Good few weeks ago I was referred to an employment support service by my psychiatric nurse and I now feel pressured by my consultant. I did tell her I would want to change career and now I feel like she wants that more than me. I don’t know, possibly she’s trying to be energetic to make me feel confident but it really doesn’t work. It feels to me like I’m not allowed any second thoughts or doubts. I did like her decisiveness to begin with, now it feels like it’s getting in the way of me communicating my real thoughts and feelings.

I don’t know how to tell her that without sounding rude and ungrateful, so I will possibly not say anything, but it comes to my mind from time to time that this service is there for me to benefit from, not for her to demonstrate how effective she is in placing me in a job that I won’t like but once thought I could enjoy.

Today is probably a first day that I actually miss my old job, this one that I got sacked from. I did like most of it’s aspects – I say it even though I realised I needed a change. I even started missing some of the workplace politics and ever changing team dynamics. In my current job I manage to avoid all of that, which is very easy as I’m ‘just a cleaner’ so there is no need or even an opportunity for me to participate in any team work, plus it’s only temporary agency placement. However, after being there for a week I realised I still don’t even know who the manager is, so this is probably as far from workplace politics as one can get and I decided I don’t particularly like that either.

My DBS (criminal record check needed for work in care) is still not back and this is the longest I’ve ever waited, I think. Me and The Boyfriend decided that if I get live in care job placement for Christmas, I’ll take it. He’s concerned about the fact that I need to earn money, I’m more focused on the fact that I wouldn’t even enjoy Christmas after having so much time off already. Therefore we will be eating various Christmas food over the next few weeks when we meet, so that we don’t feel like we’re missing on anything.

Despite having said that my SAD therapy lamp is working and giving me energy, I had to have a nap in the afternoon today. Also, I haven’t been to the gym since I started my cleaning job, but I may go tomorrow.

I came back to my habit of baking ‘healthy muffins’, recently I baked chocolate beetroot muffins and they had such a lovely texture and were very moist, better than any regular cake I ever tried, however they really smelled like beetroot! Today, two days after I baked them most of that smell disappeared and they are lovely, so I had two of them (not at the same time) with some sweetened apple sauce on the side. Next time I’m going to try zucchini muffins, hopefully they will be as moist but without any strange smell.

I use mixture of gluten free flours in my baking, but not due to any health reasons but because, apparently, gluten is what makes cakes go stale quickly and I don’t want to have the feeling that ‘I need to eat those muffins’ and indeed, they keep very well in the fridge and are always soft after I warm them up gently in the microwave.

The above reminds me, I was meant to write a post about how I’m managing my eating habits, but this needs to wait till when I get an urge to write about that, and possibly, after I loose another tiny bit of weight (yes, I lost some already).

It feels quite cold out there every time I’m outside, but yet, I’m managing without heating most of the time, which is not like me. I am oversensitive to cold and I was told it’s due to being autistic, but I didn’t really have this problem till my early 20s, so possibly it’s something to do with hormones or maybe stress levels. It would be nice not to feel cold that much any more, however, I would then be tempted to wear short sleeves much more often in summer and my scars on my lower left arm will be easily visible. They are from a couple of episodes of self-harming that I had when I was younger. I used to wear silicone patches that really helped to flaten the scars and I have a tattoo, but the tattoo artist didn’t do very good job and some of the scars are still visible, which will obviously only make people think the tattoo is covering the rest of them. With all the talk about mental health awareness, and even me writing about it here, I don’t feel like I’m ready for people to see my scars and have an opinion on them, an opinion that they will obviously not share with me.

After having a good few days away from Redecor, when I only did challenges that I found particularly interesting, I’m back on it and I did a couple of unusual designs again. This app is such a good creative outlet for me that I stopped doing other arts and crafts projects. Which is probably for the best as, with my bad executive functioning, I used to end up with loads of mess. Once I even damaged my bath enamel with some art experiments (I was trying to remove some paint layers from canvas and thought I’d do it in the bath to avoid mess everywhere else. How the enamel got damaged in the process, I don’t really know). I may try looking for other ways to create digital images out of patterns when I’ve got time.