It’s been a rough couple of months for me. It seems like almost every weekend has been marred by migraines and post-medication malaise. While I’m grateful for the medication taking of the harshest edge of the pain, whenever I have an episode I feel quite off for the several days that follow. And whenever this happens, I just don’t feel like doing the work necessary to move closer to my identified goals.
A few months ago I switched gears from aiming to be a primarily online entity to wanting to go outside and perform at local venues such as our beaches or poolside. But when I get a migraine, the last thing I want to do is get up out of bed to go outside. Some of the episodes I’ve suffered have been clearly because of being upright for longer than I should have – I tried to push the limit and paid the price. Other times the reason for the episodes are not as clear. A few days ago I slept for an unusually long time, and woke up with a migraine, with the following use of medication and sustained malaise.
I strongly disliked the entire process of creating and uploading individual songs to YouTube, and so I haven’t recorded anything new since April. Perhaps the reason I got burned out was because at that time I also created enough “shorts” content that I’m still able to post 2-3 of them a week. That pool is drying up though, so I should probably take some time to continue those efforts since they do seem to be the most effective method of growing the channel. Further, I’ve added at least 500 new songs to the “playable” list since April, so there’s a lot of new songs and new content that I could be making. I just don’t like doing it much, and when I feel sick and tired for the whole weekend, I just choose not to. I have to learn to be ok with proceeding at my own pace, or else I’ll just be making myself miserable.
On a bright note, I passed the 1000 songs playable mark! On the other hand, my voice teacher is getting much more on my case about “quality over quantity” and I fully agree, so I hopefully will be able to focus more going forward.
Speaking of misery, I’ve been operating under the assumption that if I just keep at it, I’ll gain more resilience and ability to handle my daily streams. Even after reducing the warm-up period by a half hour, I’m still finding myself mostly exhausted by the end of every stream. I usually don’t want to do anything except watch some anime or other drivel for several hours until dinner, and then I rarely feel like doing work after that. It’s hard to describe what my malaise is like, but I can typically feel the migraines coming on if I’m pushing myself too hard and have a brief opportunity to drop anything I’m doing and relax to avoid it. Several times I couldn’t even watch anime – the visual stimulus would just be too much. So I just listened to music or audiobooks.
Perhaps I’m just being lazy, since I don’t need to do any of this to meet my daily needs, but I really haven’t been able to find a way to get the body to perform the activities to reach the purported goals. The one time I did go to the beach in recent memory, I did avoid a migraine episode, but I was exhausted for several days to follow anyway. Without feeling in top shape, the idea of going out just seems like asking for trouble. I’ve been feeling overextended when even going to my voice lessons lately, which is odd because it seemed to be fine before. I’m not sure.
What is actually wrong with me precisely is still a mystery too. The insurance company denied my follow up procedure with the expert in California who helped me stop feeling sick all day every day no matter what and still holds hope that another operation could fix things. I think I talked about this a bit last time, but there is now a CSF Leak specialist team at Queens Medical Center, and they are in the process of reviewing my case. Well, more like in the process of gathering the pertinent medical records so that they can evaluate my case. Honestly, I hope that they don’t take on my case so I can be seen by the expert whose built his whole career around this issue. But, I have no money to ensure I can get what I want, so I just need to be grateful for whatever treatment I am afforded.
My Isekai Story
I have a story I want to tell that I think will fit in the Isekai Genre, and its starting to come along. I have a few chapters drafted now, and have been working on worldbuilding, though I still have a lot of ideas that need fleshing out. I’m currently a little stumped as to how to make the magic system I’m envisioning, but I’m hopeful it’ll come with time.
With a bit of extra energy over the weekend I some time getting refreshed with the Godot Game Engine which I’m hoping to use to first make a visual novel. The plan is that my first ukulele album will be a soundtrack for that experience. Ideally I’d like to make a full on video game in my world, but a lot of things will need to fall into place to make that a reality.
Work on the computer is hard for me in general. Editing videos requires fine motor control. Music notation software is clearly designed for people who are sitting at a desk with their instruments. Even just typing is a bit difficult, though its mostly the editing with a mouse to fix grammar and typos that gets me. Programming a video game or working with digital art seems like daunting tasks. Then again, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands, and can only sing and play uke for so long every day.
There are lots of ideas in my head, but then my body kind of does what it wants. And apparently the body wants to make my head feel like its going to explode pretty often. When I’m feeling ill, I really don’t want to work, and I spent at least 3 days out of each week last month not feeling great. So progress is slow. But steady. Steadily slow, at the very least.