#i would make this much less of mindless word dump but i am exhausted so I'm just gonna have to beam this silly idea in y'all's heads instead

[frozen-seagrass]

Everyone talks about Vipapa but Jesterdad has so much potential

Just- gruff and serious Jester seeing cool and unflappable Iceman and his brash but loyal RIO Slider and going "huh.."

Viper picks out his hidden favoritism in a second, though Jester still denies it

Idk I just need Viper and Jester to have a friendly competition and bet between their competing pilot students, and Maverick and Iceman are entirely oblivious to it happening

[cosmosogler]

i was trying to meditate to help myself fall asleep last night. but thoughts kept coming up and i was stuck between trying to remember them so i could write them down later and letting them go so i could sleep. i ended up doing NEITHER!!!

yesterday i took wiley for a walk and played outside with the dogs and my brother for a little while. it was impossible to sleep last night though, and it took me like 2 hours to fall asleep (so i didn’t doze off until after 3), and then i woke up again around 6 and couldn’t fall back asleep. i know it was around 6 because as i was laying there trying to fall back asleep my mom came upstairs to wake my brother up to get ready for school. i was exhausted by the time my alarm went off four hours later so i napped a bit. 

i was trying to do the mindfulness stuff, like focusing on my breathing. i wasn’t thinking TOO hard. i remember wondering if i should let thoughts go as they come up, or let them finish and then let them go. and then i was struck by the oddity of the process of thinking. i knew what the end of my thought would be before i got to it in “words.” but i was unable to stop thinking it until i wordlessly reached the end of the “sentence.” i wonder if that’s what really keeps my thoughts from going as fast as i’d like- stopping to put them into words instead of just letting the process go until it reaches a satisfying conclusion. but i wouldn’t know it had reached a conclusion unless i stopped to put the thought into words. i wonder if animals think faster because they don’t use words. do birds think in song? do dolphins think in squeals?

i am regrettably flagging in my efforts to socialize even a little bit. i said maybe a sentence today. i only left my room for about 20 minutes total. and i didn’t message anyone. i parked at my desk and read tv tropes for hours and hours. i’m kind of, sort of considering what my next move should be toward writing up some new drafts of my stories, or at the very least filling in some missing scenes and character motivations and logical strangeness in my comic script. i actually came up with a really good reason for the climax of the comic to go the way it does, which i did not have previously. just gotta... add some stuff in so it doesn’t look like a total ass pull. 

maybe i almost feel ready to start liking my characters again. i don’t know if i’m really there yet, but i could see myself getting there. i still don’t want to draw or write. that’s a problem. i noticed i feel like i have a little more energy/motivation to do literally anything if i do actually get some exercise during the day. so i’ll take the dog out around the neighborhood again tomorrow. i feel bad having to leave eve and diogi behind though, since diogi can’t even get to the park and back any more without running out of steam. she gets so upset if i don’t take her though...

my therapist gave me a thought journal i still haven’t started writing in. it’s one of those cbt things where you, like, figure out a harmful thought, write it down, and challenge it with the power of logic and write down how you feel after creating the new thought. but i can’t seem to disentangle specific negative thoughts from general malaise. 

i also didn’t compose the letter to my grad schools. nor did i start training for the pokemon competition. sign ups start on the 9th, so i have a little time... i don’t know why i haven’t started that. it’s not hard. it’s not even unenjoyable. it’s exactly the kind of more or less mindless chore that should be perfect for the level of effort i’m able to give right now. i already made the charts and spreadsheets and wrote down all the information i needed from the computer back in like december. i could go sit outside and do it with my notebook on my lap. actually that sounds like a good idea and i should try that tomorrow morning.

i dunno. i am... profoundly sad. i’m so sad i don’t even feel it any more.

this would be so much easier if i could just blame it all on one thing. like my closest friend dumping me like hot garbage with no warning. i mean yeah, that really bummed me out, but i started feeling sick before all that. it’s been two and a half months. i’m starting to think i’ll never feel better.

my mom keeps encouraging me to look for an outpatient clinic in the city. i couldn’t find one i’d feel safe at when i spent a couple hours clicking around the insurance list last week. she says i “need to get this solved.” i keep wanting to say, like... you can’t solve depression. that’s not how depression works. i don’t think that’s what she wants to hear though. also i don’t think that will actually help or change anything. she would say i’m obviously not trying hard enough, and if i just TRIED HARDER i wouldn’t feel so bad and sick all the time. and i don’t think that would be helpful for me to hear. so i don’t correct her.

i wanted to ask my therapist what she thought about meeting more often, or where i could go to see someone more often, when i saw her on friday but she kind of steamrolled over me. i didn’t get to talk about my nightmares either. it’s just, there’s only so much i can talk about and work on in an hour, and i just don’t have enough time to get through everything that i’ve been feeling in that amount of time once a week. even if it was just twice a week that would be so much better. i understand that i need to prioritize when i share my feelings with a therapist, but there’s just... an overwhelming amount of material to sort through. there’s no possible way to get to everything i feel is important to talk about right then, let alone everything i WANT to talk about. 

and when she says stuff like “but the earth is sentient” it kind of blindsides me and i lose my train of thought because i stop to remind myself that that’s not how reality works as i understand it, and i shouldn’t believe everything someone tells me just because they’re a therapist. i have to stop to address that internally every single time because i don’t want to believe that. yes there is something strange going on with synergy and life and consciousness as concepts but having mass and chemical reactions doesn’t make everything sentient. if “planet earth” is sentient, are individual pebbles sentient? dust grains? individual atoms? where is the line? what even is consciousness? when and why does a collection of tons of cells start thinking “i” instead of “we”? when does a collection of cells even START thinking? what about the solar system as a whole, since planet earth is just part of a system itself? is the galaxy as an entity sentient? where is the line. even a fuzzy line still implies a distinction.

i got sidetracked again. as much as one can get sidetracked on a stream of thought glorified diary entry. i sure hope you wanted to read about cosmic consciousness, because that’s what ended up happening. man even i don’t want to read all the bullcrap i just spouted into the last 12 paragraphs. i mean, i read over my journal entries anyway, when i want to collect my thoughts and figure out what i should talk about in therapy that week, but i’m sorry for dragging you through this nonsense too if you got this far. i’m sorry.

it’s just very difficult to capture the exact nature of a thought in only words. even moreso for dreams, since they are somehow even more abstract and detailed and littered with fragments of emotion and knowledge and association that don’t make sense any more when you give words to them. words aren’t FLUID the way thoughts are. even writing down this garbage somehow makes it... less than what it was in my head. this applies to trying to write stories too. but looking over the journal entries i can sometimes remember exactly what i was thinking about and feeling from looking at the words, even though i know no one outside of me can ever get those exact feelings even looking at the same words. it’s weird, but... sharing them makes it feel more real than just keeping them in a word document. like someone else might care even a little bit. and that makes the lack of privacy and full coherency sort of, in a way, worth it.