#I'll start updating a lot more frequently now that I've gotten things under control!

[mrrosedoodler]

Howdy Everybody

It's been awhile. I apologize for my massive absence from Tumblr, Twitch, Youtube and socials in general. So much has happened since my last stream that I need to get everybody caught up to speed.

There's massive changes coming as well, and unfortunately, streams and videos are getting the biggest out of all of them. I'll talk about Twitch and Youtube in their own separate posts here, but for now I want to focus on my absence and why it took me so long to come back.

Here's the TL;DR at the start here:

I had to go to the hospital in April because I was showing symptoms of a stroke.

Thankfully, it wasn't a stroke, but I was kept so the doctors could figure out what might've happened to cause those symptoms.

The neurologist said that the symptoms I showed could've been the result of the stress I was under, the aftermath of the COVID strain I caught back in February amplifying my anxiety, autistic burnout/shutdown, or a mixture of those three.

Since then, I've gotten proper meds to deal with my anxiety, gotten therapy, changed up my diet, and have found my true calling in career terms.

Here's the full explanation (Under Read More):

In summary, this kinda started at the beginning of the year. First, a close family member of mine had a medical emergency in January. Then, in February, I caught COVID and was basically knocked out for two months. In March I tried to bounce back, but was still exhausted and sick.

Now we get to the real meat and potatoes. April. April is where things just hit the fan. I had an unbelievable amount of stress on me at the time. I won't go into too much detail since I don't want to trauma dump on here, but to put things into perspective; I was getting stress headaches incredibly often and was sick about 75% of the time I woke up.

Aaand now we're at the thing that caused me to fully stop. The hospital visit. I had to have a family member run me to the ER because my face drooped and I was out of it, and we thought that I was having a stroke. Got there, got through testing, and it turned out I was clear of anything that should have caused that. No palsy, no stroke, and nothing wrong with my brain that would have caused that.

Came to find out from the neurologist that upon reviewing my test results throughout the past few days, there were three things that might have happened to cause this.

The stress, of course. The doctor said that sometimes the body might react in the way it did when put under large amounts of stress.

COVID. Apparently they've found that COVID can get into your brain, and it tends to amplify mental health symptoms. And wouldn't you know it, my anxiety had been beginning to ramp up over time ever since I caught that newer strain in February. Not even knowing CBT and proper coping mechanisms could help me stop it on my own after that.

Autistic Burnout/Shutdown. The neurologist said that this could have also been the issue, considering I'm autistic. Which, in all honesty, made complete sense to me.

We also reviewed my diet and what could have been contributing to my stress there, what might have gotten my brain overloaded to such a degree, and where to go from there.

As of right now, I've gotten my emergency medication for my anxiety and I've been working to better my diet and mental health. I've also been trying to cut back on stress, rework myself, and find a proper job to have while I'm working on writing things out for some original projects of mine.

I've since found that any job that tends to associate with customer service, high amounts of stress, and people pleasing of any kind seems to not exactly be my speed. I've noticed I kinda tend to overdo it to the point of disregarding my own health and safety in order to ensure the people are content. . . Which is a yikes. Thus, I've been trying to see if I can get a job at the local libraries around me instead while I write things.

But yeah, that's the gist of it. I'd like to apologize for all of this, as I've been gone far longer than I had hoped to have been while trying to figure all of this out. Thankfully, now that I'm back, we can redirect and rebuild here!

Stay tuned for more updates on the state of my Twitch and Youtube; I'll be posting updates on those soon.

For now, make sure you guys are taking time to self-care! Eat, drink, and sleep properly, friendos! And don't worry, from now on, I'll also be taking that advice.