Rosalia Rambles

Tag: health

  • Redundancy Review: Day 167-170, “What Can Go Wrong Has Gone Wrong”

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

    Good morning disaster bisexuals and chaotic lesbians, welcome to Day 167 to 170 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    So, I said in my previous article that I had mostly managed to avoid going down too hard with the pestilence my partner had been afflicted with…

    …yeah I spoke way too soon, got hit hard on Monday & Tuesday to the point I had to take time off work to recover, something I am usually very loathe to do for physical conditions as I can usually just persevere through them with the power of Lucozade and high-strength painkillers to keep my energy up and the discomfort down respectively.

    But getting tonsillitis as a fucking twenty-seven year old woman was not on my bingo card, having only had the disease once before when I was a child which now makes me regret not having the bastard things out while I could have.

    Though, given my younger self was absolutely terrified at the idea of surgery, I cannot exactly blame her for not going along with that idea and taking the antibiotic route instead, however disgusting it tasted. 

    The week started off rough, but by Wednesday I was… mostly… ready to bring myself to my desk one way or another to get back into the flow of things and let myself focus on something productive during the day which was not sleeping or seven hour Youtube videos of Metal Gear Solid playthroughs.

    Or rather, that is what I would have done, if not for my internet line being disconnected during the night.

    Somehow, someone accidentally put in my address for usage as part of an internet contract, and rather than the infrastructure company doing any amount of due diligence or even sending an engineer round to the flat to confirm that the work needed doing, they put an “unsolicited cease” on my line at three in the goddamn morning.

    This led to me putting in a very snotty, very stressed out call to my ISP who, to their immense credit, has been patient and understanding with my frustrations around this issue, answering any of my questions to their best ability even when the answer is “I do not really know”.

    Though good quality customer service does not reduce the annoyance that comes from having a vital service cut off, not just for mine and my partner’s relaxation time, but for my actual fucking livelihood too. I am a remote worker working for an organisation which has no head office for me to go into instead whilst I wait for my internet issues to be resolved, leading to me draining both mine and my partner’s hotspot on the Wednesday before booking myself into a local co-working space today.

    On top of all this, my partner is still suffering hard from their own illness as well, with the both of us feeling incredibly nauseous after eating pizza on the Monday before giving in and resorting back to the classic sick person comfort food of tomato soup on the Tuesday. Being ill is hard enough, but not being able to indulge in food that normally brings us both comfort has made navigating this period of illness even more difficult.

    Hence the title, cause with the way this week has been, it genuinely does feel like at every turn, I have been met with stone walls and road blocks.

    But I am still going.

    Somehow.

    I am going to be honest, I do not really know how I am still going after the week I have had. Regular readers will know I aim to deliver a positive message when it comes to me telling this story, about persevering even when the odds are against me, about keeping going even if the cards dealt are not what I was anticipating.

    And for the most part, that is still happening. Even if the timelines are not yet clear, I know everything I am suffering through right now will pass, and there are still spots of hope beyond the horizon.

    Right now though?

    Credit to @Basil_Mage on Twitter for this beautiful image, certainly captures the mood I am in right now.

    Hopefully the weekend calms down for me a little bit, if just to let myself vegetate in bed for a couple hours if the internet stays off. Should be getting an upgraded data contract sometime over the weekend though, set that in motion as a contingency in case what is currently happening to me happened and I had no clear idea when my internet was going to come back, small benefit of the current phone plan I have, I can actually flex what I pay and get varying amounts of data in return.

    That is about all the writing energy my body can provide me today, but at least this means I have written something mid-week rather than waiting till the weekend, which I am definitely taking as a plus. Thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review, wherever you are I hope you are dealing with less shit than I am, and that the weekend on the horizon looks to be a relaxing one for you.

  • Redundancy ‘Review’: Day 160-166, “Afflicted With Pestilence”

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

    Good morning poxwalkers and plaguebearers, welcome to what is essentially a “week in the life” post for Day 160 to 166 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    The week started out as standard, work feeling pretty intense for both myself and my partner, with the latter having a fair bit of overtime on the horizon for both the Monday and Wednesday. He got through the Monday shift pretty okay, but given the exposed nature of retail, on Tuesday he took a turn when he was afflicted with a pretty nasty cough. 

    He usually has a pretty good immune system, not getting ill often at all and any time he does get ill it never lasted more than a day or two, so I encouraged him to head into work on Wednesday, emphasising that if it did not clear up, he did not need to do the overtime.

