If you need a change, start your brain over. Start over your day. Your emotional responses. Your year. Your goals. Approach an old problem or new opportunity in a freshly reset brain. A fresh brain is a calm brain, waiting to be filled up with new ideas, feelings and solutions. There is no limit to how many times you can start over in a day.
I pursue something as far as it’s healthy. I get easily overstimulated, and overstimulation leads to overwhelm, which leads to bipolar episodes. These episodes are characterized by extremely unpleasant feelings, physical issues with speech and physical regulation, as well as dramatic mood swings. This is then followed by a dive into a depression so deep that all I think about is how all of my problems would be solved by suicide and how appealing that sounds. After a couple weeks, I wind up in the hospital to treat a major bipolar episode. At that point, I’m forced to make a change in my assessment of what my reasonable goals are. I am always learning.
This is my disability. I’m disabled from the assortment of mental disorders I have. I simply can’t handle very much stimulation. This is why I can’t work and have dropped out of college. Workplaces and college campuses are constant stimulation. It took many years of effort to accept that I’m not built for the physical and mental requirements of college and capitalism. I started over and started over, and eventually I found my boundaries. But it took all those restarts to learn, and I wouldn’t have had any hope to even keep trying without utilizing the idea of starting over.
I’ve let my work on the website fall by the wayside since 2020. It was simply too taxing. I haven’t done a thing til recently, and I feel ready to start over on the site. I am doing some sprucing to it right now, because I needed to re-examine my mission statement and intentions. I’m keeping the old material, but I’m finally (hopefully) fixing some old problems with the page layouts, and I’m hoping that I can get back to writing and tending this garden in the hope of reaching people who might benefit from things I’ve learned.
Through hard physical and emotional labor, learning, and trial-and-error, I have come to suffer less, and live a mostly manageable life. I want to hand out shortcuts to anyone who needs relief. It’s always worth your time to try to reduce your suffering.
Welcome to new and improved Goldfishpainter.com! Take a look around.
