🍑🌙 | spooky seasonings

spooky seasonings

OK so maybe I’m not as good as being prompt on these things as I’d like. idk. I just haven’t really felt very inspired this past year as far as stuff to write about.

That being said, I’ve been in therapy for the better part of the last two months or so, and it’s going really well!

Gaming, a huge part of my identity for the better part of the past half-decade or so suddenly, about midway through this past spring, stopped being enjoyable for me. I was trying out a bunch of different games and trying to figure out what had happened to the ‘magic.’

I’m not sure how many of you have ever experienced a sudden loss of interest in things you used to enjoy, but I’ve lived long enough to know that when that sort of thing happens, it’s a warning sign of worse things to come. anhedonia is a motherfucker, and for me personally, a precursor to a pretty bad depressive spell, and that’s where I’ve found myself this past year.

It makes sense, I guess, I’ve been moving on from things that used to really resonate with me and rekindling interest in old hobbies that I used to enjoy as a child but got ridiculed for a lot, and that dredged up a bunch of traumatic memories and I got depressed. you know how it goes, lol.

but anyway, I got lucky and got back into the local university’s therapy program and landed my first therapist who wasn’t a woman, and while I was pretty apprehensive about this at first, I’ve really come around to liking this person’s approach to things, and they’ve helped me a lot!!

Suddenly, I could enjoy things again, because we were tackling these unpleasant memories head-on and for the second time ever in therapy (the other time being my therapist before this one), I felt like I was actually changing as a person, on like, a cellular level.

at last week’s session, we talked about how my perspective on myself had changed. due to a lot of things going on in my life up until this point, I had been haunted by the words of a formerly close friend that I had to cut contact with last year, that I had “lived away from [my] parents for longer than [I]’d lived with them at this point…why don’t [I] just get over it? When will enough be enough?” and I had started to berate myself internally, thinking things like “oh, I’ll never get any better, I’m just gonna be this depressed and broken person forever…there’s no way to recover from this trauma I grew up with.”

But lately, I don’t feel as restricted by these feelings. I think a lot of the time when we finally make the decision to go to therapy, we expect things to just be fixed quickly, like it’s a house repair, almost. “My windows are broken, please come fix them,” and then that will solve the problem, but emotional problems and trauma are not like physical problems - you can’t just do this or that thing a few times, or take this or that pill, and then it ceases to be a problem magically! This is more like dealing with a mold infestation if we want to continue the house analogy. There’s a systemic problem - a rot in the foundation of ourselves that we have to treat and spend time nurturing to recover from. Sometimes, schemata have to be torn down and rebuilt, and in that way, we are reborn as our new selves.

I’m realizing this is starting to sound a little bit occultish, lol. I’ve been reading the Ring tri-wait…no…tetralogy? hexology? There’s like 6 books in the series (which started out as a trilogy originally) at this point. And I’m currently reading Tide, the last book in the series, which has never seen an official English release. Some kind person ran a Japanese copy of the ebook through DeepL machine translation and uploaded it to reddit, and I happened to come across it, so of course I snagged it as soon as I noticed its existence.

cw: extremely vague and minor spoilers for ring series!!

The series, for those that don’t know, is about a bunch of occult and science-fiction phenomenon, dealing with things like psychic photography & videography, simulated worlds, virtual reality, curses, and the like.

end of spoilers

So, perhaps I’ve had occult phenomena on the brain lately, having pored over five of the six books over the course of the past week or two.

Halloween will soon be upon us, and that’s the original reason I had set about re-reading these books (well, re-reading Ring and finally finishing Spiral & Loop, then reading the others for the first time). Sometimes, it’s fun to do things that remind us of the passage of time.

As humans, originally, we observed the seasons with regularity, and it’s still a part of many cultures and present in observations like holidays, but for me personally, since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 especially, it’s a lot harder to notice how much time has passed when you’re stuck inside for most of it. So, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the seasons and do things (like eat seasonal foods, or celebrate holidays in my own small ways) to kind of signal to my brain that time is passing.

I can’t speak for others, but I know I feel like we’re on like year 9 of 2016, so maybe doing this sort of thing will help re-orient myself into reality.

As much fun as the virtual world is, and as much of my life as I have lived here, online, it’s important to remind ourselves every now and then that we have meatspace bodies and they require some level of maintenance. I’m trying to be more mindful of that myself lately.

I hope everyone is doing well, don’t forget to stay warm now that the seasons are changing, and get your flu shot/updated immunizations if you’re able to, this year’s flu is supposed to be a pretty nasty one. I just got my flu shot this past Tuesday and have felt like crap since then. Today’s the first day I’ve felt more like myself, lol.

Stay safe, stay well, and stay hydrated. Pet your animals for me & hug someone important to you if you’re able.

published: 2025.10.17
by mana