    Unfortunately, he needed to come home shortly before his shift was due to end. I was proud of him for making it as far as he did, but considering the state he came back in, it was definitely for the best.

    The worrying part comes in that we are on Sunday, and it has not cleared up. The coughing has definitely got less intense, but he does not take well to illness all the same – definitely different from how I take it.

    Because, yeah, with me being in close proximity to him and offering him comfort up close and personal, I ended up catching whatever he has.

    While he gets ill very infrequently, my immune system is quite different. Two bouts with COVID have taken a pretty rough toll on how my body reacts to illnesses. Combine this with naturally not-good sinuses which are prone to infection, any pestilence I get inevitably moves up into my nose and leaves me very disoriented for a period of time…

    …which is weird that somehow, I have not taken whatever this bug is as hard as he has.

    Comparing our situations, he has been afflicted for almost a week now and still struggles to move about, eat proper food, or be at his desk for any length of time. Whereas in the span of two days with the majority of that time spent in bed zoning out to extremely long Youtube videos, while I still feel like ass I am at about the same level of functionality that I am on any other given day.

    This goes some distance to explain why I have not exactly been in a writing mood this week, most of my energy has been dedicated to taking care of my partner and making sure he can get through this situation as best he can.

    In general, I do not feel massively optimistic about my ability to keep up with writing for the rest of the year, at least until mid-December by my current guess. Lots of work commitments, working out Christmas plans, my birthday, and trying to find time to myself in that mix.

    It will benefit me to try to write in that mix, but it may be more pieces like this which are journal-styled than proper Redundancy Reviews as I have made in the past.

    There will be plenty to ramble about in the future, and plenty I can review, but for now, the story I am telling is one of perseverance, checking in when I can and keeping myself together through the crazy world we live in.

    Thumbnail picture… thumbnail picture…

    Soon.

    Soon I will have this game finished 100%, and then I will be able to ramble about it to my heart’s content.

    That covers what I want to catch up on this page. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to relax before the work week begins once more and that any impending Monday blues do not hit you too hard.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 159, “It Still Feels Weird To Rest”

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

    Good morning daydreamers and fantasists, welcome to Day 159 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    It is a wonderfully brisk autumn Sunday, and events have moved at a very slow pace today. Woke up later than usual, saw my partner off to work, laid in a little bit longer before heading to the kitchen to mess around with food plans for the rest of the week, hung out with a very close friend of mine, and then once my partner came home from work, we threw our heads against the wall at the last major challenge we have to face in Expedition 33.

    By all accounts, today was good and restful… so, why am I sitting here feeling guilty about how today has gone?

    I have talked at length about how weird it feels for me to rest sometimes, that I am somehow undeserving of taking time for myself, especially when those moments often come after prolonged periods of stressful circumstances where any person would consider it a reasonable reaction to want to rest.

    It is definitely part of my mindset that I need to change the most, that not every waking hour needs to have a defined end product and I am okay to do things solely for myself than in service of other goals…

    …of course this is very much easier said than done when you consider I am running a blog where I try to review something in my life that I have experienced recently and I have weaved myself into a trap where my every waking moment can become “content” for me to write about if so desired along with the fact that I will be paranoid if I cannot write about anything interesting on a given day and the desire to tell a story from my past is not present.

    That did not start out with me meaning to get extremely real with my perspective on things.

    The structure I have given myself does not do much to help things. Something I have reflected on over the course of writing this series, and finding myself planning ahead for when I find myself in a permanent role once more, is that having the structure based on days makes things more difficult for myself when I inevitably fall behind due to life circumstances, leading to filler posts or massive anthology posts.

    When I can eventually transition the Redundancy Review into the “Rosa Review” (maintaining alliteration at all times of course), I will instead be calling each post an episode instead, lessening the pressure on myself if I wanted to step away for a day or two to focus solely on taking time to rest and providing a more broad scope of what to talk about.

    Posts would still be created, just at a lesser frequency. I would hate to give up on what I have created here, and letting my skills atrophy again would be a damn shame considering how much I feel I have improved over the course of writing these posts.

    Even if my mind is still not fully where I want it to be right now, I still want to do my best to tell this ongoing story.

    For those who come after.

    I am… so excited to talk about Expedition 33 once I finally 100% it, there is so much I love about that game that I want to write about at length but I still have not actually hit the ending yet, want to beat the superboss before I do that.

    Though, it does sort of leave me without a “formal” review topic today, but I have got some cool pictures from the walk I took with my friend.

