I’m in a bit of a weird place right now and I came across a Reddit post I really needed to see. If you reach a point where your hobbies are not bringing you joy, instead of looking for a new hobby to bring you joy (which is what I often do) recognize that this is a symptom of depression. Your hobby is fine, deal with the root cause.
I have been prone to mood swings and depression my whole life. The mood swings are exhausting and frustrating, but I’ve always been this way and I’ve come to accept this is just who I am and this is my personal challenge. I don’t want to talk about it much more right now, but on the plus side I will say I’ve finally reached the point where I begin to recognize the signs and can take steps to ground myself and keep it from going too far in either direction. In my case, exercise is an important part of self-care and I stopped exercising when I got the crud, so I made a point to get back into running and immediately saw some improvements.
The idea of Neocities as a mechanism for self-care has been percolating for a while, but recently paeneultima mentioned blogging on their site as part of daily mindfulness techniques. And of course, the lovely softheartclinic pops into my mind from time to time.
I have utilitarian tendencies, so even with this personal space I sometimes feel a need for the content to be “useful.” I have gotten much better about feeling like my creative product should be useful or consumable to others and I am happy to make content for myself, which I think is an important step, but now I’m trying to embrace the idea that things I make for myself don’t need to be useful, they can simply be things I enjoy. I’m going to start looking at this site as an ongoing self-care project. When I was on social media I would usually have a tag for posts that would cheer me up when I was down. I need to implement something like that here.