Hobbies I Used To Enjoy

04/01/2024 Cassie6 Comments

This week’s Weekly Wednesday Blogging Challenge question is Hobbies I Used to Enjoy and uh… hi, my name’s Cassie and I have ADHD, allow me to introduce you to my hobby graveyard

So, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (or ADHD), for anyone who doesn’t actually know what it is or how it presents, is a mental health disorder that includes a combination of persistent problems, such as difficulty paying attention, hyperactivity and impulsive behavior. And one of the major traits – especially in AFAB adults – is continually starting new tasks before finishing old ones. It’s a dopamine thing; the ADHD brain is constantly seeking the stimulation that will provide next hit of dopamine, and motivation is… difficult to sustain.

Although I would argue it’s not a deficit of attention – it’s the inability to control attention. If I’m doing something that’s giving the brain the happy juices, I can hyperfocus FOR hours – forget to move, eat, drink, anything.
On the other side of the coin, if it’s something that doesn’t give the dopamine, like idk paying bills, trying to corral the brain weasels is next to impossible – it’s not interesting, it’s not exciting, I can’t do it.

As a result, I’m always picking up new things, trying them, falling in love with them, buying all the things for it (we mentioned impulsivity, right?), making our entire personality about this thing, wanting to do it all the time, and then… discarding them when the next new shiny thing comes along to try. We call this a hyperfixation.

I fell into Duolingo hard. I was learning German, Italian and Welsh. I forked out for the paid account of Duolingo. I bought notebooks. I bought phrasebooks. I bought Richard Scarrey/Usbourne First Hundred Words books in the languages.
It lasted… maybe 6 weeks and all those books are languishing in my spare room.

Stardew Valley. I spent HOURS playing the game, I created multiple farms and multiple characters to play all the different variations of the story. I could literally – and I do mean literally sit for DAYS without doing anything else. Never intentionally, and there were times when I was sitting there thinking ‘Cassie, put the game down and go to sleep’, for example, but I couldn’t because there was SO MUCH HAPPY BRAIN JUICE.
That lasted… maybe 6 months.

Then the same thing happened with Animal Crossing. I played obsessively for 6 months, haven’t touched the game in nearly a year. And I found myself thinking the other week that I wanted to play again – but I don’t physically know how to pick it back up again.

Currently it’s Palia, and has been for 5 or so months. Like, we’re literally talking I UPGRADED MY LAPTOP TO PLAY THIS GAME. In a way, I’m really really glad I had it over the autumn when I was in so much pain with my hip because I don’t actually know how I’d have got through it. I’m still playing every single day and I have a fucking amazing spreadsheet tracking all the quests and stuff I’m doing in the game.

Then there’s the fear of the hyperfixation.

I’ve got one hell of a hyperfixation on Taylor Swift right now – I know I know – but was unsuccessful in the lottery and wasn’t able to buy tickets for the Eras tour. In August 2024. I still don’t know if I’m relieved about this or not because what if I’d spent £££s on tickets but by the time the gig rolled around, I’d lost interest?

Li and I went to Hobbycraft the other month and I picked up a whole bunch of kits of things I want to try – things that look fun. I spent probably £40-60 that day. It’s all sitting in the bag. Because what if I don’t like it? What if I DO like it? What if I try it and I’m no good at it.

And I’m terrified of the day that reading stops giving the dopamine hit.

So yeah. ADHD and abandoned hobbies. sigh I has them. All of them.

stacking the shelves

Stacking The Shelves #4

31/12/2022 Cassie6 Comments

I am feeling so fucking proud of myself right now y’all. I did a whole bunch of HUGE things in the week. Admittedly, I’m still exhausted and hurting but like beaming with pride.

Wednesday, we drove back down to the retail park just outside of Exeter and went into Currys. Li had been stealing my Switch and she’d moved onto my island in Animal Crossing, but she really wanted her own Switch. Because I’m an amazing Llama, I said that as long as she can afford/transfer me the monthly payments, we’d get her one on my Curry’s credit account. We sensibly waited for the Boxing Day sale, and there was an amazing bundle with 3 games and a memory card but the check-out process was just Not Working. We spoke to various customer service people but couldn’t get it to work. So we toddled to an Actual Store. Fucking annoyingly, that bundle wasn’t on sale anymore, and it was back up to well over £400 which we couldn’t quite afford. But she did get a Switch, a memory card and Animal Crossing.