    The place where I live has had a lot of rain lately, and living right on the banks of a river leaves the local area prone to flooding. This resulted in the very amusing shot of the public life preserver being decently submerged by the rising water, but the picture of the coffee shop on stilts is the more impactful one.

    It is a place called “Coffee Evolution”, and it is actually where my partner & I had one of our first dates together as a formal couple. Staff have moved since that point leading the quality of the coffee to sadly decline, but I still appreciate the memories I have of the place.

    Plus, this is the first time I have been able to see it on its stilts up close and personal, considering when this area floods it usually blocks access off entirely. It is only because the flooding was not as severe as usual that I was able to take these shots properly.

    That will cover everything for today. Thank you very much for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to relax and not have the impending Monday blues bring you down too much.

  • Redundancy ‘Review’: Day 148-151, “Finally Slowing Down”

    Redundancy ‘Review’: Day 148-151, “Finally Slowing Down”

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

    Good morning tortoises and hares, welcome to one big ass catch up post for Day 148 to 151 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Work has been utter chaos this week, preparing for a big launch requiring all hands on deck for all manner of tasks, which had the net result of me ultimately having very little time for writing between managing period symptoms, managing sinus infection symptoms, and engaging in what small self-care activities my remaining time & energy would allow.

    Not entirely out of the woods yet either with work, but at the very least I have the weekend now to enact some basic recovery plan and actually engage with my hobbies once more: gaming, cooking, and of course, writing.

    Admittedly it has been a while since I have had something like this at work. My entire career has been marked by various points where a massive effort was needed to get something out the door on a Friday, usually leaving me exhausted by the time everything wrapped up and just wanting nothing more than to sleep for fourteen hours.

    The fact that I am awake, aware, and engaging in something mentally stimulating after nine hours of sleep shows that I have built a resilience to this kind of thing… when you ignore the fact that my dual-afflictions this week meant I had to take Wednesday morning off because I felt like I was going to die if I put on a VR headset and every day outside of that it was a challenge to drag myself to my desk each day…

    …but I kept going, even in the face of adversity, and that is what I am going to be proud of. Through anxiety, pain, and exhaustion, I always choose to keep moving so I am able to see the better days on the horizon.

    Trying to write things down after a period of not writing for a bit always feels difficult, as if somehow I need to shake the rust and cobwebs out of my system even though I have been practicing for several months now, although my usual stumbling block is finding areas to elaborate on in a positive way rather than harping on the negative aspects of what I have been experiencing.

    I believe it is important to let yourself experience negative feelings, but not to let them consume you – a balancing act that is most definitely easier said than done. Suppressing negative feelings can result in them escaping out at the worst of times, lashing out at those around you when everything becomes too hard to bear, a painful experience I know all too well. But constantly dwelling on whatever is bringing negativity to your life ultimately lowers your resting mood which can make it harder to appreciate what few positive moments come your way.

    For all my struggles, there is still a lot I have going for me in this life, and I want to try focus on that more than what is not exactly going my way right now.

    Think that will cover everything for today, a bit of a shorter post but given my exhaustion and minor addiction to Clair Obscur right now, it does the job of hopefully starting a new streak.

    Need a thumbnail though, so I will use some pictures of the burgers I made tonight. My first proper bit of cooking this entire week.

    Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to have a relaxing weekend and that you are able to recover from whatever might have happened during your week.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 144, “Been in worse beds”

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

    Good morning bed bugs and dust mites, welcome to Day 144 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Sleep was a rough time for me last night, the hotel bed is comfy enough for sitting up in to write and watch TV but was lacking when it came to actually settle down. The pillows did not offer much support, the mattress is too firm for my tastes, and I forgot to bring a plushie with me to cuddle as I slept.

    It was at least a single bed, meaning I did not have to sleep in a space larger than what I needed, which would make me miss my partner more than I already do.

    Silly, in a way. We spend so much time together that it should, in theory, be easy for me to be away for a couple days – especially considering we were long distance for two and a half years with very infrequent visits for the majority of that time period. 

    But I am most definitely someone who struggles without him, which partially drives some of my recent fear, paranoia, and catastrophising. I am terrified of losing the life we have built together through any period of sustained joblessness on my part, especially because I would be absolutely loathe to move back in with my parents. Not because I do not like them – our relationship has actually improved massively over recent years – but because it would represent a major stumble in my path forward.

    Everything I have I view as the product of all the hard work I have put in over the last five years, and me of five years ago would never imagine in her wildest dreams that she would have any of what she has today. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” is such a bizarre question to me because outside of a few key moments, none of this I could have predicted or planned for.

