GHDR Report 1010: Into the Doldrums | DSri Seah: Investigative Designer

SUMMARY // My GHDR plans were derailed by multiple chronic health conditions, but the major condition is not having like-minded people to talk to. How to address this?

A rough piece of wood holds up an elegant sagging shelf.

A rough piece of wood holds up an elegant sagging shelf. (full size image)

Happy Groundhog Day Resolutions Report Day! This report covers progress made since the September 9 report to date.

This has been a difficult month. I’ve been helping family members manage physical storage, and I have overextended myself and suffered from exposure to dust that triggered my bronchitis. I only recently realized that my other coughing symptoms were likely caused by GERDGastroesophageal Reflux Disease, in which acid flow up from the stomach and into my throat and lungs.. At least now I have something I can try to control for, but the month of walloped by breathing issues has caused my physical fitness and mental stamina to fall to dangerous levels.

Despite this handicap, my horizon projectsThese are long-term projects that have several stages, each stage building on the previous. As the project evolves, they can support other projects. did see some light progress. There are three main projects:

SRI-BOX (code) - The “Deno Web App” is now named dsri-box and has an official public repository at codeberg.org. Stage 1 lets me develop web applications on the front end, which means that I can start to develop my own front end library.
PKMS (blog) - There is a new “chat-style” All Writing page that presents posts from all three writing areas. It’s a more personable way to see what new writing on the website, and it helps distinguish between the “writing voice” I am using.
INDIEWEB CLUB (social) - I’ve written new copy for the renamed Web Revivial Group. I’m calling it the IndieWeb Club Nashua now to be associated with the IndieWeb Camp online organization. Their website and chat are an incubator for people making their own websites to get away from centralized platforms.
MASTODON MIGRATION (social) - I also finally migrated my Mastodon account to indieweb.social which is better aligned to my current goals than the starter server I used.

This is only about 5 or so days of self-focused work out of the entire month. The rest of the days went to handling family matters and recovering from illness.

Current Goals

While isolating myself for health reasons, it because very clear that I really crave conversation with like-minded people. This has been the goal of the past two years.

I’ve come to realize that I’ve been far more of a hermit than I thought I was. The constant interaction with family covered up the hermit feeling. The hermit feeling I have now is more like being disconnected from other people who get excited by the things I’m excited by, and want to work on them. My thinking is that fresh voices will lead to fresh thinking, helping me break out of the doldrums I’m experiencing.

Here’s rededication to that interaction goal:

Find new people to have conversations with on a regular basis.

I don’t think it reallly matters WHAT the conversation is at this point. Making the new connection, no matter how brief, is an improvement over not having any at all. I have to be more proactive about it despite my low reserves of energy, because right now it feels like nothing is worth doing.

A secondary goal continues to be finding new sources of income. With my low levels of energy and degraded physical health, this will require me to dig deep and try to do something that I know how to do. Ideally, I would have wanted to find like-minded people to collaborate with, but I don’t think it’s likely to happen due to wishful thinking. I can’t wait for family issues to resolve themselves either and they are beyond my control.

Lastly, there’s the underlying goal of simply recovering from bronchitis and learning to live with the extremely limited GERD diet. There is also physical weight conditioning to rebuild leg and core strength. I’ve dug out an old barbell and put 50 pounds of weight on it to just do slow leg squats to start. I’m hoping that as I rebuild stamina, my mental stamina will also improve.

Conclusion

I am too exhausted to think of anything else. I’m trying to keep moving forward when I am feeling beaten down. By focusing my hope on making new acquaintances to talk to, I’ll start to break free of the beaten-down feeling. I really need to be around people who aspire to think about creating new things.

On the bright side, I finally did get my Flu+Covid vaccine, so that’s one less thing to worry about.