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I find that I operate in cycles with the seasons. It's around December that I really start to get back into my old nerd ways. I know a lot of folks on here are like this every day, but I've grown away from it as I've grown older and it seems every year I go through phases of getting back into the habit.
I think part of it has to do with being stuck inside and it being cold and dark. If you read my post about why I hate summer, you'll understand that I feel a bit more at home when it's cold and dark...but I can only stand so much of it, so the beginning of the dark days (in my hemisphere) is where it's at for me. It's this time of year where I start to remember my introversions and my old hobbies, and since there's not a lot of light or much to do outside, I don't feel guilty just firing up my laptop and screwing around on it for a few hours. At other times of the year I feel like I'm "wasting" my precious little time that I get to myself, and instead do "adult" things like errands or chores or something similar. While I know this isn't relaxing, the part of me knowing that it's done makes my psyche feel better. Winter is the time I can skip some of these errands and just not care about it. It's dark, nobody expects much, really.
So I start to gravitate towards what I like to call my little nerd interests - Gemini, updating my capsule, figuring out what to do with my RaspberryPi, do some light coding, gemlogging, or whatever else strikes my fancy. It's me-time, self-care...and without most of the guilt of Real Life. The thing about this is that by the time February rolls around, I'm totally done with Winter and I'm fighting off a light bout of seasonal depression, and all I can think to do is get out of the house and do something physical like running, biking, or fixing up my property. So all in all, I'd say my most active computer/nerd times is from about December to mid-February, where, when I look back at my digital acitivity trail, most of my time is logged in these months.
Being a parent of two young kids, I've come to the full realization of what having no time to yourself is like, and those tiny moments that I do have are usually spent just relaxing - which is itself a form of self-care, but just not those things that I would say that I "want to do" or are "interesting".
I spent most of my life being by myself, and so naturally I picked up a nice interest / hobby in comptuers. Besides school and schoolwork, I could dedicate hours to this pursuit and while it could be frustrating at time, I really really enjoyed it. But now that I look back at these days, I feel a couple ways about it. First, I miss the days when everything was new and the Internet wasn't commercialized (hence being here on Gemini). I never really launched into this as a career, so it's with a bit of sadness that I think about what could have been, but on the other hand I am glad that I'm not in that junk pile that we call coding and development these days. It's too complex and interwoven that you can't have a life outside of studying code. No thanks. Secondly, I think about all the time I had to myself. If I had it now I'd probably not know what to do with myself, but I still look back to those days where everything was about what I *wanted* to do. Don't get me wrong, I had to grow up sometime, but there's always room for looking at your past with rose colored glasses.
The solution for me is carving out self-care. Be it writing a gemlog like this, or even just going out for a simple walk, self-care is so critically important and I don't think we focus on it enough as a populace these days (at least not the one I live in/around). I liked having self-care be spontaneous, but, alas, that's not the case anymore, so now I schedule it. And let me tell you, I'm terrible at scheduling things like that, but it's somethign I need to do.
That being said, I'm glad I finally had some time to sit down and write to my Gemini capsule. If you made it this far, hopefully I didn't bore you with my diary-like entry today.
Get out there and you do you. #self-care
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2022-12-15
Tags: winter, self-care, introversion, seasons
Gritty
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gritty@smallweb.space
Thanks for this post; it's just what I needed to read today. I'm feeling the onset of that seasonal low mood you describe, plus recovering from a tough few weeks at work. I've been getting into Gemini (for the first time) and *nix (again) recently for that reason. Good to know I'm not the only one! Cheers, Jonathan