    So as I slowly lose my relationship with the work that has enabled my current lifestyle, I find fear creeping in that I will lose everything, which I can recognise is catastrophising because I have proof I can minimise my lifestyle to a sustainable degree, and even if I was unable to find full time work, there are options I would be able to take.

    Making a change is hard, and even as I take the required steps to try enact that change in myself, I find myself struggling to keep the momentum going. For all my talk of “I will make it”, there is a fear deep within me that I will be in this pain forever.

    But I will make it.

    This is only temporary, despite everything my mind is telling me.

    Sometimes, a moment’s peace is all I need, which segues me nicely into the review topic.

    For all the problems I had with the hotel bed, there is one thing this room has that I very rarely encounter in hotels: a bath.

    There is a certain appeal I find in taking a bath, sure it might be lovingly described as “soaking in your own filth” by some, but the ability to immerse yourself in a tub of warm water to soothe your aching muscles, lift the weight off your shoulder, and weld together the broken parts of your soul once more is something I will always take advantage of.

    This bath was surprisingly accommodating to my height as well, being someone above six feet tall there are a lot of baths that force me to hunch up my legs if I want to get myself properly inside. Whilst I could not fully lay flat in the bath, this one was long enough for me to stretch my legs out and get just below my shoulders submerged in the water.

    Additionally, I went to Waitrose before the bath to grab some supplies for the evening, which included two bottles of low-alcohol cider, one of which was the accompaniment to my bath.

    Soaking in the water, stretching my legs out, and sipping a crisp apple cider put me at peace like nothing else has in recent weeks. My mind felt quiet, and even though the bath lasted a relatively short twenty minutes, that period of time was absolute bliss.

    That covers everything for today, I should probably consider getting ready for Metal Gear tonight. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to enjoy your Saturday, take it easy, have a good drink in the company of great people.

  • Redundancy ‘Review’: Day 139, “Restraining the Flip-Flop”

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

    Good morning flops and flips, welcome to Day 139 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    So around two months after declaring I was weaning myself off my antidepressant medication, I have now been back to the doctor’s and decided to go back on the medication.

    This… was not an easy decision to make, but it is something I hope to ultimately be temporary – something that helps ease my pain whilst I navigate a rockier than expected life transition, being able to go off the medication once I return to a greater point of stability.

    In addition to sertraline, I have also been prescribed a beta blocker to help with the initial anxiety that comes with going back onto an antidepressant and to hopefully control some of the panic attacks I have been experiencing. The doctor reassured me that taking this step is not a sign of weakness, but one of strength. 

    Though, as I sit in bed writing this review and contemplating the action I have taken, I find myself being consumed by doubt, possibly because of how late it is, but I want to talk about it all the same.

    I have used the phrase “better on the inside, better on the outside” a few times whenever writing a Redundancy Review, in the context of talking about how I want to improve my mental and physical condition as part of a greater plan to be a better person.

    But I wonder how much changing my “outside” is going to help me, and whether I need to start looking “inside” more to figure out what exactly I need to do next. Right now I am laser focused on changing my job as that constitutes a major part of my life and finding a career with greater purpose might at least ease some of the immediate stress.

    It becomes more of a philosophical question the longer I ponder it: what does it mean to change “inside”?

    There are many answers I can provide, but I think the first step needs to be committing to the short-term improvement that I hope the antidepressants will be able to bring. Once I am no longer bogged down in the deepest recesses of my own mind, I should be able to look at everything going on in a more objective sense and make more informed choices.

    Hopefully seeing my therapist again helps too, there is a good deal of clarity that an outside lens can reveal on what I am truly feeling, and hopefully she can help me write a solid plan for getting myself back to the person I want to be.

    I do not intend to surrender just yet, this is just a stumble on my journey towards who I want to become.

    This post serves more as a milestone post for my own journey than anything else, I will hopefully be back to writing proper reviews tomorrow with the somewhat usual VTuesday segment. For now enjoy this picture I took on my trip to Swansea just over a week ago.

    That covers everything for now, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you have not had too hard of a Monday and that the rest of the week is shaping up to be a good one for you.

  • Redundancy ‘Review’: Day 138, “Sunday Guilt”

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

    Good morning expectants and impatients, welcome to Day 138 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Daylight savings time has ended in the UK, meaning the clocks went back one hour last night giving everyone an extra hour in bed… or in my case, even more time to spend playing Clair Obscur.

