Returning to development, status report

Last week I did put some time into doing some misc. work, moving files and exporting apps to a different computer, reorganizing folders, filling tax forms, and so on, and I'm returning to development this week. There's also a couple of topics I want to update you about.

Sick leave money

I mentioned last month that I had the intention of finding a writer that I'd trust to make some content while I was on sick leave. This would be someone on whose style I had enough confidence, had some familiarity with themes treated by the game, and was willing and capable of accepting the offer. Some of you warned me that this wouldn't be easy, and indeed I couldn't! So Chili Cherry and I have agreed that the income from Patreon that I would have otherwise earned for those weeks will go towards paying extra work hours on her part for a while. 

My health status

I heavily dislike sharing this much information about my condition, and I didn't even intend to until I felt like I could no longer continue to work last month, but I felt like once things go this wrong, I owed you at least an explanation. This is for the most part a retelling of what I already said on the Discord server.

I had been calling my condition sensory hyper-sensibility up until a few months ago, and while that's still and has always been correct, what's actually disabling for me is misophonia. Misophonia is a rare mental disorder that provokes certain noises to trigger a disproportionate, negative emotional reaction on the person.

The sensory hyper-sensibility has been with me for my whole life, and for the most part it's been inconvenient but rarely disabling. The misophonia started a bit over four years ago when my old neighbourhood's church had a change in management and decided they could do as much noise as they wanted whenever they wanted, which did put me on a path where I've been hopping from house to house as I could no longer stand living in any new place I ended up at.

About half a year ago, I bought and moved to a second hand van, but I had increasing trouble finding a place that was both quiet and secure, and ended up on a traffic accident due to anxiety and bad weather that left me without the vehicle, which is only about to finish getting repaired. After that, my mom was buying herself a new home, so we pooled some money to get one of its bedrooms soundproofed, but the work made by the company was a total disaster. After the accident, I was pushing myself to keep a pace of work I think would be reasonable under normal circumstances, expecting that the new room would finally let me be quiet. But when each new solution fails once and again and again for years, each new failure leaves me more exhausted and desperate, and adding that to the stress of work left me completely burnt out. Am I well now? No, I haven't been in the last few years. I just feel well enough to resume work, but then again my living conditions are shaky.

I'm currently practicing progressive muscle relaxation on a daily basis at home, finding the correct dosage of Valium to lower stress without making me feel knocked-out, and receiving neurofeedback therapy. I've received other forms of treatment in the past, but they were either temporary patches (medication), innocuous, or directly harmful (exposure therapy). I've recently started calling my condition misophonia because it perfectly fits with my symptoms, unlike other hearing disorders like hyperacusis, without having any sort of official diagnosis yet, because again, these conditions are rare enough that your typical family doctor may perhaps have read about them, but never met anyone who suffered or even treated them. In fact, the one diagnosis I have is one of hyperacusis, made by the one doctor who worsened my condition by pushing me towards exposure therapy. Some treatments recommended by doctors researching misophonia are progressive muscle relaxation and neurofeedback, among others, and neurofeedback in general is hard to trust because there's relatively little research and its results may vary heavily depending on the practitioner. This, on top of the price, is why I was reticent to give it a try until I could find a better location to live in, but I'm running out of options and I've corroborated that the doctor offering treatment here is regularly reading research and takes it seriously.

Hopefully I'll only ever bring up the issue again to say that things are getting better.