Pixie's Chronicle: Week From Hell

It's only been a week and I'm already massively failing at one of my new year's resolutions. I think that has to be a new low, even for me.

As you may remember from last weeks Pixie's Chronicle, I made a new year's resolution to be more organised, which would hopefully lead to a more consistent upload schedule for my stories. But noooo, life decided it wasn't going to throw me a bone, and thus, it did everything it could to stop me from getting the latest chapter of Madness Within out.

I said in last week's entry that I would have the latest chapter out by Saturday, but as you may have noticed, the chapter didn't end up being released until Wednesday, four days after I said it would be. I really am sorry about that, especially if you feel like I keep messing you all around. I mean, the days I say I'm going to update are just estimates anyway, it doesn't take into account life throwing things at me that inevitably slow me down.

This was one of those times.

Saturday rolls around and I'm feeling rotten. I didn't end up getting much sleep as my insomnia seems to be coming back, likely brought on by stress like it often seems to be. Family drama continues on like it normally does, and no matter how much I try and stay out of it, I always end up dragged into it. You can cut toxic friends out of your life no problem, but cutting toxic family members out is near impossible, especially when you have to constantly hear about them through other family members. To get peace of mind, I would have to cut contact with everybody, and that's hardly fair to the few people who are actually half decent to me. That would essentially be me making them choose between me and whatever other person I'm unfortunately forced to share most of my DNA with.

So I constantly feel like I'm on the verge of passing out from high blood pressure because of how angry and anxious I've been over all these situations. Because I get myself so wound up over everything, it means I have difficulty falling and staying asleep. Thus, by Saturday, I had made myself ill. I had a terrible headache and felt like I hadn't slept in ten years. So there was no way I would be able to concentrate on finishing the chapter. I had managed to polish up my plan and that was about it.

Then Sunday arrives, and I'm still feeling pretty much the same, only this time, things were made worse by my neighbours and other people I live with again. I live in a house of early risers (which on a Sunday, I consider a crime against the universe). So by 6am, all I can hear is the banging of pots and pans, people stomping around, slamming doors, vacuuming, my neighbours shouting, the sound of cars racing each other up the road, and just uhhhhh. Noise in my neighbourhood has been getting progressively worse over these past few years.

I'd had enough. My eyes were sore, my head was pounding, and I was starting to feel like a zombie again. So the first thing I did when I got up was log onto my laptop and ordered myself some earplugs. Because I literally cannot take this anymore. It's getting to a point where it's severely affecting my health and concentration. I can't get any work done when I'm not getting any sleep. It's just humanly impossible. I normally hate the idea of earplugs because I'm very squeamish when it comes to anything to do with my face and head, and I always have visions that if I wear earplugs, they'll get stuck. But I'm just that desperate at this point. I've tried everything. I've tried going to bed earlier, sleeping with my head under my pillow, sleeping with my earphones in, but nothing works.

So yeah, getting some work done on Sunday certainly wasn't going to happen. I probably could have taken a nap, but I thought that if I could force myself to stay awake all day, then I would sleep deeper the next night, meaning that it would be a lot more difficult to wake me up super early the next morning.

Unfortunately that didn't quite work. I fell asleep a lot easier, but because my body is now used to being woken up at about 5-6am, it has now started naturally waking me up at that time, expecting loads of noise. All was quiet for about ten minutes, and then all the noise started, meaning I couldn't get back to sleep and wake up when I was supposed to. I tried to get some writing done that day, despite feeling tired as hell, but then I noticed that some jobs that I had my eye on had become available, so I had to drop everything and work on my applications. Sorry, but that just had to take priority. So fingers crossed that all goes well on that front. I tried my hardest to make myself stand out, so here's hoping I get lucky.

By the time I had finished all of that, it was way too late and I was far too exhausted to do anymore writing. It was nearly 9pm by this time, and I had only written the first 1200 words of the chapter out of the typical 5000 that I aim for. So I tried to force myself to go to bed early to try and make sure that I got plenty of sleep, just in case I got woken up super early again the next morning. Low and behold, I did, but I had at least managed to sleep decently, so I wasn't feeling too bad.

Or so I had thought.

The day started off pretty normal. I've been trying to force myself to eat breakfast in the morning, something that I normally skip because I'm an idiot. Don't skip breakfast people. They ain't lying when they say it's the most important meal of the day. So I thought starting to have porridge in the morning would be a good idea. Problem is, I've never made porridge before, and I'm not exactly skilled in the kitchen, so things were bound to go wrong. I thought about calling my mum, but then I thought no, I'm 21, I can't keep running to my mum for everything. I'm an adult now!

I ended up creating a monster...