    I am only slightly sorry, it has been a long time since I have had a game where I can do nothing but sit and let myself become immersed in a fantasy world, especially one with so many themes that resonate with my current situation. 

    Though I do feel a little guilty, and I know it is somewhat of an irrational guilt with some grounding in reality. I feel worried that I should be doing more on my weekends, that even after stressful weeks I should forgo any meaningful relaxation time in favour of doing even more job applications or working on every personal project under the sun.

    But that is the “grindset mindset” I have developed from being within the tech industry, of the desire to always be moving, to move fast and break things because you never know what will be born from the wreckage – and it is a mindset I do not want to be in anymore.

    Being real, I am struggling to write today. I have been writing, deleting, and writing paragraphs, feeling completely unsatisfied with whatever I am trying to output and subsequently feeling guilty over that lack of output.

    I am seeing my therapist in two weeks time, so, that gives me both impetus to keep moving and to add what I am currently feeling to my greater notes… should probably send her a link to these posts as well, they do a pretty good job of keeping track of how these past months have gone.

    Also seeing the doctor tomorrow, to talk about the stress I have been experiencing because of work and other life factors, potentially looking at a route back to antidepressants to take some of the load off my brain.

    I will make it through this.

    One way or another.

    There is still so much I want to do.

    And I am scared I may not get the chance to do any of it.

    But I will not know unless I keep moving.

    Considering I am struggling to write today, I am going to skip the review segment, and I am going to make the thumbnail a screenshot that I took during a Clair Obscur cutscene today, being thoroughly called out by one of the characters.

    Short, and not very content-packed as some reviews have been this week, but I am at least still consistent.

    Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. If you are in the UK I hope the clocks going back has not messed with your system too much, or brought down by how early it gets dark now because of that. For everyone else, wherever you are I hope you are able to relax and that the Monday blues are not too hard to bear.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 135, “Staying Sharp”

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

    Good morning swordsmen and pikemen, welcome to Day 135 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Starting this one pretty late in the evening compared to how I normally get these done, had basically no chance to breathe during work today followed by a lunch where I was purely focused on recovery, before finishing up for the day and deciding that I wanted to focus primarily on eating for the night alongside playing some Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

    Absolutely fantastic game by the way, I am just over four hours into the game currently and I am having the time of my life. I think it might end up being too big to do a proper Redundancy Review on, but I definitely want to talk about it at some stage. The themes of the story, the writing, and especially the music are all top-notch with so much to say about all of it.

    But for now, I want to write. 

    I have talked at length over the last couple of weeks about what the “purpose” of the Redundancy Review is. Documenting change, giving myself the opportunity to look back on where I was, and to clear my head from a busy day – though there is one painfully obvious purpose I have yet to talk about.

    It keeps my brain sharp, and my writing skills in use almost every day, which I can see the results of in my everyday life… for the most part.

    When friends or my partner ask for writing assistance, it usually comes quickly to me, be it for a quick naming suggestion, help in jazzing up some paragraphs for a job application, or even for the rare commission. 

    However, the fun part comes when I am asked to write any form of professional email at work. Deep down I know what I need to write and how to handle myself in any work correspondence, having done the task for almost two years after my mentor let me get hands on with production work.

    But there is something that comes with doing that task that causes me to freeze up and overthink about what I need to write, performing several rewrites and word changes to make sure I am not coming off overly harsh, too friendly, or somehow sounding like I do not know what I am doing.

    This has reminded me of two pieces of advice that both my mentor and the producer I worked incredibly closely with have given me. The former comes in regards to me talking to her about my overthinking once:

    “Yes, I know you are an overthinker. That is why I do not give you the chance to think and give you so much to do so you focus on that instead.”

    Harsh? Yes… but she has a point. If I am given enough to work on, and the work is sufficiently stimulating to my brain, I find myself getting into a rhythm before long which seriously helps quiet my brain.

    The second piece of advice came as the producer and I talked about me going overly formal on client calls, making me wonder about the nature of professionalism:

    “Professionalism is delivering your points clearly and not saying fuck.”

    That one in particular has stuck with me, and it has actually helped inform how I handle professional interactions, letting myself sound more natural in how I explain things. I still go a little robotic from time to time, but my delivery has relaxed immensely.

    In a way it is funny, I always worried about my professionalism when it came to delivering my work output, which itself is delivered on calls where a large portion of my plushie collection is on show for my colleagues to look at.

