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nyame0021. Bake
Arguably, livewellbakeoften.com's peanut butter cookie recipe has been more a contributor to me keeping it together than anything actually intended for that purpose. Baking is mindless, and the care it requires (to me, at least) isn't involved; it responds just as well if I'm having a terrible day as if I'm alright (something that cannot be said about my fanfic or original prose intended for completion).
I bake lots: the aforementioned cookies, brownies, yellow cake, chocolate cake, and random things I make on craving. I'm a big stress-baker, plus aside from frozen French fries and chicken tenders, I'm not much of a cooking person: the stuff I'd want to make tends to be a little too strenuous, and I like sweet stuff, so it works out great.
Baking is really fun, honesty. Highly recommended on your next bad day.
2. Read
The shenanigans of fictional people in books are an incredibly fun distractor. I haven't read much at all this year, ashamedly, but I've been getting back on it, partway though a couple novels and having read quite a few one shot fanfic over a the last few months.
It's a nice form of emotional engagement; you get to experience a breadth that you never could in real life, and for me it takes enough focus that I can't wastefully multitask during it, just listen to quiet music, at most.
A great fic I finished recently was Reconstruction Site by disco_vendetta (I listened to the podfic by Rhea314, which is also wonderful). In my bookmarks I said that the author can write affection incredibly well, and I felt genuinely warm for the hour after.
One of the fantasy novels I'm reading is Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, which is a really beautiful novel, with a bunch of stubborn girls who are stubborn in very different ways, in a really thoughtful deconstruction of a fairytale I'd never thought to examine, in an incredibly real world. It's fun as hell, frankly, though terrifying or sad or bitter at times. But a fun world to fall into for an hour.
Some good poetry is nice, too--I'll often just go through the tag on my Tumblr. It also helps with the other hobby I'll talk about later.
3. Watch rom-coms
When I saw that there was a sequel to A Christmas Prince on Netflix, I squealed and watched it immediately. Is it good, from the view of a critic? Not at all, but I devoured that shit. I watched so many rom coms November and this month--Set It Up, To All The Boys I've Loved Before, both A Christmas Prince movies. Those first two are genuinely excellent on their own merits, but I'm just a sucker for a tropey hour and a half, always.
I tend to curl up on the couch with my baking and the one comforter that's always there and lay there and enjoy the movie while getting some rest to re-up for the week. It's a nice time.
4. Listen to music
It's been a lot of Arctic Monkeys recently, because I'm a hopeless romantic at heart and the longing in those songs twists my heart up a shitload. I love their music, and they manage to distill the worst pining and wanting into smooth baselines and lovely vocals. (Some recs if you've never heard of them: Do I Wanna Know?, Do Me A Favor, Piledriver Waltz, 505.)
But in general, music moves me: yesterday (Friday) my school held a concert, and the band played Resplendent Light, which I hadn't heard before, and it was so beautiful. Before it, the band instructor said to imagine a pristine pond while it played, and it felt like stepping into an innocence, or a very gentle and kind ascension. I really needed it then, and I found it on YouTube this morning, still so pretty and calming and uplifting.
But aside from the transcendence, all the music can occasionally be a spark for the last thing here:
5. Write not-fic
When I'm feeling down, the last thing I wanna do is be productive or work on a legitimate project beccause the effort needed and the often inevitable failure is incredibly draining, so sometimes I'll write little snippets of self insert stuff that will ever see the light of day, or pretty imagery that'll never manage to quite fit something I'm actually working on.
Most of the time, though, it's poetry. I've been writing it for years--there's an insufferable poem I wrote at ten and posted to a poetry website that needs to be destroyed from the face of the Earth, but it languishes--but I like to think the poems I write now are better and keep everything I've written since June 2017 in a Google doc, and the document starts out rough, but it's approaching readable.
Most of them are about love, like quite a bit of my writing, but many are about family, frustrations, guilt, politics, pick your poison. I find poetry really useful because it's the only one that allows me to write something emotionally honest, sometimes brutally, without having to write nonfiction. It's a really good release--paper listens. Google docs files and note apps, too.
This year I've got myself a crush, too, which is quite awful, but also makes for a good muse to project the maybe bad poetry onto. Write something about about them, or music, or touch. Maybe angels.