As established, I'm not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. I ended up not putting enough milk in and too many oats, forgetting that the milk would be absorbed by the oats. The oats all swelled up and exploded out of the bowl, creating this weird looking thing. It looked like I had created Weetabix on steroids. If you're British, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It turned into this rock hard mass of huge oats that all got stuck to the bowl. So yeah, needless to say, my first attempt failed. I wish I had taken a picture to show you guys how much of mess it looked, but I was hungry and more focused on throwing that mess away and trying to make myself another batch. Luckily, I did a pretty okay job on the second attempt. Mainly because that time, I took the absorption of the milk into account.

I finally started doing my exercise that day, mainly jogging, yoga and muscle exercises. I weighed myself for the first time in forever and...yeesh...I didn't realise that I had let myself go quite that much. I mean, of course I'd noticed I'd put on a few pounds, especially since I have gone up two sizes in clothes within a year, but I had no idea just how bad it actually was. And considering how small I am, I should not weigh that much. So yeah, that was definitely something that gave me an extra bit of motivation to look after myself more. Curse you mental illness! Like I said last week, I used to have a great body, but when my anxiety disorder started to take over my life, I lost a lot of weight due to stress and probably not eating as much as I should. The only sizes that would fit me were kids sizes. I was nothing but skin and bone at one point.

Naturally, this meant that the people around me began to panic, thinking I was anorexic or something. So this made me panic and made me super self-conscious. I started forcing myself to eat loads, just to prove to people that I wasn't anorexic, and to make myself look more normal again. That ended up backfiring, because I ended up putting on way more weight than I wanted. This is another prime example of my weird stupidity. So now, I'm trying to find my happy medium.

After exercising, I was all pumped up, ready to write the next chapter. So there I was writing away, feeling pretty confident that I was finally going to finish the chapter when I got a message from my bank and decided to sort out what they needed me to sort out. I then remembered that there was an account that I needed to close, so I thought while I was on my account, I'd go ahead and do that. A few months ago, I had gone into visit the bank itself to do this, only for the guy who was serving me to be all weird with me, stare at my information for a few seconds while I stood there awkwardly, before telling me that I could just close the account online. I mean, that worked for me, it saved me making an appointment with someone.

However, it turns out I can't do that. So that guy had lied to me. Now I've got to go back and try and make an appointment again, which really stresses me out, and I hate dealing with official stuff. So I was already feeling pretty mad at this point because I'm someone who really hates being messed around. I then freaked out because an old boss of mine still hasn't answered any of my emails, and I really desperately need some crucial information off her. I have done everything to get in touch with her: email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you name it. Nada. And annoyingly, I don't have her number.

That for some reason then caused me to have a huge existential crisis. I ended up sitting there for around an hour, just thinking about my place in the world and in the universe. That then triggered a depression episode, and I started to feel like my life wasn't going anywhere, that I was never going to fulfill my dreams, I started regretting most of my life choices and began thinking what was the point to anything. I burst into tears and curled up into a little ball of stress, rocking backwards and forwards, further proving just how insane I am.

It took hours for my boyfriend to try and calm me down and help me see sense. I'm still not one hundred percent recovered from it, but I'm certainly feeling a lot better than I was in those moments. I just felt completely and utterly hopeless. It doesn't help that I really do feel like I'm at some giant crossroad in my life right now, and I'm sure that's how a lot of people who have just graduated university feel. It doesn't help that most of my friends have their lives super together right now. I have a friend who works in a lab! A lab! Why can't I be that cool?

I think I do really need to stop comparing myself to other people though. I think that's a huge part of my problem. I see that other people are doing well and it constantly makes me question where I'm going wrong in life. I know what I want out of life, but it's just the in-between parts that I'm feeling lost and confused over. What do I do in the meantime? How do I get to my end goal? Is there even a point to anything when we're barely even a spec clinging to a rock flying through space around a hot, giant ball of plasma that's orbiting a giant black hole. Gah! There I go again!

I get like this sometimes, and it's really annoying.

But I did manage to at least turn it into something productive. I did a painting that I felt like represented my relationship and struggle with mental illness. It was just a little something I splashed out onto paper, but I'm weirdly proud of it. It helped get a few things out of my system and reminded me that I really need to try and keep finding positive outlets.

My painting

I had a conversation with my boyfriend that got me thinking. He noted to me that I'm starting to treat a lot of my hobbies like chores. I'm forcing myself to do them, and not letting them come naturally to me like I should do, therefore they're not as fun and start to stress me out. And I was like, holy cow, he's right! So that's something I definitely need to work on. I need to learn to just let myself have fun and relax because I'm constantly tense about everything. In my attempt to be more organised and productive, I've obsessively turned everything into a chore. I need to try and find that balance. It gave me food for thought.