    I do use virtual backgrounds when talking to external clients, as much as I feel like it would be a conversation starter.

    For now though, I keep myself sharp through writing these reviews… which I should probably try write a review segment for today…

    …yeah, let us have a “VThursday” as a complement to VTuesday, even though the name does not roll off the tongue the same way.

    This was something I actually ordered back right before I lost my job, a canvas panel from the “holoAnimArt” series, a collection of original art depicting Hololive members as the animals that they adopt features from for their VTuber model. Being a massive Shirakami Fubuki fan, as I have talked about before on the Redundancy Review, it was a no-brainer to pick up.

    I am surprisingly blown away by the quality of both the included print and the wooden easel it comes with for display purposes. The canvas itself has a loop in the back if I wanted to mount it on a wall instead but I really like the presentation of the easel, gives it a more rustic feeling that matches with the more realistic depiction of the Hololive member as an animal.

    The only gripe I have with it, and this is most definitely a “first world VTuber fan” problem, is that because of the size of the easel and the canvas it does not fit well onto my pre-existing, yet admittedly overflowing, Fubuki shrine, so I either have to display it on its lonesome or commit to doing a full rearrangement of my displays in order to build a better Fubuki shrine.

    You know, if that is one of the biggest problems facing me right now, then my life really is not that bad, for all the overthinking my brain likes to inflict upon me.

    But that will do it for today, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review, my every day writing practice. Wherever you are I hope you are able to relax, it is Friday tomorrow, and the weekend is beckoning us ever closer.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 134, “Self-Expression”

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

    Good morning impressionists and pointillists, welcome to Day 134 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    One of the first things to fall for me when I enter into a depressive spike is my outward self-expression. My appearance starts to falter as I neglect doing a proper hair wash and shave to use what little energy I have on not smelling like the dumpster I feel I am, and my choice of clothing goes from the goth-lite style I typically enjoy to simple hoodie and joggers.

    It definitely helps me to cope with the depression, I do not need to put much mental effort into deciding what I want to wear and can instead direct that energy into making sure I can do what is absolutely essential for the day.

    In a way though, it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. I find myself falling into a state of depression, which makes my self-expression slip, which worsens my depression because I struggle to feel like myself, which makes it harder to find the time to dress up all cute and fancy without it feeling like an obligation.

    Writing definitely helps ease that feeling, or at the very least make me feel as if I am able to keep up with a form of self-expression, even if that mostly boils down to letting the words flow out of my head onto the page to make things more quiet up top – very much needed because of how noisy my brain feels right now.

    On the plus side, I know my employment will at least last for the rest of the year, with some amount of uncertainty about what might come next depending on the work output of myself and the people I work with. It provides comfort and anxiety simultaneously, the former from the fact I know I can at least see out the rest of this year working towards a goal, and the latter from once more facing down the barrel of uncertainty in a highly competitive jobs market.

    God this is turning into a proper ramble, I am struggling to keep my head focused on the task at hand and I keep veering off topic to talk about everything going on.

    I think I am just going to do some affirmations before I head to the review segment, both for myself, and anyone reading who may need it.

    It is tough to carry on right now, but I want to keep moving forward.

    There is still so much room for me to grow, I can keep growing stronger.

    My career has not peaked, I still have so much more to give to my field.

    Everything I have been through has helped me become who I am today, I am the net result of every victory and every defeat.

    Things feel overwhelming right now, but I will keep going.

    There is still so much beauty in this world I am yet to bear witness to, and I want to be able to put my own stories into the world.

    I teared up a little bit writing that all down if I am honest.

    Anyway, time to go into the review segment for today, which… is less a review, and more just a discussion about my fursona.

    Meet Rosa, the Arctic Fox & Phoenix hybrid. She is essentially my “truesona”, being a reflection of myself more than an actual character I would embody, down to her having similar proportions to what my actual body looks like IRL. This reference sheet was drawn by my friend Ely, who I think did a fantastic job with the entire thing.

    So, why did I make the design choices that I did with her?

    Part of it comes from my background in playing Monster Hunter. In both Rise and World I had armour & weapon setups that focused on the idea of fire (or blast, in this case) and ice, which slowly evolved into becoming my signature loadouts with me even developing lore based around the two Elder Dragons that the weapons were derived from.

    This elemental aesthetic inspires not only the animal choices for the fursona itself, but for the colour detailing on her as well, with the orange & blue markings representing her two elemental affinities, the colours being matched in the eyes two.

