the sources of my stress are things I’d rather not discuss publicly, but I will say that a lot of things are beginning to get better, if slowly. Life is letting up a little bit. That said, I’m still pretty exhausted. I think I just ran on empty for a really long time and recovering is going to take a while. I’m trying, but these things aren’t linear, and I just have to strike the right balance so that I’m not stressing myself out further by beating myself up when I don’t improve as quickly as I want to.
I went on a hike with my brothers when the weather warmed up and explored the flooded parts of the trail. That was nice.
But there are good things lately too, and I’m trying to focus on them. I’m hoping these good things mean I can see the light at the end of this shitty tunnel, finally. Some days I feel like I’m getting there. Here’s some of that good news:
1. My family adopted a Siamese cross kitten about a week and a half ago. Technically she’s an early Father’s Day gift – my dad is outrageously hard to buy for, but Siamese have always been his favourite breed (he grew up with them, and my brothers and I grew up with his), and frankly, the joy she’s bringing is something we all needed. Money is tight but our pets have gotten all of us through a lot in the last few years. We couldn’t be happier to have her in our family. Many names have been debated, but it looks like we’re going with Smudge.
Here she is asleep on my dad’s hand. She does this stuff a lot.
2. My mother and I have been invited to sell at our local ArtsFest again this year. We still have a lot of stock left over from last year, for I think a variety of reasons, but we think that with some price adjustments we can do well and recoup some of last year’s lost costs. We’ll likely take up the offer, and I’m kind of looking forward to it.
3. I’ve been writing. Around mid-January I got all caught up in a TV show called The Librarians – when I’m depressed, I get addicted to stories; I’ll pick one and seriously fixate on it for a while. And in that show I found some inspiration and started writing fanfiction for the first time in a while. I always circle back to fanfiction, I’ve been writing it for years, but suddenly I was writing a lot of it. I’ve managed to write every single day since late January, eventually transitioning from mostly fanfiction to mostly original work, though right now I’m still doing both. This is good for a lot of reasons, including the fact that I rarely have both motivation and inspiration for this long (and both is good, for an aspiring fiction writer) – and that writing is helping me feel like myself again. That’s really nice, because I miss me. Because of it I got so addicted to writing for a little bit there that I started ignoring other things and people for it (sorry, Keynan) but I’m a bit more balanced now.
As a result of this, I’m working on some big personal projects this summer, using some of my simpler, lighter story ideas. I’m aiming to finish at least one novella, and then looking into Amazon self-publishing. I have to start somewhere.
And that leads me into 4. Good music things have been happening. One of my other story obsessions this year, in February and March, was the Disney Channel original movie Lemonade Mouth, which is cheesy but also one of my favourites. Among others, it stars Hayley Kiyoko, which led me to listening to her music properly, as I’d meant to do for years anyway. As it turned out, she had a show in Toronto at the end of March, which I convinced Keynan to go to with me. It was an incredible show, and I totally loved it – and I fell in love with her opening act, a band called flor. I looked them up when I got home and instantly fell in love. I haven’t listened to much else since. Like I said, I get fixated. They released their first full album a week and a half ago (the same day we got our kitten, actually) and I absolutely adore it…
…So much so that I started writing a short story based on it. Well, it was meant to be a short story – I can already tell that it’ll go over 20k words at this point, and I think it’s asking to be more than that. It might end up being the novella I finish, despite having already planned and started work on something else. But this story is flowing so well that I can’t leave it alone.
Even better new: on their short tour to celebrate the album release, flor is coming to Toronto again, for a headliner this time! The show is on Wednesday night and I couldn’t be more excited. I have a feeling that that concert is going to be to this summer what Motion City Soundtrack was to last summer. I’ve had a bit of a hole in my heart since MCS parted ways and while flor is a very different band, they seem to have filled it. I really adore them and I’m so excited for what’s probably going to be a smallish, more intimate show where I get to jam out to my new favourites.
So there’s most of the news. I’m still working hard at getting better, and taking this summer to try to get my health in order. But I’m still having bad days, too. I’m trying to make time for creativity, to get back into the habit of making things, with mixed results. My journal is still plugging along as well, so hopefully in the near future I’ll be back to making craft and journal posts on at least sort of a regular basis. I’m doing my best to keep looking up and forward, and with any luck I’ll be in a much better place by the end of the summer than I have been in the last nine or ten months.
Here’s hoping. We’re all in this together.