Nothing

Oh . . . all those smiles and laughs are for @Former-Member. Thank you for keeping on trying with my name 🙂

Hello @Mazarita 🙂 I hope it's a late start due to peaceful sleeping and that the rest of your day is overflowing with good moments and creativity (my favourite distorted light shot)

Haha, @Former-Member, love all the emojis flying around you today.

Guess what, I've skipped a few steps and got myself into the shower and dressed!

*fireworks go off in celebration of my first shower in too long*

Lol. Yes, I'm a bit of a feral at times. I did get peaceful, relatively unbroken sleep from about 2am last night. About nine hours I think all up. Love the abstact quality of the distorted light, @Former-Member.

@Mazarita I know you have a new project and imagine your nerves are on hyper-drive. It makes my chest tingle - just the thought of it!
But there is also an underlying positive feeling that's just as strong - I'm happy for you.
This is probably going to be a bit of a rave, but I often find myself trying to understand emotions - to do that they have to be something physical, for me to get my head around them.
I don't understand the brain, but I have read through some big words in my quest. There seems to be a seemingly unending variable voltage, influencing a seemingly unending variation of chemicals, going through a myriad of processes, over an infinitely intricate network.
That sounds like an awfully long list of things that can go wrong to me. So I imagine, as we've evolved, we've developed a certain percentage that we can actually do without. Like if it was the voltage that goes wrong, it might burn-out part of the wiring in the network, something that sends or receives, and then that particular chemical won't get made?
When your looking at emotions like fear and excitement, I think fear is more basic; excitement is like a combination of chemicals; so when inevitable damage occurs to this extremely complicated organ, maybe certain emotions revert to the more basic.
Wow, that did end up being a bit of a rave!
Basically I just wanted to say, I hope you have a good day 🙂

@Former-Member, I like your raves.

Yes, we are very complicated physical structures as humans. And, for all the treatment options available to us, the brain is still a relatively unknown area. I know that with medications I've been given, there has certainly been an aspect of 'hit and miss' with the trialling, rejecting and eventually finding ones that help the most. To make things even more complicated, these 'suitable' medications can sometimes become unsuitable over time, depending on what state we are in and where life (and our bodies and brains) take us. Mental illness is not at all easy to treat, it seems to me.

Nerves are not too bad just at the moment. I'm taking the new project one step at a time, first just the exchange of emails and information about the project with the director. Then will come my time of actually putting together the short sequence she has commissioned from me. I think I'll be okay with this one. Problems arise much more noticably with my nerves if I'm in a sustained (and social) situation in the workplace, where the pressure is every day and the social anxiety I suffer comes under strain every day as well. I've never been able to sustain the stress of it all and have broken down repeatedly out of jobs over a long time. This one I'm doing from home, over the internet (my comfort zone) and is a one-off, so it should work out okay. I'm hoping anyway.

Have you been to the shops yet? I'm still basking in being clean and tidily dressed.

@Mazarita Love that you are basking and have a new project on the go.

@Former-Member @Former-Member and anyone else on this thread Hi and hope you are going well. This is an after dinner cup of coffee, the sort I used to have like clockwork, but not anymore as I try and keep coffee to before 6pm.

@Former-Member I liked your post too. It is best if we try to get our heads around the neuroscience of it a bit. That way we can get a fell for what emotions are natural biological processes triggered by environment and biology .. and the smaller bit that we can exercise conscious voluntary control over.

hi @Appleblossom

Hi @Former-Member

I have spent time with my new zoo family today. Sometimes animals are easier to cope with humans!

Saw you are feeling upset about family. Its a difficult time for lots of people and it seemed that you tried to do the most tactful thing by being on your phone. Its hard when we feel nothing we do is good enough and everybody has expectations on us.

Sometimes we try and please others or do our duty, but sometimes we do have the right to simply be ourselves. Be kind to you too.