    Fun fact: I have given enough of my characters that are supposed to represent me heterochromia that I have had to write a note down that reminds me which eye is supposed be the chromatic one, as it is always a blue right eye with an unnatural colour for the right eye – orange for the fursona, and pink for any of my Monster Hunter characters.

    But I want to dive deeper on why the phoenix was chosen as one half of this hybrid. The arctic fox part is easy enough to explain: it is a creature associated with cold environments and I absolutely love foxes.

    The phoenix has a lot of personal connection to me though, and it started long before I became a furry.

    Initially, my connection to the mythical creature came through my first D&D character, Marieya Ebontide, someone who I have written a lot of fiction about and still need to give her a proper ending. After coming up with a part of her backstory on the fly for a nothic to dig into, that small fact soon evolved into developing her as a sorcerer suppressing her powers, gifted to her by having the soul of a phoenix.

    Over time, I found myself connecting with the concept of the phoenix more. I related it to my own challenges, how each time I got brought down to my lowest point I would always find a way to rekindle myself to come back stronger than I did before.

    Fire dims, colour fades, and feathers shed – but nothing lasts forever, and whatever is bringing me down low fades, letting my flames reignite once more to let my true nature shine through.

    I will finish up this review by going into the painful and excruciating details as to why my truesona has wings…

    …wings are fucking awesome.

    Simple as.

    While they do a good job at helping hammer home the phoenix aspect of the character, they are mainly there for being damn awesome, even in the small amounts of lore I have written for her I specify that they are not flight-capable wings, primarily there to add lift to jumps or stabilise herself during acrobatic manoeuvres.

    That pretty much covers it all for today, thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you have been able to get past the hump day feelings and are able to look forward to the weekend coming soon.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 129, “Adaptable”

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

    Good morning thinkers and ponderers, welcome to Day 129 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    I had a good evening last night, where the anxiety I had been feeling throughout the week almost completely receded. I was able to be silly with my partner once more and we even played Monster Hunter Wilds for half an hour – a far cry from how active I have been in video games even within recent months, but still a positive amount of progress.

    Though I find myself needing to remember that progress is most definitely not linear, as I woke up this morning back to being on the verge of panic attacks and finding myself rotting in bed until the late hours of the morning, struggling to move for fear of the thumping in my chest becoming so much worse as my balance becomes unsteady.

    But I kept in mind the ultimate message of what the Redundancy Review represents: to keep moving, no matter the circumstances.

    So I went for a walk in the local park, walking alongside the river with a mocha from a small local stand, which was actually my first coffee since Monday due to how unsettled my stomach has been, though it was not even for the hit of caffeine. For once I wanted to drink coffee purely for the experience of drinking coffee, albeit my usual mix of chocolate and coffee.

    Fresh air was definitely needed, and even though I still found myself scrolling through social media on my phone as I sat on a memorial bench close to the waterfront; being away from my bedroom helped massively, and let me try organise my thoughts into something coherent.

    If there has been one thing that has carried me through my career, it is my adaptability. Through the games industry, through the extended-reality industry, and now as a contractor, there is no denying that whilst I will bitch, moan, and cry, I will adapt to the requirements of the role to step up to whatever challenge comes my way.

    Sometimes this does mean I need to break, because this is not the first time I have needed to slam on the emergency brakes during my career, in fact it was only during 2023 where I did not need to take an extended period of time off due to stress. But there is one common theme from all those breakages: I came back, and I carried on, taking on the lessons learned from that breakage.

    Each time I thought my world was going to end, I was reminded of why I am on this earth, and why I choose to carry on each time. I can look back on several incidents over the last five years that threatened to bring me down, and, with the benefit of hindsight, see that I have still made it through, in spite of everything.

    My redundancy will soon become another one of those points in my past, something that hurt me deeply in the moment it happened and threw me off the track for a period of time after it, but will eventually become a part of my greater story.

    For now though, it is still a traumatic thought in my mind, that even though there was nothing I could have really done to prevent it, and that it was not just me caught up in the wave but all of my talented former colleagues as well due to the whole company going into administration.

    But if I look back on my history, and keep in mind why the phoenix is part of my fursona, I always come back. Sometimes I need to reincarnate, but that is okay, because change has only made me stronger…

    …note to self write Redundancy Review about my fursona soon, cannot believe I have gone over four months and not talked about being a furry.

    Back on track, need to write a review segment for today, and given my partner & I finally got around to watching KPop Demon Hunters on Wednesday, I think I want to talk about my favourite song from the film: What It Sounds Like.

