Well, I’m here to write about my Life Plans again. To start, I’m referencing some entries I uploaded over the summer. I have this “flipbook” app, which I think sort of works? But I’m backing it up with the files converted to jpg. If anyone is dying for the links to the previous entries, you can find them here:
- Life Plan, version ??? – The Apostate Turtle (June 23, 2025) https://apostateturtle.com/?p=1850
- July 2025 Newsletter – The Apostate Turtle (July 29, 2025) https://apostateturtle.com/?p=1877
- August 2025 Newsletter (PART ONE) – The Apostate Turtle (August 29, 2025) https://apostateturtle.com/?p=1885
From June
From July
From August
I also made this list of ideas while I was in the hospital:
What’s Working, What’s Not
So, in good news, the chronic pain is going a lot better. I finally was able to articulate the severity of the problem. Which, I wasn’t able to clean my house or do basic tasks due to constant, severe left-sided chest pain. It wasn’t my heart, so everyone said it must be anxiety. But positive affirmations did not work and behavioral activation always failed. Turns out, it was GI. They suspect gastroparesis. But, being put on meds to help with that has helped the pain a lot.
The Ketamine worked great at first. Right around Thanksgiving, I had a bunch of horrible trauma-related dreams around HBM in Worcester, so SI spiked through the roof. Like, I almost went back to the emergency room. I felt like I had let everyone on my team down. It’s kind of back under control again. They asked what the trigger was and I didn’t really know. I think it’s mostly nightmares, and the isolation that comes with not having a car.
In other news, I’m back at work, but only part-time and I’m still on disability. The primary barrier to full-time employment is probably, once again, a car. Which, not being employed full-time is the primary barrier to most of my other goals. I’m working on getting funding for some of these bigger projects, but that’s taking a lot of time.
However, drinking water is probably going better than it ever has before in my life. Which is to say, not great, but the “15 mini reusable water bottles and a cute wooden tray” method definitely works better for me than anything else ever has.
As for The Depression Cure, I’m following a modified version of the week-to-week plan in the book. You’re not supposed to put it all into practice at once, or it won’t work. So, it said that I should find a pulse monitor, which I did. And I try to wake up in time to be able to sit on my meditation pillow for half an hour in the mornings and sit in my sun lamp and read a book written by my grandma. The book is really, really dense but super meaningful, and I think the sunlight helps as well. Getting onto a schedule is a trigger now because of the idiot therapist who dropped me over the issue, so I think I’m going to need to be working on that indirectly.
Trying to line up funding for major projects is a work in progress, as I mentioned.
I signed up for OkCupid again because it’s the only mainstream app that lets you specifically filter for other asexual people. I bit the bullet and went for the six-month plan, because obviously I’m going to have to be playing the long game here. Especially since the more popular apps like Hinge don’t let you filter based on orientation (which you’d think would be standard??) so I’m limited to OkCupid, which I think is slowly on its way out. If I had money, I could go to ace meetups or whatever, but that’s going to have to wait until I have a job, which has to wait until I have a car.
I’m trying to get into a partial hospital program specific to trauma, but it’s been impossible to get the referral, and apparently it takes at least a month after that to get in, so I’m not holding my breath. EMDR similarly is on hold (I think) until I can get a referral. I did the intake to volunteer at a local organization with kids, but I have to wait I guess until there’s an opening.
In other news, the DMH Clubhouse just isn’t working out, because the people there smell bad and chew with their mouths open, and my emotion from the beginning to the end of the day was raw, unbridled disgust. I also got kicked out of the DBT group, which the leader felt bad about because I only got kicked out for being in the hospital, and I was very dilligent about communicating everything. Apparently, if I call again in six months, I can get back on the waiting list. Like, I can’t get on the waiting list now, knowing that it will be years before a spot opens up. So, that was an epic fail, as we used to say.
Conclusion
Anyway, I wrote this all out because I thought if I sat down and wrote out this article, I would know what action steps I have to take immediately to get my life where I need it to be (ie, married with kids). But, I think that what I’m realizing here, is that I’m actually already doing all the things that I can be doing. I’m re-assessing my life plans regularly, I’m still kind of on the timeline that I established in 2022 (way before the entries above), and I’m working really hard every single day. Mostly everything I do in a day is intentional, except when I’m frozen in place because I have too many tasks and can’t possibly do everything. So, maybe the main thing I need to figure out is picking out just one task. I have so much trouble with this because I don’t know how to just pick just one. Like, I have so many books. How do I know which to read in any given moment?? Or what if I don’t even want to read, I want to try my hand at latch-hooking? But I can never do these projects because every second of the day I feel like I need to be working. I can’t pick just one task, but I sure as shooting can’t relax. I think that’s one thing that helped at the hospital, was if I hadn’t taken a break in a few days, they would demand that I put my work down and watch YouTube and eat a snack. I mean, the body doubling helped. The fact that everyone thought I was the bee’s knees helped. Pep talks helped. The fact that there were people who could, theoretically, be there if there were an emergency helped. (I’m always worried about emergencies, but I think that’s just because I was the oldest kid and I was “in charge” when we were unsupervised, which was basically always. But I really wasn’t old enough that I would have been able to reasonably handle an emergency.) Probably being forced to take a break helped a lot. Like, I played Sims 4 today and now I’m finally writing this entry. If I’d been in the hospital, they would have made me take a break weeks ago.
So, building community would be primary if I had a vehicle. But, as it stands, maybe the most important thing right now is to relax and try less hard.