Wow imagine a happy positive Theia update post for once
The new semester started this week and I am...doing okay. This is my last full semester (I need about six more credits to graduate after this thanks to the university fucking me over) and I'm taking six classes right now. Most of them are just to fulfill my Upper Level Electives requirement (excepting Human Genetics for non-majors, since the school requires that everyone take science credits), which means I got to pick out some really cool classes that I'm excited about taking, like Data Science, Data Analytics for Cybersecurity, and Markup and Scripting Languages. The workload is pretty intense, I can't lie, and I can tell I'll have a lot less time for Smogon this semester, as I'm already spending 12-14 hour days on campus doing work, but that's okay. Looking to the future is a little stressful since graduation is so near, but I'm hopeful I can find a decent job somewhere.
I have taken up going to the gym, with mixed results. Going to Pilates with 30 other girls who are all pretty and athletic is a little daunting, especially when I can't do things as easily as they can. On the other hand, kickboxing has turned out to be a lot of fun, and I even (accidentally) made friends with some girls at kickboxing who recognized me from Pilates the night before.
Hand in hand with that, I mentioned that I've been struggling with eating issues and depression in my last post. After like a year of trying, my therapist and I finally have found a good combination of meds that seems to work for me. While I'm not "normal" yet, I have been eating with more regularity as of late. I've taken up meal prepping again, a habit I ended up abandoning during a particularly low point, so I bring lunch with me to campus and almost always eat at least once per day, which is a pretty drastic improvement.
As great as meds are, I really owe most of my improvement to the people I've been surrounding myself with lately. Back in September, I created a server for people to help out with tournament coverage articles and it kind of sort of accidentally also became a friend server. It's been a really great thing for me after sort of drifting in and out of friend groups for a while, to just create my own and invite people I enjoy spending time with. Some people joined just for aforementioned article writing and ended up staying and becoming friends too, which has been wonderful. Everyone there is so supportive not just of me, but of each other, and it's a very positive environment where we do normal friend things like weekly movie nights and it's nice to have a group of friends outside of people I staff with, where a lot of our interactions are colored by some bullshit or another happening on the site. I have friends share cooking and cat pictures with, friends to teambuild with, friends to just chat about dumb shit with, and I know that sounds very simple to a lot of people but it's a huge thing for me. It's helped me shift my mindset a lot away from being so hyperfocused on what other people think of me and instead just enjoy being here with people I like being around and do the things I want to do.
Of course, things are far from perfect and I am far from better. I've been this way for a long time and there's a lot of damage to undo. There will certainly be low points and setbacks and falling back into old bad habits, because that's just how it works. But for the first time in a long time, things are starting to look up and getting better is starting to look possible.