    Given that this is the finale song of the film, there is going to be obvious discussion of spoilers ahead for the remainder of the review. If you want to stop reading here, thank you for reading, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

    For those intending to stick around, let us get right into it:

    Bit of background context, KPop Demon Hunters is a film about three KPop stars, Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, who form the group Huntr/x, performing absolute bangers by day and protecting the human world from demons by night. Early on in the film it is revealed that Rumi is part-demon herself, with the story focusing on her struggles with her own shame in relation to fighting back the main villainous group of the film: The Saja Boys, demons disguised as a KPop boy band.

    There is a lot more I can say about the story, but I want to get right in to talking about the song, so in brief: Rumi gets revealed as part-demon to her bandmates, forcing her to flee and allowing the Saja Boys to bring Gwi-Ma, the Demon King, into the mortal world in an attempt to feed him as many souls as possible. Right before there is a mass sacrifice, including Mira, Zoey, and the band’s manager Bobby, Rumi returns to start this final song.

    It starts with her admitting she cannot hide what she is anymore, and starting to finally open up to herself & her band mates, with the second verse being:

    “I tried to fix it, I tried to fight it

    My head was twisted, my heart divided

    My lies all collided

    I don’t know why I didn’t trust you to be on my side”

    As someone who can bottle up things for long periods of time, I heavily relate to these lyrics, especially in the context of being transgender. For someone who accepted they were not cis around the tail-end of 2019 and only told the majority of their friend groups at the start of 2020, the last line of this verse speaks out to me, especially when, outside of my parents, everyone who I have told about my gender has accepted me without hesitation.

    However, given what I have talked about today with relation to my redundancy and needing to come back from things that bring me down, it is the first chorus that starts to hit home for me:

    “I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back

    But now I’m seeing all the beauty in the broken glass

    The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony

    My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like”

    I almost cried hearing this part of the song for the first time, as I see so much of myself in these lyrics. My redundancy effectively broke me, it shattered my perception of what my life currently is, it put my self-esteem issues front-and-centre once more, and it made me fearful for my future.

    But ultimately, as much as I have spent the last week pining to go back to when times were simpler, I cannot go back. All I can do is make the most of what has been given to me to work with, which has formed the basis of the voice used for the Redundancy Review: a vulnerable look at my own progress, stumbles, victories, and everything in between. 

    Everything I have gone through has left an impression on me, and like Rumi, a lot of those impressions are scars/patterns that I could be ashamed of, but I should strive to own them, as they are not exactly going to go away any time soon.

    After this, Zoey and Mira join in with the second part of the chorus:

    “Why did I cover up the colors stuck inside my head?

    I should’ve let the jagged edges meet the light instead

    Show me what’s underneath, I’ll find your harmony

    The song we couldn’t write, this is what it sounds like”

    If it is not already clear, I love finding transgender comparisons in songs, and these lyrics are no exception.

    It took a long while for me to fully find a level of self-expression I was comfortable with, and admittedly, I have been struggling in the last couple of months to find the energy to express myself as a transgender woman outside, and even inside, of my flat. The last time I truly dressed as “myself” instead of just dressing comfortably in “egg” mode was VeXpo, but during that time I felt unapologetically me – even as I was walking around the convention hall with plushies dangling from my dress.

    No matter how messy it may seem, I need to push myself to go out dressed up as myself, because even if I do not entirely feel like it, because even at my messiest, the jagged edges of my expression make me who I am.

    The choruses after the first one carry a single variation in the final line, with:

    “The song we couldn’t write, this is what it sounds like”

    Changing out for:

    “Fearless and undefined, this is what it sounds like”.

    Whilst the first chorus relates more to Huntr/x’s story as a whole, given that they struggled to write a new song to take down the Saja boys, each subsequent chorus ending with “Fearless and undefined” shows that despite all the troubles the girls have faced throughout the story, and for all the uncertainty that may come in the future, they are together, and it is the struggles they have endured that will keep them together, even if everything feels “undefined”.

    I love this song so much, it has honestly been the song I have listened to the most from the film due to how much I relate to the lyrics. Though I still need a thumbnail picture… god this stuff is hard when I do not just want to screenie Youtube videos…

    Okay, swiped the album cover from the Amazon listing for the soundtrack, that should do it.

    Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are I hope you are able to take a chill weekend, mine is going to be occupied with a trip to Swansea for card game related purposes, which should be fun.

    KPop Demon Hunters is available on Netflix here: Watch KPop Demon Hunters | Netflix Official Site