#I'd managed to avoid getting sick all semester too

[tacoma-narrows]

Y'know what's fun? Feeling like you're getting sick as you're heading into finals week

[hannaswritingblog]

Blog update! (since I feel like I owe you one) - as of 15/02/22 (late evening/early night)

If you prefer to have it short, here you go:

I promised to write more during my university break and didn't do that. I'm very, very sorry, especially to the people who requested fics recently. You could be hearing this a lot and I didn't want to be another person to say this, but I've been going through things recently and on top of everything I'm currently sick. But! today I managed to work on some things and I will most likely be able to post at least (some of) the requests over the next couple of days.

I also plan to keep requests for ficlets and oneshots open for a longer while + I hope to update my fandoms soon (maybe even this week), but I'll make another update about this, especially since this is mainly a heads-up about the upcoming posts.

If you don't mind going through my rant, see below the cut:

Hey! I'm happy to see you in a rant part of this post.

I went on a break at university over two weeks ago and as I announced in this update, I hoped to write more during this time. Yeah, you guessed it - I didn't write more. As a matter of fact, maybe I wrote less in the last two weeks than I did in some periods before my break, even with university work. It's not that I wasn't doing anything with my life, it just happened not to be writing.

One thing that kept me from writing definitely was struggling with that one uni thing that stayed with me after the semester ended, which is my thesis. At first I was paralyzed with the idea of even starting it (which I've been struggling with since October) and then I stressed over changing the subject of the thesis around 4 months before I'm supposed to have it finished. I'm a bit more calm about this now since my new subject got approved and it's something that feels much better in terms of academic writings, so even though I took some time from myself, I'm more optimistic about the case now.

Another thing is that, as I already mentioned, I'm currently sick and unfortunately, it’s now confirmed that I have covid. Ironically, the info helped me to let go of some stress. I'm the last person in my immediate family (people I live with or meet frequently) to display symptoms and then test positive, so we kind of expected I'd contract it too. We're the (un)lucky ones who made a choice to get vaccinated and got sick anyway, but I seem to have the worst symptoms and it's not worse than bad cases of flu I went through as a child/teenager. It's definitely a huge relief to see everyone else is doing better now and that we avoided the worst (whether you believe it's thanks to the vaccination or not is up to you, I mean it, but for me it's comforting to think that I did everything in my power to protect myself and my loved ones and that maybe it paid off one way or another). It's also good for me that I'm sick now and it didn't start, like, next Saturday, because hopefully I'll be well by the weekend and I'll be able to attend the first classes of the new semester next week.

With all of that said, despite my sickness things are starting to look up. I am finally getting the requests ready and I hope to have them posted this week, maybe even all of them. I'm not sure how the ficlet will go since, as I've been stressing it, it takes longer to finish those and I haven't properly started yet, but maybe it'll end up well.

As I mentioned, I might make another update later this week about the requests being open and changes in fandoms, but we'll get to it later. :) Thank you for reading, and stay safe!

[my-autistic-things]

Going off the "doing something calming before hand", you could be going through major sensory overload/a burnout. My sensory issues get really really bad when I've been extensively overwhelmed for multiple days at a time without a true break to recover. I can manage a whole school/work week fine if the weekend is spent doing nothing/sleeping/resting. Look at what's going on in your life; are you under more stress then usual? Is it the end of the school semester? Did you just start a new hobby that you love but it adds less time in the day so you don't get as much rest? Anything taking away from "recovery time" stresses my brain out, and I'd bet it's stressing your brain out too. Try taking a short vacation from life, like allowing yourself to sleep as much as humanly possible for a couple days. Call into work sick if you can for 1-2 days. Only attend your classes (if it's college and you don't get excused absences) and immediately go home. Literally do nothing all day (or only 100% fun and relaxing stuff). Watch Netflix all day and don't talk to too many people. Avoid all the Bad textures for a couple days.

After that, you might have recovered enough to deal with the Bad textures. Ofc, if possible, try to eliminate as much of the sensory issues as possible in your life, but if you can't, find ways to cope so your body can deal with them. Stimming with a super Good texture throughout the day might help too. Ya know those fluff ball/(faux!) rabbit fur keychains? If you like those, playing with that all day might help your sensory system chill enough to touch bad textures later.

Hey so this might be stepping over some boundaries because I’m not autistic but are there any autistic people out there who can give me some advice about dealing with sensory issues regarding clothing? I am ND(ADHD, bi-polar, anxiety) so I don’t think it’s weird that certain textures and tastes really bother me, and it’s never been too much of an issue before because I could just avoid yogurt and never touch cotton balls, but these days it seems like my aversion to cotton shirts and shoelaces has gotten worse and worse and now I’m having issues even touching my shoelaces and wearing like half my clothes. I don’t really have the time or the money to throw out half my wardrobe and replace all my shoelaces so are there any coping mechanisms for this kind of thing? Any advice, from anyone, would be extremely welcome.