#CampNaNoWriMo July
Hello darlings,
So things have been going well here. I'm still doing the youtube speedpaints, but I did stop doing the scribble dailies since people didn't seem to like them and they were a lot of work on me after a while. So it was a win-win to stop doing them. I still draw but not as much as I was during my break from working. Speaking of that, I'm working a part-time job now so that kind of sucks away my time and inspiration, but it is neccessary. Now I'm looking for a full-time job. Such is life.
I had some pretty strong coffee this morning so I have heart burn and an upset stomach. It'll pass though. If it gets really bad there's always Pepto. I'm really resisting the urge to put emoji's everywhere because I'm hyper... because coffee.
But to the title of this post! I'm going to try to do Camp NaNoWriMo this year for the month of July. I've tried Nanowrimo's before though and I've always started strong the first couple of days and then just stop.
I touched a bit on this on my twitter this morning but I've think I've got a theory on why I do this, or at least some of the feelings behind why I sputter out when it comes to writing.
Well for one, when comparing writing and drawing for me, there is more instant gratification with illustation than writing because to me I can more literally see my progress and I can more readily control how long I speed on an illustration or painting, With writing there are standards on how many words or how long something needs to be in order to be considered a piece of writing.
I think this is one of the things that ultimately discourages me and just get compounded on the other things that I'll touch on in a bit. Writing to me feels great at first, but then quickly feels like a grueling, unfulfilling process, but that's just because I'm getting ahead of myself in the writing process. I see the final product in my head and it takes too long to get to the page. I find it frustrating.
On top of that, after the rush of the beginning when I start feeling like writing isn't paying off I start thinking to myself, "What's the point?" I also have the nagging feeling that no one cares about what I write or if I write and that ultimately I don't have anything worth saying. I'm 26 and I still feel like I am too young to have a valid perspective of the world or have enough valid experiences in my life to be shared. I'm not old enough for my voice to matter yet. And that's really shitty isn't it.
No this is coming from a couple of things I think. One being my own head since I tend to get down on myself as I go through mostly depressive bipolar cycles. The second being that at least to me my culture doesn't value a young voice. This is even more true because I am a part of the dreaded millennials. I don't think either of these things are more to blame but I think they feed into each other in my mind. And all of this culmulates into the imposter syndrome too. Its all one big mess.
I try to fight through it, but given my depressive bipolar cycles it can be really, really hard, sometimes impossible, sometimes I push through. Most often though I crumble because during my hypomanic phase I'll put a LOT on my plate. I'm gonna write a novel, a book of poetry, draw a series of illustrations/paintings, finish that 100 game that I'm half done with, start exersizing... You get the drift.
I've gotten better at this more recently after being able to get help for my illness medically, as well as being able to talk to someone so I can get a clearer perspective on the things around me. Pespective is the hardest thing to keep when your mind is being put into extremes.
Right now I am hypomanic. How do I know. Well for one I never write blog posts and here I am writing quite a long one. I binge watched a show the other day while playing a video game and had no regard to what time it was. I played some ddr the other day, something I also don't do on a regular basis. I'm not talking about hey I should exercise so I'm going to ease myself into this again. I mean I'm going to push as far as I can until I can't even really stand up and I'm gasping for breath. Now I didn't get to exhaust myself like I wanted because someone in the house wanted to take a nap, but I would've done it. And mainly the reason I wanted to was because I had to much energy, I was feeling too alive, if that makes sense. The days before that I had been waking up at 5-5:30am after going to sleep around 10 or 11. Now I'm all about being more productive but this is very out of the ordinary. When I am feeling normal I sleep nine hours. No more, no less. That is how much I sleep. If I sleep more or less for some reason its because something is wrong. Either I'm getting over a cold, I'm depressed, or I'm hypomanic.
I think I'm getting off track. A consequence of pushing myself too far with playing ddr is now my knees and legs ache and that was two days ago. I'm lucky I didn't hurt my knees more because sometimes the weather makes my knees hurt so much it'll wake me up in the middle of the night and its all I can do to not cry. So I just walk around the house trying to pop my knee since that seems to bring some relief sometimes.
