trying to update this weekly so here's a life/project update :)

[serpentinemalign]

hello!

twitter has done something to the algorithm or i am just weak-willed, i'm not sure which. i've been glued to my feed all week, which has resulted in me being here a lot less. apologies!

it possibly can't be blamed on twitter but can instead be blamed on my being very exhausted and sad this week. work has been busy, and i've had lots of cries and sad epiphanies and therapy was hard this week too.

i am finally discussing my selfshipping and kinks with a therapist for the first time ever and it is extremely cathartic and good to have a professional reassure me they are absolutely fine and not a moral blemish on my character. but we are also probing into like... why and what purpose do they fill and what trauma and lack has led to these desires expressing themselves in this way and why i carry so much shame and feel the need to self-vivisect about them too. i'm being read for filth about why hugo is my fave which is funny in a way, him being an analyst too.

we spoke a little about meditation which was interesting because the non-horny side of my hypnosis feed this week has been all about the distinction between hypnosis and meditation and how... some not good ideologies may be behind people drawing a stark line between the two. i'd definitely like to read more into it. i've read takes that meditation has become commodified/westernised and that's become the mainstream understanding of meditation today (especially 'mindfulness' as a buzzword), at least in the west (i know that's very broad - i'd like to understand more of the nuances!). and i'd like to learn more about how that happened. i talked about how previous experiments with meditation would either put me in the good sexy trancey state where i wouldn't really be thinking of much at all, or it would make me viscerally uncomfortable because my inner monologue is just SO negative and scary and usually i am distracting myself to avoid that.

i think that from personal experience trance states can be meditative and there are commonalities between the two states, but the more that i practice my specific flavour of hypnotic subjecthood, the state i crave is more like wilful dissociation. there is a specific place i go in my head where i get to be not a person and disconnected from all my usual thought patterns. it feels amazing because while i know i will eventually have to go back to personhood, it is so freeing to temporarily not have to think or to feel anything at all really. it's just empty there, nothing but space and blank walls, waiting to be filled by words outside myself.

we are dealing with an ongoing House Problem (not an emergency or anything, just annoying!) and need to wait till monday to call the landlord to fix it, so till then we're just patching it up as best as we can. it has added to the load of chores, though (and the urgency with which they must be completed), which sucks, because i am very much an 'it can wait till tomorrow' type of person but this time it can't, we have to continually keep an eye on the problem and we've had to move a bunch of shit around and it's just always in the back of my mind and will be till it gets sorted. :(

i'm into week 2 and double digits of 'draw hugo every day' challenge. i still need to draw today's! i don't have anything in mind but want something quick and easy. maybe a more gestural hugo so i only need to put a few lines on the page. i am considering limiting to 15 mins per hugo or something, just to encourage me to also do other stuff, like use him more as the keys in the ignition rather than the sole project for days with limited energy. but then, it's also nice to pace myself so i can make it more of a learning experience, studying from refs or trying to draw stuff i normally wouldn't from imagination. here are the newest hugos:

i feel like you can detect the days that i was just SO fatigued that nothing was making sense to me. i am deeply enamoured with chibi hugo, however. i wanna get him in sticker form or print him on a mug or something.

the hugo shrine is nearly complete as well, but the last parts are the stickiest... firstly, transforming my current f/o page into more of a generalised 'shrines/gushing' page. i like to write about my silly little fellas so it would be nice to actually use it for that and shift to a more writing-focused page where characters without shrines have a little bit of space for gushing/explanation as to why they're here. i need to go through some of his pre-crisis stuff to make sure the pre-crisis information is accurate and also to grab DRIP from those issues, like when he wears a purple top hat and cape for no reason. i also have generally some comic arcs to reread for the 'other stories' page... and some to experience anew.

i haven't been reading much at all lately (another symptom of spending too long on twitter) but picked up nancy friday's 'my secret garden' again... it's super interesting to read. lots have changed, lots have stayed the same. i'm just sort of bouncing around books and sampling little pieces at a time, which kind of reflects everything i'm doing at the minute, both creatively and 'input'-wise. i don't mind in one sense, because it's a perpetual dopamine hit to do lots of small things that i like and not have to perpetually hammer at one thing. but it does make everything slow, which is annoying in its own way. it's kind of like, because currently at work i have one big project and everything else is just on the margins, all my craving for novelty is spilling into my hobbies which have become very disorganised and chaotic. this does make me a little frustrated, because i've had little time or motivation to work on bigger projects like graduated commitment, so that's something i'd like to do next month.

i'm also eyeing a submission deadline coming up soon, but i don't know which pseudonym i'm going to use for it. it feels exhausting switching between them and not really getting much momentum with my output, because i have spread myself quite literally thin. it also leave me in a kind of option paralysis about what content is permitted to go in the story, rather than just writing it and then selecting the most appropriate level of anonymity.