So Things Haven't Been Too Great

[Ranger] Howdy all.

We haven't made an official public progress report entry that was actually posted shortly after it was written in eons. So far this blog has made me really happy and I bet I have only discovered the tip of the iceberg in my ability to customize things and add what I want to it. I don't see much point in badly summing up the last few years, so instead I'll just vaguely go over what happened since December.

December through February was a rough time for us. We just barely made it through finals after an exhausting and nerve wracking semester. Gray learned something that flipped his world upside down and grieved about it for at least a month or so since. It's pretty much an open secret for what that was, but we don't like the idea of posting that explicitly on our blog just yet. I remember for about a week or two, Gray was scared and hid in the back.

As for myself, I haven't been the happiest either. I struggled a lot with stress, and after leaving Tulpa.info, taking a stress break has been hard. Our roles of being the overcompensating host flipped really quickly and Gray took the wheel while I hid from the back for like a couple weeks or so. I spent more time in other places than usual, but it only confirmed what I already knew- these other spaces I knew about were not a great fit for me. I felt better once I reopened the cBox, and it made my headmates happy to have their own little place to go to.

Things were fairly precarious system wise too unfortunately. Things were tense enough we seriously considered the possibility of our other headmates fronting as temporary hosts. Luckily, we were able to dodge that bullet. However, the idea of our other headmates having more opportunities to switch in has been on our mind. We haven't made much progress on it simply because we hate the idea of forcing our headmates to switch, especially in a situation they won't feel comfortable in.

Given our mental health problems, Gray and I decided the best course of action would be to not go to school this spring semester. This has been good and ultimately necessary to focus on our therapy work and general life stuff. However, we have also struggled with sitting around and not doing much. While we have a few things we want to work on, we have struggled with feeling mostly aimless and demotivated. We want a job, but we don't know if we should get another one if we're going to have the same issues that lead us to getting stressed out again. We're seriously considering the possibility of taking an independent or freelancing route too. However, there's also the problem of unresolved mental health problems being connected to job stuff too. We're in the process of getting job counseling from a rehabilitation center so we can get more insight on what to do, but this process has been really slow.

By mid February things started to improve. While things aren't great, they're not completely terrible either. Gray is motivated to write code from time to time and work on Collatz stuff while I am slowly gaining back my motivation to practice tulpamancy in general. Our other headmates didn't get tons of time, we mostly focused on Dream to make sure his only interaction with us wasn't just doing therapy stuff. He chooses to opt-in to participate in our therapy work every time, but he needs time with us when we're not stressed or needy.

And then around the beginning of March, Gray's father got Covid and brought it home. Home quarantine stuff disrupted our schedule and made us more demotivated to exist as a healthy human than usual. Gray's brother getting sick stressed Gray out a lot, but after his fever went down things seem okay.

Gray and I are growing tired of the sluggish pace, I'm sure we'll figure out something eventually. At the very least, we are making progress with our therapy work.

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System News and Stats

• Our system is down to 11 now. Me, Blue, Fhern, Exabier, Evergreen, Gray, Ian, Dream, Moltosha, Ryan, and Adriel.
• Fhern's two parts are Fernardo and Hope.
• Ian's two parts are Duck and Bune
• Adriel's three parts are Chrome, Gerodious, and Tom
• A couple of our headmates got to switch for the first time!
• Blue switched in on October 8th, 2022
• Ryan switched in on January 4th, 2023
• Dream switched in a couple times, but for some troubling reasons
• We have some new art, but there's not tons of it or anything super exciting.
• Our wonderland is not in good shape. Given mental health stuff, we struggle with persistent intrusive thoughts and headaches. What little wonderlanding we have done has been limted.
• While talking to Gray, I did make an important realization about why it's difficult for us to talk to each other. I need more time to look into this however.