Princess Diaries ੈ♡₊˚•.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ ꒰ঌ Currently... ໒꒱ ⊹ ࣪ ˖

Mood: Thoughtful

Weather: Sunny

Current Song on Repeat: "That's So True" by Gracie Abrams

Reading: Mozart : the reign of love by Jan Swafford

Watching: Gilmore Girls Season 3

Playing: Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Drinking: Alani Nu Juicy Peach Energy Drink

Perfume: Yara (Pink Bottle) by Lattafa

One Thing I'm Grateful For: Vitamin D Fruit Gummies

It's been a minute since I've written a "life update" style post for my blog, but it has been for good reason. As I previously mentioned in the introduction of my last media roundup, finals for the spring semester came around quite quickly, and then I immediately started travelling internationally. I visited Dubai and Abu Dahbi in the UAE, various cities in India, and then Singapore. I don't really plan to expand upon my experiences abroad right now in this post itself, because I'd like to dedicate seperate blog posts about each of the places I've visited where I can talk about them in detail, so please look forward to that sometime in December!

The other reason why writing blog posts, doing website updates, or really doing anything that isn't just lying in bed and sleeping has been difficult is my relatively recent thyroid disease revelation. I'm completely okay, and it's nothing actualy life threatening, but the relief I felt when I received the blood test results that confirmed it cannot be understated. From my memory, I've been chronically fatigued since I was 12 years old, which also happens to be the age that my mental health issues started. For a very long time, I've always assumed that my fatigue was just a symptom of my depression, and to be fair, it probably partially was! I wrote about it a bit in a post back in January, but I feel as though my depression and major mental health issues started going into remission after almost an entire decade in 2024, but I was still just always...tired. Although I wasn't living with an overwhelming sense of dread and fear anymore, I still wasn't able to get out of bed a lot of the time to do the things I wanted to do. I used to get scolded by my parents for how much time I spent laying down, and for YEARS I've been making jokes about how my useless secret power is my ability to fall asleep whenever and wherever regardless of how much caffeine I had to drink. Back in early 2023, I used drink the 30-ounce Panera charged lemonades and then proceed to fall asleep soon after! I always knew that this wasn't necessarily something normal, but I honestly just assumed that I was being lazy. In college, I feel like it's really normal to hear people talk about how little sleep they received or about how tired they were, so I just never gave the underlying reason for my exhaustion a second thought. It wasn't really until I started spending an extended amount of time around my parents while travelling that they realized that something was seriously wrong. I think watching me sleep for almost 15 hours straight without waking naturally was the final straw for them. I ended up getting my blood drawn and perscribed the appropriate medication. It's been almost three months since then, and I've....actually been starting to feel better! Things are not perfect of course, and to be honest I've still been adjusting to my new normal. My biggest health related goal right now is to learn how to discern between the need to actually take a power nap to make up for a lower quality of sleep I might've gotten the night before, or just a naturally dip in energy in the middle of the day that a nap will actually make worse.

The biggest thing that I've gained from treatment is my brain functioning again. Since the age of 12, I've felt my ability to think and process information slowly and steadily decline, but again, I just thought it was a matter of me being lazy and depressed rather than something with a physical cause. I just remember life feeling really foggy all the time, and I used to have a lot of trouble retaining and processing things. Now that this isn't really as big of a problem anymore, I've really felt my spark to start learning again come back, and it's been great! I've found myself actually being able to concentrate on things like reading and taking notes now, something that I haven't really been able to do in a long time. I think that the main reason why this didn't really cause me too many problems during undergrad is because so much of that experience for me was online during the peak of the pandemic. With classes being mostly online, a lot of things were open note with flexible deadlines so although I struggled at times, I was still able to get things done and graduate with minimal academic issues. With my capacity to read and focus on other things coming back, I've found myself less inclined to want to watch things anymore. I feel like part of the reason why my Youtube watching obsession started was because it took minimal effort to do. With a few clicks, I was able to have on a 2 hour long essay about something I vaguely interested in while I closed my eyes and laid in bed. However, because I actually have the energy to do more now, I don't really feel satisfied receiving information in this way anymore. Everytime I try to watch something I'm not happy just sitting down to watch it. I start to feel the urge to multitask which results in me doing neither task truly well: I've neither absorbed what the video was talking about, or I was unable to complete the physical task in front of me meaningfully because of the interference from what I was watching. Again, I'm still adjusting to this new normal, but I'm trying to embrace it. A lot of the time, I still feel the need to put on something in the background so that I'm not sitting in complete silence all of the time while focusing on other things, so unfourtunately I've managed to become my own worst enemy: a fan of classical music (LOL). Teenage me would be horrified (I found classical and slow music to be borderline unlistenable, I mostly listened to music that could keep me awake such as hyperpop and glitchcore), but I'm doing my best to embrace my changes in taste as they come. Another thing that I wrote about in the past was how I found it hard to accept changes both externally and internally, but I think that because I'm able to think more clearly it's not as hard to work through as it once was.

Overall, I've just been doing a lot of self work beyond the web to try to understand who I am as a person beyond my illnesses, both mental and physical. I honestly don't see myself creating or updating my main site in a visible way for the time being. I've been working on a slightly new main site structure (more of a Sanguine Royal v2.5 with better site organization rather than a v3 honestly) and rather than rush it, I want to take my time and plan it out properly before coding and launching it. I still plan on interacting with other sites and small communities I'm a part of as well as hopefully come back to blog a bit more regularly though! I've already been chipping away at my Q3 Media Roundup bit by bit. All in all, life feels really good right now. I feel like I'm returning back to myself.

♡