Another unfortunate side effect is that I scratch at my face. I've done this since I had acne. Now there's a lot to unpack with this, parents yelling at me asking me why I don't care about myself when even washing my face everyday doesn't seem to help, the look on their face when I have a large red pimple on my face that I'm trying to ignore. I pick at it because in my mind at least that means its not there anymore. So I win? Well thats what scars are for I guess. More to the point it wasn't until recently that a part of why I scratched and picked at my face was anxiety. Part of it I think is control. This is something I can do. I beat the acne into submission. Well thats not really how it works and it just makes it worse. Which makes me feel bad, which leads me to scratch more, so on and so on.
Another aspect that I realized while reading books on mental illness and talking to my therapist was that scratching and picking at ance is also a form of self-harm. I was suprised to learn this but at the same time to me it made sense. There's the pain of the picking but that releases endophines into the brain, so the more you hurt the better you feel. Our brains are really fucked up. The messed up thing too is that if I wasn't having a bad breakout I would pick at my blackheads, which would make them worse, and so on and so on. Its a vicious cycle. But its something a lot of people have to try themselves to stop doing. Like even right now I want to scratch at my face. I'm not upset by anything, nothing stressful has happened, but my brain is stressed, its on high alert because of the hypomania, it wants to calm down. It knows one thing it can do to calm down. So instead of doing that I'm trying to keep my hands busy by doing this.
I guess its working. lol
Sorry that was a lot. All this because I wantd to announce that I was going to do the campnanowrimo. But it is related in a way because the subject of my writing is going to be my struggle with head stuff (as I like to call it). I don't know if I've always had bipolar or not (its still something that is still rarely diagnosed in kids), but I see its effects throughout my life.
Weird thing is too, some aspects of bipolar are encouraged. My obsessiveness about my acne was sometimes seen as me caring about my appearance and therefore myself. Its fucked up. My Hypomania written off as an overly cheerful personality or just a kid being a silly hyper kid.
Its touched every aspect of my life I think.
I'm getting tired.
I'm going to rest now.
So things have been going well here. I'm still doing the youtube speedpaints, but I did stop doing the scribble dailies since people didn't seem to like them and they were a lot of work on me after a while. So it was a win-win to stop doing them. I still draw but not as much as I was during my break from working. Speaking of that, I'm working a part-time job now so that kind of sucks away my time and inspiration, but it is neccessary. Now I'm looking for a full-time job. Such is life.
I had some pretty strong coffee this morning so I have heart burn and an upset stomach. It'll pass though. If it gets really bad there's always Pepto. I'm really resisting the urge to put emoji's everywhere because I'm hyper... because coffee.
But to the title of this post! I'm going to try to do Camp NaNoWriMo this year for the month of July. I've tried Nanowrimo's before though and I've always started strong the first couple of days and then just stop.
I touched a bit on this on my twitter this morning but I've think I've got a theory on why I do this, or at least some of the feelings behind why I sputter out when it comes to writing.
Well for one, when comparing writing and drawing for me, there is more instant gratification with illustation than writing because to me I can more literally see my progress and I can more readily control how long I speed on an illustration or painting, With writing there are standards on how many words or how long something needs to be in order to be considered a piece of writing.
I think this is one of the things that ultimately discourages me and just get compounded on the other things that I'll touch on in a bit. Writing to me feels great at first, but then quickly feels like a grueling, unfulfilling process, but that's just because I'm getting ahead of myself in the writing process. I see the final product in my head and it takes too long to get to the page. I find it frustrating.
On top of that, after the rush of the beginning when I start feeling like writing isn't paying off I start thinking to myself, "What's the point?" I also have the nagging feeling that no one cares about what I write or if I write and that ultimately I don't have anything worth saying. I'm 26 and I still feel like I am too young to have a valid perspective of the world or have enough valid experiences in my life to be shared. I'm not old enough for my voice to matter yet. And that's really shitty isn't it.
