Another day of unnerving tension and restlessness. Today at the office I was struggling to concentrate and focus on programming work. I also had a zoom-meeting, which was much easier to handle than quiet desk work, even though I definitely an introvert and feel very awkward in social situations at times.

One thing that occurred to me that I kind of expected to lose motivation at some point because of how I feel. That’s what happens when I get depressed, but not this time. I was fully awake at all times, more energetic. But the constant tension in my body and mind seemed to start taking a toll on me.

While shopping, my body felt weak and when cycling home I needed to drive slower than usual.

I’ve had Anxiety the last two days, which is something I’ve never felt before, at least in this intensity. In hindsight, the coming changes in my life make it understandable to have such a reaction. But the last days were horrible, to be frank. I woke up feeling bad and unrested, and after a few hours a strong sense of tension showed up in my mind. I felt restless and anxious, most of the things I tried to do to distract me, made it even worse.

I ended up cycling on both days, which made me feel exhausted in a good (physical) way and also ended the anxious feeling for the day.

I’m glad I realized this early, even though it still hit me hard. I know the warning signs for my Depression pretty well, but for this I was caught off-guard.

So for now, here are things that helped me to deal with this situation:

  • Go for a cycle-trip. It helps me turn of my mind for a good while which is exactly what I needed.
  • Shower after coming back home. Even though I never shower cold, it feels good to wash off all those negative feelings, which is weird because it works for me.
  • Smell a strong taste. For me that was an essental oil which distracts my brain enough for a while.

With the realization what happened came a strong determination to follow through with everything. This determination will carry me through the coming time, I’m sure.

:)

Escaped from anxiety, found a beautiful sunset. Listening to Cory Doctorow’s “How to seize the means of computation”

Today I my phone started crashing when I tried to pull down the notification drawer. The whole screen would go dark for a brief moment while the system UI apparently restarted and I’d end up at the lock screen. Restarting the phone did not help. I pulled a logcat from the phone and found the following exception

java.lang.RuntimeException: Canvas: trying to draw too large(144480400bytes) bitmap.

Curiously, the crashes stopped when I closed all open apps.

I’m planning to change my job after almost 10 years in the same company. Today I started working on my CV and, naturally, spent a few hours setting up my workflow. I updated typst, installed mupdf as a light pdf-viewer and realtized my lack of basic linux knowledge when it comes to scripting. But I managed to build something that works just the way I want. First i start my editor and load the typst file. Then, I use entr to watch that file and compile it into a pdf when it changes. Finally I send a HUP signal to mupdf and tell it to reload the file.

ls cv.typ | entr -s 'typst compile cv.typ && pkill -HUP mupdf'

My good deed for the day: Rescued this little rascal from the salad bowl and put it back into the garden. 😊