So overall I've been feeling a bit sorry for myself this week. But luckily I managed to pull through enough to finally finish chapter twenty-four of Madness Within, which you can read by clicking here. The chapter felt like it took forever to write, probably because I'm trying to get back into the swing of things. Not to mention, I once again had to split that chapter in half, so I was desperately trying to fill up as much space as I could. I still feel really bad over the super long wait, so I decided that I would do another update this week. So you guys can hopefully expect the next chapter either tomorrow or the day after if all goes well. That should hopefully allow me to get back on track of trying to update that story every Saturday. Fingers crossed anyway.

Speaking of Madness Within, I still can't believe how much attention that story gets! I'm so grateful to everyone who reads, leaves a review, follows or adds the story to their favourites. I logged on one day to do a routine check of stats and I just could not believe what I was seeing for Madness Within!

Views: 103,115  Favourites: 424  Alerts: 662

Thank you so much, guys! Words cannot express how grateful I am! I never in a million years thought that I would see statistics like this. Just...wow! I'm literally speechless. Madness Within has now become my most popular story of all time! And the story isn't even finished yet which just makes these numbers even more astonishing to me! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

But unfortunately, because of my stressful week and my mental breakdowns, I haven't been able to get much further with Immortal Bond. It's been constantly in my thoughts and I've been daydreaming about it, but unfortunately I haven't been able to write up anything like I had originally planned for this week. But hopefully if I don't let myself fall down that dark hole again, I should still be able to start work on it soon.

Regarding Immortal Bond, I also keep debating about whether or not to actually delete the old version of the story. Part of me wants to out of embarrassment over how bad it is, and the fact that it wasn't going anywhere, but at the same time, I know that people did like that story and would probably like to go back and read what's there. Because I know that's what I sometimes like to do with stories I love that have been abandoned. As sad as I am that they never got finished, I still love what's there, so it made me wonder if people felt the same about Immortal Bond. Plus, it might also be a good way for people to see if the story has in fact improved or not. I don't know. What do you guys think?

Chapter four of Destiny's Dance has now been cleaned up and re-posted onto FanFiction, and is also now available on AO3, which you can read by clicking here. Unfortunately, that chapter update ended up being a day late, as for some reason, I completely lost my sense of time this week. For some reason on Thursday, I thought it was Wednesday, and it wasn't until I was uploading the chapter that I realised it was a day late. However, I did luckily manage to get chapter eight of Madness Within up on time. The tidy version is now on FanFiction, and you can read the chapter on AO3 now by clicking here. I'm also hoping to try and post Ladybug's Lullaby onto AO3 at some point this weekend, so keep an eye out for that if you're interested.

It seems that the idea of me creating a Taurus Pixie Twitter account has garnered some mixed responses. The main two responses being that they would love to follow me and think it's a great idea while the other is people ranting about how they stay away from social media. So - umm - okay I guess? It was interesting to get you guys' take on social media, but my question wasn't about that, ahahaha. I mean, to be honest, I do agree with them for the most part. I'd love nothing more than to delete most of my social media, but I need it for the line of work I want to go into, and because it's the only way I can stay in touch with most of my friends since most of them are from other countries.

So at the moment, it looks like me getting a Twitter for you guys to follow is leaning more towards a possible yes. I'll be sure to keep you guys posted and let you know if I do create one. Because at the end of the day, regardless of everyone's opinion on social media, it's still an excellent way to get information out there quickly.

On the topic of social media, I have still banned myself from Tumblr. I briefly go on if someone tags me in something or messages me, and I also went on to experiment with posting links to my fan theories. That seemed to be successful, as I did notice a huge spike in views when I did that. Not to mention a few people liked the post itself, so I'll probably try that again in the future when I make my next Miraculous Ladybug post.

That should hopefully be released either next Monday on the 14th January or the Monday after, the 21st. It's a topic that I'm really quite passionate about within the Miraculous Ladybug fandom, so I hope that my post does it justice. I'm going to be talking about all of the hate that Marinette seems to get. I'm going to be examining and arguing against a lot of the reasons people have for hating her as a character. Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I'm also entitled to disagree with them. I wanted to create a healthy debate. So if that sounds like something that might interest you then keep your eyes open for that. 

Overall, I think it's safe to say I had an...interesting week. I'm definitely hoping that I have a better one next week. I mean, it wasn't all bad. It probably all felt a thousand times worse than it actually was because of how tired I am as things always feel worse when you're tired. I have been feeling a bit better today, despite once again not sleeping properly last night. I have been managing to stick to my exercise new year's resolution, so that's good. I still need to make a move towards starting the other ones. Though I guess with me doing that painting I kinda have.

But still, I hope next week comes with less stress and mental breakdowns. 

I hope that you all have a lovely week, and I'll see you all again soon.

Pixie out.