Redundancy Review: Days 70-74, “Small Victories, Big Losses”

(for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia’s Rambles)

Good morning bassists and drummers, welcome to a massive catch-up post for a bunch of missed days of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

A lot of what I write for the review is self-indulgent. I talk about my emotions, things that make me feel happy, and food I have eaten that tasted good. The entire series is a reflection of myself written down as a living record.

And so, given the fact I took a very hard loss over the last week, I am going to take today’s catch-up post to let my emotions fly a little bit, because fuck me do I need it.

There has been a lot that has gone wrong in my life, wasted my degree years due to stubbornness, losing friends cause of a lack of emotional intelligence, and going through severe periods of distress due to transition related issues.

But I can comfortably say that the last three months of my life have been the worst period I have ever experienced – and that is fucking saying something considering how dark my mind got during my university days.

Ever since I got the news that the company I worked for was in the shit, I have been fighting every day to try get small victories, and I should not minimise the fact that even small victories mean a lot when I have gone through what I have gone through.

But for every small victory I feel like I take a big loss alongside it, and I am really fucking tired of that happening.

Even in the last couple of days I have taken a small victory and a big loss simultaneously with my custom cosplay order falling through two weeks before my convention. The seller was courteous and offered me a full refund for my disappointment, which is the small victory, but the big loss comes from the fact this outfit felt like it was going to be the centrepiece of my convention holiday – something I have been looking forward to all year and now I have to go put together a backup plan in a short amount of time.

I am not going to name and shame the seller. As part of the refund I agreed that I would not leave a negative review, and I am sticking to that. I would much rather move on and try make something positive out of this mess… finding yet more small victories.

Every day feels fearful to me now, as if something has changed in my brain that has shifted my outlook from nervous optimism to outright pessimism. I had a breakdown on my partner last night and when I started talking about some of the fears I have about upcoming things, I said a line that breaks my heart even now to repeat:

“I am wanting to prepare for the worst because that is all I can expect nowadays”.

Making the best out of a bad situation should be an admirable trait, one I can take pride of, especially as someone who has lived in startup culture for the last three plus years and has made a name for herself of trying to be adaptable in times of crisis, knowing how to problem-solve my way out of anything.

But I resent the fact I have become that person.

I resent that I can never go long without needing to put out a fire.

And I hate the fact that everything I am going through is making me a colder person and I do not know what to do to stop it – which I am not even sure I fully agree with saying cause the main thing that differentiates this period of time from the previous absolute worst time of my life is that I actually recognise I have people to live for now.

I will keep going, I do not want to stop… but I am absolutely praying for a better season to come my way, because quite frankly, this summer has sucked.

Going to keep it simple with a different review today, talking about another Stardew Valley save of mine that I have with a friend, this time on the Forest Farm layout.

I have mentioned it in passing before, but I have an obsession with building infrastructure in video games. Paths, roads, transport structures, all of it is fair game for me wanting to make neat layouts & patterns in whatever I play, and Stardew is a game I find surprisingly useful for that purpose, especially when presented with the challenges of any of the nonstandard layouts.

Forest in particular has been an interesting challenge, in trying to find the perfect blend of farming crops, farming animals, and utilising the main feature of the farm – that being renewable forage and hardwood options.

Initially I had struggled with this task, especially when it came to building layouts that could work with the sprinkler patterns I usually use without actually having the sprinklers to plan out the infrastructure.

But as with my mind itself, things start to make a lot more sense around Winter in this game, and without needing to worry about (much) crop watering and focus more on getting stuff organised for the next year, I feel a lot happier plotting out paths and working out where things need to go.

On this map in particular, it is evidenced by the massive tree farm I am trying to establish in the top middle of the map. This initially started small scale with each tree type being vertically aligned which made collecting forage from the tappers a nightmare, but once I had established where the animal pasture needed to go a lot of space opened up which has led to the larger scale farm pictured above.

There is definitely still a lot of work to be done on this farm, but considering this is only the end of Year 1, I am extremely excited to see where this goes next.

Here is where I would usually say something about getting my rhythm back, but honestly, as much as the Redundancy Review will keep going, I am not sure how well I will be able to write individual days depending on my mood – I definitely want to try chronicle my convention holiday each day, but, we will see how it goes.

Thank you for reading this far if you did, I hope you are able to have a relaxing weekend, a longer one than usual if you are in the UK.