>>4621 >first pic inb4 "why not both"? But sure, why not? I'm excited for Christmas because I finally have an excuse to let myself bake; I was mostly successful thank God in shedding a lot of the unwelcome fat the pandemic years slapped onto me which totally wasn't my own fault, but that meant not baking anything except the occasional loaf of bread. Don't know if I'll go so far as to let myself experiment with the hellhound creampie biscuits again but— >anon what You heard me. Christmas Day does mean lots of family stuff though, so that means taking down my sexy wolfgirl tapestry— >anon what I can have a sexy wolfgirl tapestry if I want! And I do want. But it's rude to force other people to see it, so it's getting moved to the bedroom with the rest of the sexy tapestries until Christmas is finished. Aside from that, I'm mostly just fighting the year-end urge to be a lazy little shit instead of doing all the things that would set me up for next year.

>>4621 Around here we thankfully have no indians so we stuff the turkey for Christmas instead of thanksgiving, and my mother in law, that I've been taken care of since her surgery a month ago, will be sharing dinner and teach me how to make her stuffing recipe. Was a rather stressful and tiresome month with the constant overseeing but at least I'm finally getting some praise.

>>4634 >my mother in law, that I've been taken care of since her surgery a month ago >at least I'm finally getting some praise Admirable, Anon. I hope she was as dutiful a patient as you were a carer. Mothers-in-law can be quite a handful.

Reluctant bump rather shitty holidays and I kinda feel not like talking about it but it might be cathartic to shitpost about it with fellow anonymous online fetishists.

>>4698 Go on then, Anon.

Not sure if this is really a girl issue or a human issue or what, but here goes. For the last few years I've been living in a three bedroom place with my best friend and a rando third. The third has changed a few times, and they were usually nice, but it very much felt like I was living with my bestie and also there was another person there. Last year, she finally moved in with her BF leaving me with the current rando, I decided to pick up her half of the rent because I didn't want to deal with two randos so it's just the two of us. What I have found over the last year is that without the pressure of having someone I care about observe me, my behavior has become ever more degenerate. I eat ice cream at 3 AM, I hardly ever work out, I order food for delivery far more than I should, I stay up until 5 or 6 in the morning, get an hour or two of sleep, then roll out of bed to go to work. After work, I just lie down on the couch and sleep for 3-4 hours, then get up and do it again. A few weeks ago, I just didn't sleep and drank 3 monsters over the course of the day to say going (I don't even drink coffee!). It used to be that when I did this degenerate shit my friend would give me crap for it, or at least check in on me. If I was up at 3 she would hear the TV on when she got up to pee and come check if I was ok, and You can bet she would hear me microwaving food during times I shouldn't be eating. Even without her encouraging me to care for myself, I found myself doing it because i didn't want her to worry. I'd brush my hair instead of throwing it into yet another messy bun, I would suggest we go for walks as an apartment, I would cook nutritious food for myself. Now it's like I'm just out of fucks to give. I wasn't like this in college, when I wanted my roommates to think I was a normal, functioning woman with cute throw pillows and scented candles. Now I'm like, "who cares what my roommate thinks? She doesn't matter to me, who is she going to tell? Neither of us leave the house anyway." It's like I had been living with my mother and I had outsourced all the emotional work related to taking care of myself to another person, except I have never done that before in my life as when I was living with my parents I pushed hard to be independent and wanted to be perceived by them as little as possible. I thought maybe I was just going through a phase or something, but it has been a whole year now and I'm worse than ever. I don't really know what to do about this. I tried talking to a therapist, and she said it sounds like I might have an anxiety issue but before dealing with it she wanted to rule out some sort of cancer of the adrenal system and said I should go to my PCP yo get some tests done. That promptly did not get done, because I can't bring myself to care about my health for more than 3 seconds and have therefore not made an appointment. Has anyone experienced anything like this at all? How do I start caring about myself again? Ideally without having to fall back on relying on another person to get me to care again.

