what are we doing right now?

last updated: april 4th, 2025!

life is beautiful in every way because we got engaged to our partner system on the 10th of march, and this true happiness eclipses everything else on this page!

for the sake of it being a now page, though, let's have all the other life updates anyway:

we are still unemployed... but, we are making progress towards doing what we love full-time! we just finished volunteering at an art gallery, so hopefully we'll be able to get a job soon that is relevant to our career aspirations. to help with that, we're also working towards a gold arts award qualification.

we are part of an artists' collective in our city, and a lot of exciting opportunities come from that! for example, we have three upcoming exhibitions our work will be featured in: two at the end of may, and one in june. our work was also featured in an exhibition just a few weeks ago, and we were tasked with taking photos of the launch evening.

the first end-of-may exhibition we will be contributing an installation to, about mapping a lifetime or adolescence. the other end-of-may exhibition we'll be contributing mixed media paintings and a poetry booklet to, on the theme of neurodiversity. the one in june is with the photography group we mention later on this page, and we'll be partially responsible for curating it!

we try to perform our poetry often, and go to several different open mic nights a month - though sometimes the dates clash with other responsibilities. we are also trying to develop a collaborative performance piece with a friend who's a dancer!

since we are often performing, we are constantly generating new material. this is to say that we write pretty often. lately, the muse ariadne writing club has been a source of a lot of the inspiration. although, in our hiatus from neocities, we have fallen behind, and are now trying to catch up.

we were kind of art-blocked for abstract stuff, but through leading a painting workshop for our friends at a photography club, we feel the passion for acrylics and palette knives again! we're aiming to host the workshop many times, and to refine it and deliver it to different groups.

every tuesday, we go to that photography club - it's a group for lgbt+ people aged 16-25. there's also another art group for autistic adults that we're meant to be attending, but we hate it there and are going to try to fizzle our activity out...

in general, when it comes to creativity, we're making an effort to make cool stuff as much as possible, but also to fuse our disciplines into bigger projects. we have a lot of ideas and a lot of directions we could take things, so we can't let the wealth of choice give us decision paralysis as we work towards actualising the plans we have in mind. there's always so much to do, because living in the world is so inspiring.

to be honest, a lot of what we do is stuff we consider "work-related" and "productive", and we have an unhealthy complex about staying on that grindset. so we've been trying to allow ourselves to unwind sometimes, and just enjoy life. we do genuinely enjoy working, but there needs to be a balance, and when we find ourselves getting extremely stressed out about the idea of not working, we know we should be kinder to ourselves.

last year has been quite a lot in terms of retraumatisation and healing, and we are feeling strong and capable in 2025 - though we now have a new alter named reverie. she doesn't have any pages on this website, but maybe we'll convince her as we get more accustomed to websiting again.

we recently had another alter surface - their name is erato and they've been here for ages but didn't feel safe enough to explore being alive. so, as challenging as it is to have significant system updates, it's also proof that the threads are untangling and we're becoming more and more able to recover from our traumas.

one more thing about health - this year, we are determined to eat healthier and exercise more to improve our physical health. this is proving to be challenging, but we will do our best, as it's all we can do.

okay, but what about media and hobbies? well, we really like to read books, and once again we have set a goal to ready 36 books this year (and currently have 9/36). we mostly read translated (usually japanese) contemporary fiction. our goal to watch 24 new movies this year is doing much better than last year: we have 6 so far!

in conclusion, things are truly wonderful. some of them might be stressful and difficult, but it literally doesn't matter right now because we just got engaged.

learn more about now pages here!