Discover Top Posts Tagged with #happylog

My right eye’s been twitching involuntarily lately. Even in times of freedom, relaxation, during calm and happy moments. I need to meditate more, I’ve realized, and I should check the happy things from previous years.

This week 3 years ago, I was returning from a Saaremaa road trip, met a friend from OKC in Killing-Nemo, laughed and had fun, made stir-fry and got defenestrated. Then I tried going back to Tallinn through Pärnu , missed all the buses, texted my girlfriend who packed up in a minute and got the last bus to Pärnu, and we got a big hostel room for ourselves. Exactly 3 years ago today, I was supposedly “fighting depression and going through my to-do list”, but the following day, Friday, I had fun on CS meeting, and “met Saara after a long time (5th time!)”, as the happylog states.

This week 2 years ago, I was living in Stockholm briefly, but at the time I was already organizing a pancake party for coworkers. Ten people showed up, we ended up sitting on the kitchen floor, drinking ungodly combinations of whiskey, 80% vodka, 40% beer, cider (and happily avoiding Salmiakki). For me, everything ended well, but one of the coworkers slept in our staircase, and came back at 7am, slept on a couch and had a long shower.

I found a woman on OKC, correctly guessed she’s an INFP just from one photo, and started talking. At that time I was also emailing with another INFP friend who was stressed out from school then as she is now. I had some realizations after talking to one former girlfriend about how her boyfriend treats her, how she doesn’t like to be called his girlfriend, and along that I understood some of the mistakes I made when we dated. In between I took walks in Hagaparken, got compliments for my blue hair, and ordered Adventure Time Munchkin.

A year ago, I got my 27” 4k screen, was playing Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and invited aforementioned INFP friend and her now-boyfriend for hanging out, vodka, and her Australia trip pictures. Which she brought on a miniscule USB drive, so all the pictures were resized to something disgusting like 1024px. The next day, I met up with Liisbet, had Thai-style vegetable stir-fry, and forced her to play The Wolf Among Us for a little while.

Please remind me to slap myself around if I ever start complaining I have an ordinary life.

#personal #happylog #my life is amazing

Things that made me happy - December 2013 - personal growth

It's hard to pin-point what's the best thing that happened to me in December in regards to personal development, but two things that made the biggest difference were 12 Stabilo pens and a book called The Last Best Cure (TLBC).

PENS

It's unusual how much pleasure I got from having those "88" pens. Really, just having them. I get excited with stationery. Always have. I guess for me it represents creativity, possibilities, doing what I'm relatively good at.

I've started carrying these to bed with me every night, along with a game design notebook. And it worked. If I wouldn't sleep immediately, I would take it and scratch ideas. And then during the day I'd take all the colors and write different aspects of something in different colors. And then I'd write Thought Records in another, just because it was so pleasing to see nice colors come from my hand. I don't like advocating "you first need tools to get creative", mostly because it's absolutely not true, but these simple, affordable pens made some difference for me (see "priorities" further).

The Last Best Cure

This is a book I would recommend to everyone. And I really mean everyone. The writer is a science journalist, so 1. she knows how to explain things in a simple, yet accurate way; 2. she does her research 3. she had a personal stake in this (poor health), so she did research this 4. it's also a personal story, so it's not just boring facts and numbers disconnected from reality.

The book is basically about her recovery from severe autoimmune problems. After western medicine has failed to solve much, her doctor gave her 1 year to trial a different approach - mindfullness, talk therapy, meditation, yoga and acupuncture. And wait, before you go "oh fuck, more of this superstitious bullshit", trust me - she back every single one of those with plenty of research.

She explains a few important concepts - gene methylation, which means that you can turn on and off some of your genes throughout your life (for both good and bad). She explain how having shit life messes up your immune system and causes rashes, eczema, irritable bowels, all kinds of pains and inflammation and anxieties. She also describes simple ways to fight it. Ultimately, your brain has much more healing power than you give it credit for.

Mindfullness & Xanax

I've been practicing mindfullness this month - trying more to focus on here&now than just overthinking randomly. It has paid off. For the first month in FOREVER, I had taken 0 Xanax. I was using it only rarely even before, but it's a nice start.

Also, thanks to doing CBT Thought Records now and then, I learned a bunch of things about myself and handled some mood swings better than before.

No facebook for a while

One of the best things I've done was closing down my facebook after my first December pancake party. My friends complained that I'm hard to reach, yes, but the payoff was tremendous. The third week I wasn't aware that fb exists anymore. I just did my stuff. Hobbies. Games. Friends. Deep conversations. Anything.

What was a bit surprising was that I had less social anxiety. It was just so simple. You go to people and talk to them. I know a lot of you are struggling with anxieties and I know it's never as simple as snapping your fingers and solving the world, but if you actually have enough opportunities to see people every day (e.g. you don't stay home all day), then facebook just gets in the way.

I'd like to admit that Tumblr was still an issue, and with the ~70 notes I received on some weeks, it was all too easy to look for reaffirmation here instead of fighting my abandonment issues on my own.

Priorities / game development

Choosing your priorities and sticking to them makes all the difference in life. That is, some people have easier time finding motivation in life than others. I don't, not usually. Not unless I'm hypomanic, or in love.

So for me, trying to stay motivated means hard work. It's recursive. Motivation make you work hard; hard work keeps you motivated as you see the progress and feel the difference you can make. I waited my whole life to start from the end of being motivated; now I see the problem with this and am trying to start from hard work. And it works.

However, to get to hard work, first you need to have priorities. I will talk about my priority management in a separate post, but let's say I've just decided for one project. If something has priority, you give it time and preference over other activities. Which is where absence of facebook factors in - it's hard to ignore friends when they're constantly popping up on IMs. It's hard to say "I'd rather work than talk to my friends", because that sounds so one-sided. I still spend more time on friends than on projects. But I need to learn to change this if I want to turn my projects into a full-time job eventually. In that case, talking to your friends is like quitting your job.

So, again. Less friends, more hard work. Declining invitations (there's always more parties in Tallinn), avoiding chats, less drinking (actually none), less CS parties... and more "getting up and doing some small small piece of work" attitude.

But seriously. Those Stabilo pens. Aaaaah. So good.