>>5497 >she said it sounds like I might have an anxiety issue but before dealing with it she wanted to rule out some sort of cancer of the adrenal system This sentence didn't so much give me whiplash as it attempted my explosive decapitation. Disordered sleep, onset of depressive behavior sprinkled with executive dysfunction? Yeah sure, here's a ticket clipped for an adrenal workup and if it comes back within the requisite number of standard deviations then let's say it's, uh, anxiety. Whatever - both we and her insurer will have to give her the benefit of the doubt since she's the one in the chair. Alright so let's see: When you were motivated by shame, a need to escape, or some other extrinsic factor you were fine. Sounds like you've turned into a lump because you can't find any reason to care or the mechanism that permitted you to care has burned out. There are two dimensions to this, one physical and the other of meaning. The obvious physical stuff aside, could be you've got some kind of executive disorder or other neurochemical issue that you were getting around by jamming outside shame where intrinsic motivation should be, not to mention the general guide-rail stimulus that comes with working your way through the regimented goals of a university course. (Sounds like it wasn't all the way smooth after that, especially since you mention that your friend would catch you burning midnight oil regularly enough that it was something she'd worry about on your behalf.) Brain glitches aren't something to immediately blame, but it can be helpful to remember that it takes way more work to look after yourself when there's a slab of malfunctioning meat fizzing betwixt your ears. As for that side of things, the usual advice applies. Exercise, preferably progressive resistance training (no you won't get muscly like a guy would, you already know that very well) will absolutely help. Good nutrition will help. Sleep will especially, especially help, and even though getting away from a fucked sleep schedule when the caffeine cycle's got you in its grip is super hard, doing the other two things will help a lot. But the main question that you're asking here is the most important one: "Why should I care?" It isn't enough to flop your meatsack around the world, you've gotta have a reason for keeping that thing running. You've probably already figured out that the usual Instagram bio shit is a scam, so where's that leave you in a world that's figured out it's way easier to just show JPEGs (WEBPs? That cancer kind of fits the metaphor better) of goods meant to temporarily substitute for satisfying things instead of ponying up the things themselves? Physical factors aside, all the things you describe yourself doing might not seem to have much of a payoff - that's why you want to stop doing them - but in actual fact they produce that sweetest and most addictive of poisons: Incapability. >oh fuck please no motivational speech No speech. You're smart enough to know the thrust by now anyway. Find that thing that you need to do. Not immediate goals or self-care or whatever, but the thing that makes all that necessary as a means to an end. It'll probably scare the hell out of you, whatever it is, but you'll be constantly pulled toward it even as you try to run away. >so what gives you the right to flap your fingers about this Anon 'cause it happened to me too. Miserable work, fucked/interrupted sleep, bad diet, no exercise, practically zero motivation to fix any of the above because I was really just sneakily running myself down any way I could find so that I had an excuse to not be capable of anything. There was no sexy amazing autobiographical story to the turnaround, just me getting explosively angry and disgusted at myself. After that it was things anyone can learn: Seven Habits stuff, a diet overhaul, proper exercise that made me sore afterwards, and so on. I didn't like it very much but I liked the consequences of doing it even less. Take it a little at a time, but don't stop - it's the stopping that kills. The more I do, the sneakier and more cunning those backsliding demons get. The only way to overcome them is to fight them methodically and sensibly each and every day. There's something like that for you too, Anon, something more than "I can't let people I care about see me like this". Finding it is the most important thing you can do, at least next to the lifelong journey that finding it will put you on. In the meantime, do what you can to get the physical side of life under control, however many tries it takes. Even if it seems pointless now. It'll all turn out to have helped a lot in retrospect, trust me. Shotgun of a post that this is, I hope at least some of it helps.

>>5498 >but I liked the consequences of doing it even less Of not doing it. Time to take my own advice and sleep more, I guess.

>>5498 Thank you for taking the time to write all this Anon, I really appreciate you taking my 4am fever dream post seriously. >As for that side of things, the usual advice applies. All of this is good advice, I definitely need to be more physically active as I feel better in all ways when I am. If I can get over the hump it might make a positive feedback loop. >Find that thing that you need to do. Not immediate goals or self-care or whatever, but the thing that makes all that necessary as a means to an end. >There's something like that for you too, Anon, something more than "I can't let people I care about see me like this". >Finding it is the most important thing you can do, at least next to the lifelong journey that finding it will put you on. I guess this is my real problem. I don't have anything to live for? Don't get me wrong, I have no reason to die, but I already did all the things I wanted to with my life and i never had very lofty goals to begin with. I have lots of little goals, I want to get better at Splatoon but I'm not going to make my life about that. I want to clear more land for gardening so I can plant more food crops in my little space, but that's not a reason to push forward. I can hope that by taking better care of myself I can amend some of my messed up thinking and get to a place where I can find a purpose, but as is? I'm just living my life on cruise control, I want to maintain my standards of living and that's it really. I'm unsure if that's a moral failing on my part, but I'll definitely try to do more soul searching to see if anything is hiding under the mental rocks. Even if I find nothing, there's a part of me that is now embarrassed that I admitted to the internet that I'm living like a worthless blob and wants me to get my shit in order for that sake alone, so with luck I can at least plaster over the root problem for a little while longer. Thanks again for reading all this. I wish you the best of luck in keeping your backsliding demons in check, as well as in your pursuit of whatever that thing is you found that gave you purpose.

>>5500 This beautiful post number, and I cant even put spaces in the right place. Truly, doubles are wasted on the foolish.

>>5500 >I'll definitely try to do more soul searching to see if anything is hiding under the mental rocks. I found that the first part of the Seven Habits stuff provided a pretty decent method, which helps a lot. This sort of thing isn't something one can wholly think one's way out of, it's more a case of practice, and of having something to guide your practice. I don't think what you described yourself doing is a moral failing so much as a form of self-medication. Something's wrong, but you can't tell quite what, or what you should do about it, and so you do whatever you can to try and relieve it, even if that just numbs it for a time. In the physical sense, this might take the form of someone abusing weak stimulants to salve an underlying executive dysfunction. In the spiritual sense, someone might become a workaholic to try and exhaust themselves mentally in order to avoid insomnia caused by a crisis of meaning elsewhere in their lives, or overeat to salve persistent emotional distress from dysfunctional relationships. It's a fact that lots of people end up figuratively blowing themselves up to avoid what they should do. Some do it in a quick, sharp one-night bender, others take years. Some do it before they begin, others do it right on the threshold of their destination. Same result. I don't think this is wholly physical or mental, but something larger, and that's why it's important to recognize that you'll always meet this resistance even and especially if you're on the right track, and that the only way out is through it. Anyway, imagine where you were in life before you blobbed out as a kind of exploratory base camp - somewhere you strike out from and can return to while you scout, but not somewhere you're going to permanently stay once you want to move. The camp metaphor works in other ways. For example, spending time and effort improving it can help you, but if you spend too much time just getting better at being where you are then you're by definition not going forth. Seems to me that until now your friend was acting as a kind of beacon who helped you get back to camp. Think of her assistance, and of the structure and social guide-rails you had in university, as being a tutorial. But like anything with a tutorial, you eventually have to go and do it for real, and adapt to whatever twists and turns on the original material get thrown at you. What's happening right now is that you got a little lost - which is expected when you're exploring, there are no maps - so your next task is to return and recover. It's not directly finding that meaningful thing, but it is something you need to do to eventually find it. Put like that, isn't it exciting to know that you're turning for home, that you can be back where you were, and that getting there will set you up to go forth again?