i stopped covid precautions for my mental health xoxo

— too many people

for me, taking covid seriously again has been, on balance, positive for my mental health

i don’t mean the preventative reasons (although they’re important too!). i mean that the act of taking precautions has felt like it’s rewired part of my being

every time i put on a mask, keep a mask on, open a window, move an event outside, monitor the air quality, stay home with…

okay so i’d been avoiding the merlin app that other people had recommended because i thought it was american only. apparently that’s not true and here’s the areas it covers.

it’s pretty neat! the other day i heard a new bird in the park and used the sound id feature and found out it was probably a chiffchaff!

the app’s not perfect, for example it doesn’t have good pictures of black headed gulls in their winter coat (where they…

• birds! birds! birds!

one thing i liked about reading the dao de jing is the opposites. i mean i knew that coming in, all the yin-yang stuff, but there’s something i liked about the particular way it’s executed

for example,

Because beauty is acknowledged by all as beautiful, ugliness springs into being.
Because goodness is recognized by all as good, evil has meaning.
Presence and absence give birth to each other; difficult and easy complete each other; long and short complement each other;…

i love all the feeds i follow. i keep adding more, as i click through and wander about and find new ones

sometimes i wander off and don’t check my feeds for a while. part of me feels bad about that, although i’ve been working to expand the part of me that accepts that that’s just the kind of person i am, and also figure out what that looks like in practice

---

feedsweeper

feedsweeper is a tool for the RSS…

El. Rond Hubbard

• this goes through my head every time his name is used
• context: i've been listening to the fellowship of the ring
• whoops i forgot to mention that in the nowpdate

the left pair

the left pair was made first. it’s the rye worsted by tin can knits. i chose this pattern mostly because they had a nice diagram for the construction, simple set sizes^[1], and used thicker yarn^[2]. i decided to make the cuff and heel and toes a different colour because i felt like it. that ended up being a kinda interesting decision because the heel looks weirdly tall and narrow when the socks…

realising that one of the reasons it’s hard for me to post is that i have a lot of half thoughts. somehow i have more drafts than posts on here. i get an idea, and then the idea prompts some questions like what do i do with this idea? or is there a solution?, but finding a response to those questions is sometimes hard and somehow there’s always a next question

the next question here is what do i…

i’m proud of myself :)

not necessarily for the physical end products (although like hell yeah! i’ve got some cosy socks!) but because i had to do a bunch of emotional work on the way. like,

• getting comfortable spending money on myself for fun things (turns out i have to relearn this lesson every time my financial situation changes)
• learning how i like to learn (focusing on a part until i understand it, doing the same thing multiple times, giving…

related to the previous post: the thing about advice is that you have to learn how to use advice

a non-exhaustive list of things that got in my way:

• treating basically everything as advice even though sometimes it’s just like, someone talking about their own experiences and they’re not really thinking about whether or not it would apply to someone else (nor should they have to)
• not knowing how to handle when advice from someone i trust doesn’t work…

occasionally i come across the advice “do it scared” and “what’s the worst that could happen?” and “anxiety can’t kill you”. many times from strangers or people who did not care to know me

it was a real eye-opener the first time someone said it in a way that wasn’t condescending. they were genuinely interested in my struggles and offered it as advice that worked for them and something meaningful they wanted to share with me

i think the implication…