No this is coming from a couple of things I think. One being my own head since I tend to get down on myself as I go through mostly depressive bipolar cycles. The second being that at least to me my culture doesn't value a young voice. This is even more true because I am a part of the dreaded millennials. I don't think either of these things are more to blame but I think they feed into each other in my mind. And all of this culmulates into the imposter syndrome too. Its all one big mess.
I try to fight through it, but given my depressive bipolar cycles it can be really, really hard, sometimes impossible, sometimes I push through. Most often though I crumble because during my hypomanic phase I'll put a LOT on my plate. I'm gonna write a novel, a book of poetry, draw a series of illustrations/paintings, finish that 100 game that I'm half done with, start exersizing... You get the drift.
I've gotten better at this more recently after being able to get help for my illness medically, as well as being able to talk to someone so I can get a clearer perspective on the things around me. Pespective is the hardest thing to keep when your mind is being put into extremes.
Right now I am hypomanic. How do I know. Well for one I never write blog posts and here I am writing quite a long one. I binge watched a show the other day while playing a video game and had no regard to what time it was. I played some ddr the other day, something I also don't do on a regular basis. I'm not talking about hey I should exercise so I'm going to ease myself into this again. I mean I'm going to push as far as I can until I can't even really stand up and I'm gasping for breath. Now I didn't get to exhaust myself like I wanted because someone in the house wanted to take a nap, but I would've done it. And mainly the reason I wanted to was because I had to much energy, I was feeling too alive, if that makes sense. The days before that I had been waking up at 5-5:30am after going to sleep around 10 or 11. Now I'm all about being more productive but this is very out of the ordinary. When I am feeling normal I sleep nine hours. No more, no less. That is how much I sleep. If I sleep more or less for some reason its because something is wrong. Either I'm getting over a cold, I'm depressed, or I'm hypomanic.
I think I'm getting off track. A consequence of pushing myself too far with playing ddr is now my knees and legs ache and that was two days ago. I'm lucky I didn't hurt my knees more because sometimes the weather makes my knees hurt so much it'll wake me up in the middle of the night and its all I can do to not cry. So I just walk around the house trying to pop my knee since that seems to bring some relief sometimes.
Another unfortunate side effect is that I scratch at my face. I've done this since I had acne. Now there's a lot to unpack with this, parents yelling at me asking me why I don't care about myself when even washing my face everyday doesn't seem to help, the look on their face when I have a large red pimple on my face that I'm trying to ignore. I pick at it because in my mind at least that means its not there anymore. So I win? Well thats what scars are for I guess. More to the point it wasn't until recently that a part of why I scratched and picked at my face was anxiety. Part of it I think is control. This is something I can do. I beat the acne into submission. Well thats not really how it works and it just makes it worse. Which makes me feel bad, which leads me to scratch more, so on and so on.
Another aspect that I realized while reading books on mental illness and talking to my therapist was that scratching and picking at ance is also a form of self-harm. I was suprised to learn this but at the same time to me it made sense. There's the pain of the picking but that releases endophines into the brain, so the more you hurt the better you feel. Our brains are really fucked up. The messed up thing too is that if I wasn't having a bad breakout I would pick at my blackheads, which would make them worse, and so on and so on. Its a vicious cycle. But its something a lot of people have to try themselves to stop doing. Like even right now I want to scratch at my face. I'm not upset by anything, nothing stressful has happened, but my brain is stressed, its on high alert because of the hypomania, it wants to calm down. It knows one thing it can do to calm down. So instead of doing that I'm trying to keep my hands busy by doing this.
I guess its working. lol
Sorry that was a lot. All this because I wantd to announce that I was going to do the campnanowrimo. But it is related in a way because the subject of my writing is going to be my struggle with head stuff (as I like to call it). I don't know if I've always had bipolar or not (its still something that is still rarely diagnosed in kids), but I see its effects throughout my life.
Weird thing is too, some aspects of bipolar are encouraged. My obsessiveness about my acne was sometimes seen as me caring about my appearance and therefore myself. Its fucked up. My Hypomania written off as an overly cheerful personality or just a kid being a silly hyper kid.
Its touched every aspect of my life I think.
I'm getting tired.
I'm going to rest now.