• 18 Dec, 2025 *

Spent most of the day yesterday working on a habit tracker in C using ncurses.1

I haven’t been writing much lately because I’ve been focused on coding. Today I’m thinking about anonymity and how it impacts my honesty on the internet.

Because I see a few people openly discussing their sexuality or neurodivergence in frank ways, and that’s not where my focus is when I sit down to blog. I don’t live in an area that celebrates the LGBT community, and the state itself is legislatively anti-LGBT; the world doesn’t understand let alone celebrate neurodivergence, and I’m not the "sexy" sort of neurodivergent. Depression is seen as romantic; psychosis is scary.

I’m not someone who gets lonely very often. My sister and my ex-boyfriend are the only two people with whom I’m in regular contact, since my family disowned me during my most recent psychotic break. I’m more open about the fact that I live with mental illness than I am the fact that I am attracted to men. To some extent it doesn’t matter who I’m attracted to, since I’m too ashamed of the fact that I’m disabled and unemployed to seek out human companionship.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of. There are millions of people who aren’t able to work due to disability. But it’s taken me almost a decade to come to terms with the fact that because of how I am, despite the fact that I’m still young it’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to work again. Which means I’m going to spend the rest of my life in poverty. Because I’m poor on top of everything else, I don’t feel as if I have anything to offer a partner except myself, which is problematic and also not entirely true.

We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals. – Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer

Coding, for me, is a largely solitary activity. I have years’ worth of learning ahead of me, and I’ve thrown myself into it for the last six months. Blogging is the only real break I take during the day, other than stepping out of the office to deal with household chores or to run errands. A couple times a week I focus more on creative coding or writing interactive fiction than on learning anything new.

Sometimes I wonder how well I would be progressing in my self-study if I were a more social person; someone who goes to in-person coding meetups and participates in hackathons. That’s not worth spending too much time on. That’s like wondering how my life would have turned out if I weren’t prone to psychosis, or if I didn’t have ADHD. Medication gets me further than wishful thinking, but I’m the one who has to do the work to identify what symptoms are causing me the most difficulty and to overcome that difficulty.

Today the difficulty is focusing. I’m struggling. I’m sure once I get a walk in I’ll feel a bit better. But I’m having to sit with the fact that nothing I’m reading is sinking in, and I have so many options for coding exercises or projects that I don’t know where to start. That I’m going to have to talk to my nurse practitioner about upping the dosage on the Strattera, and that we might have to add an antidepressant, because I’m noticing that discipline isn’t always enough to overcome the complete lack of motivation.

So I’m contradicting myself again. "Meds aren’t going to fix the problem" and "I need appropriate doses of medication to function" can both be true at the same time. Some days I wake up with all the discipline I need to overcome my inertia and some days all I want to do is sit and stare at the wall and not think. Today is one of those days.

Maybe this is a way of being honest. Not every day is going to be a day of fruitful learning and accomplishment.

I’m still working out how to implement a streak counter so I can keep track of how many days in a row I read, code, or game. Ideally I’ll figure out a way to track days that I do all three with a different color, or getting the date to block out as a color rather than having the calendar day appear as that color, but for right now it’s starting to do what I want it to do and I’m happy to see how much progress I’m making in the ability to plan out larger programs. This one I’ll be lucky if it comes in under 500 LOC; I’ve done a few modularized programs in JavaScript and Rust but nothing major.↩