The title reflects both the weather today (which came as a shock to me when I left my flat not that long ago) and my general mood of late. (I nearly wrote, for the benefit of non-Scots: ‘if you don’t know what dreich means, Google is your friend’. You can certainly use Google to find out, but please don’t make the mistake of thinking of the corporation as your friend.)
My general mood of late being what it is, I’m finding it a little hard to get into writing this. The stream of consciousness that normally fuels my unposts is little more than a trickle at the moment, so I’m going to have to write more nonsense than usual. I suppose this is appropriate for #Stimtober (as Steve Asbell has tagged this month on Twitter): just letting words flow without too much regard to what they mean is, I suppose, a form of stimming. This paragraph, however, is heavily edited-as-I-go-along, so it’s not quite as nonsensical as it might be.
This paragraph, on the other hand, is an experiment, just writing the words that come to mind and trying not to edit any of them at all. At all. I’m just going to see what happens as I type for a little while. I’ll need to go back and correct stuff in a bit because it’s coming out very, very, very quickly. Very quickly indeed. Very quickly. Yes. But that’s just how it is. How it is when I don’t submit stuff to conscious editorial control. And there are some funny typos appearing, I see, but that’s what you’d expect, isn’t it? I suppose. Well, I’ll leave it there. That’s probably enough of that.
OK. Maybe I’ll do a completely unedited stim post some time, but one paragraph will do for now. And, actually, I probably need to use dictation to get the right effect. Goodness knows what could come out!
Why is my mood so low? Why am I suffering from particularly poor executive function at the moment? I don’t know. Working out cause and effect is hard. Is my gender dysphoria, for instance, which caused me to feel awful about the size of my enormous feet while waiting at the bus stop earlier, a consequence of my mood or something feeding into it? Are the extreme transphobic views of a member of an organisation I’m involved in something to do with it? Loneliness? Feeling rejected by people? Erratic sleep? Not eating regularly? Difficult decisions? Living in chaos? Financial worries?
Life is so hard.
Just now, to set the scene for those of you who like to, and are able to, picture stuff in your heads, I’m sitting in an armchair at the end of a corridor-like room in a café. Behind me is a window looking out onto a garden (it’s looking pretty grey and wet out there), and I can look straight ahead to the front window of the café at the other end of the corridor. It looks out onto a park, with mature trees and lots of grass. Strangely enough, the weather doesn’t look enticing in that direction either. Music is playing and people are talking in another part of the café, but my headphones are blocking a lot of that out. Not quite enough, though. The warm lighting in here is a contrast to the encroaching darkness outside. It feels very wintry.
I’ve had two Americanos while I’ve been here. I had a bowl of leek and potato soup by way of a late lunch, and I had some banana bread with my second cup of coffee. I can’t afford this lifestyle at all. This is very financially irresponsible of me, I know. Or, at least, I strongly suspect it is, because I still don’t really know what my financial situation is. And I have no real urge to find out. I have no real urge to do anything much.
Life is so hard.