Hiya! How have you been doing? If you've seen these, you know whats up. If you're new, these threads are for you to tell us about something cool going on in your life, or vent about anything you might want to!
For me, not a ton going on. Things are going well with the new partner, and we spent the holiday together. Chilling back at home the rest of this week, and am getting back to writing music! Still no luck with jobs, starting to apply to some lower level things just to get back to work of some sort. Shit's rough out there, been about 5 months now, and I know that ain't shit compared to what others have been going through employment wise. Watching more anime lately, so that's been fun, working through Space Dandy now.
The corgi sends her solidarity and snuggles!
Hope you've all been well! Remember, you are loved 
I left the one group chat I was in and gave up on the concept of having friends. It's not just that screaming leftist malappropisms at people doesn't work, that's more a subset of the problem. When I do not put in 100% of the effort and make myself 100% available all the time and message people first, people stop talking to me. It's not a two way street, they just don't even bother. I am putting in all the effort, because I guess I need them way more than they need me.
But there's also just no friendship or conversation if I do not give all possible ground to people. I understand that my special interests are improbably weird, even the really mundane ones, but it is like if I talk about them at all it's an instant kill to any conversation. I have facilitated actually having "friends" by pretty much exclusively talking about whatever it is they wanna talk about, all the time every time. These people barely know anything about me as a result. It's kind of infuriating.
So I had a fuckin meltdown and gave up, wrote a little rambling screed and left that group chat. I am now trying to devote more time to feeding my special interests, like making Sonic Adventure look/sound/play properly, recording cassette tape copies of stuff, multichannel audio and weirdo trans-sapphic books. Fuck trying to gut yourself and hiding your whole being for the sake of having "friends".
That's the worst part, though; I fell back into masking again. Like obviously if you wanna make friends, it helps to A) have similar interests, and B) give a little when it comes to interacting with theirs. But I just fell into the trap of totally eschewing stuff I like for the sake of other people. Honestly fuck talking lmao