Thursday was the biggest day. So I’d pre-booked us a table at Yo! Sushi in Exeter for 2pm, and we’d decided we were going in on the train a few days ago because of the noise Eliot had been making. And we’d decided I was going to have a treat in Waterstones because I legit cannot remember the last time I went to an actual bookstore. Way before the pandemic. To say I had a bit of a shopping spree would be an understatement. I spent close to £200 on books. I bought SIXTEEN books – though one of them is a guided journal and one of them was a drawing book for Li. And without trying, I managed 7 fiction and 7 non-fiction!

My poor credit card is curled up in the corner crying. And I earned enough Waterstones points that I had £20 credit so I maaaaaay have just also ordered

I’d grabbed a Yo! Sushi gift card in their sale – it was 20% off and I’d already said to Li that there was no budget for sushi, we could eat as much as we want to. We both love the place, neither of us has been to one in like 5 or so years. I got a £100 gift card and… well let’s just say that we earned enough bonus points in that one trip that dessert was free! LMFAO We ate about £60 worth of sushi and I tried a whole bunch of new dishes – and only one of them I didn’t eat because it was a weird texture. We will definitely be going back again, and I want to go to the Exeter museum as well so I think we’re planning on pencilling that in before I head back home at the end of January.

And then, because that apparently wasn’t enough books or something, I’ve also been to the library and checked out:

Although, to be fair, these were all reserved before Christmas.

I’ve had a bloody brilliant week, even though I’m still hopped up on co-codamol and naproxen a couple of days later. But I have all the books to read, my reading journal for 2023 is set up, and I’m super excited!

‘Books and ADHD and bears, oh my!’ (Spoilers: may not contain actual bears)

30/11/2022 CassieLeave a comment

So… it’s been a few weeks since I last posted again, and I wanted to talk a little about why that is and how my ADHD affects my reading.

The biggest thing over the last month has been a shiny new hyperfixation. Hyperfixation, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a trait of ADHD that means intense focus on a particular thing for an extended period of time. After wanting one for a couple of years, I finally bought myself a Nintendo Switch in the pre-Black Friday sales. And promptly fell down the rabbit hole of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It is wonderful and I am in love. I have many many issues with Tom Nook – the fucking crook. I signed up for a deserted island, and found that 2 people were moving there with me, along with Timmy, Tommy and Nook himself. Then Blathers – admittedly, he’s wonderful – and his museum moved in. I’ve got my house and done the first two upgrades, currently working on paying off getting a second room. And somehow… somehow I’ve been conned into building a shop for Timmy & Tommy and now… Now I’m building THREE HOMES for more people to move to the island?! I didn’t get a fucking furnished house – no, I got a tent.
I LOVE THIS GAME.

Another way ADHD affects my reading is that – as you’ve probably noticed – I’m great at starting books. The finishing thing? Not so much. And once again, I hit the point where I had over 25 books in progress, all my library books were suddenly due back and I got really stressed out. Reading stopped being fun and I was really overwhelmed, and knowing that I wanted to be writing about the books I was reading made it feel like extra pressure to Do It Properly.
And when I feel like I have to do things properly, it makes it feel like I can’t start it because I don’t want to do it wrong and so there’s no point in doing it.
(Logically, I know there’s no way to ‘do’ my own blog ‘wrong’ – that’s just how the brain feels in these situations).

Added to that, I’ve started the second year of my degree and have been struggling a little bit. I’ve been finding it hard to get motivated to study, and had my confidence knocked by getting a low grade in my first assignment – caused by misunderstanding the question. Being a distance-learning degree, there’s a lot of reading, the more I struggle with this the more difficulty I have reading for pleasure because that voice in the back of my brain yells at me every time I pick up a book that isn’t for school that I should be studying.

I have started reading again in the last week or so, I picked 4 or 5 of the books I was reading and tried to focus on those and have actually nearly finished a couple of them. Woohoo.

But the combination of all of these things, I haven’t been able to figure out how to come back to blogging. And the longer it’s gone on, the harder it’s become to open up that new blog post window and start typing. It ended up becoming this big thing in my head that I didn’t know how to breach.

Obviously, writing this post, I DO want to come back and start blogging about books again. And that’s the thing. I want to blog about books and reading, rather than writing a ‘traditional’ book review blog. I love sharing my love for the books I’m reading and geeking out about them, and enthusing about books. I’m definitely learning I don’t enjoy writing ‘proper’ book reviews, but I do enjoy my paragraph long drive-by reviews. I love doing the weekly link-ups, they’re probably my favourite thing. I just need to figure out how I’m going to make this work for me – because I really do want to find my rhythm, because I really really enjoy being here.

book reviews · life

A Quick Catch Up

31/07/2022 Cassie5 Comments

So, the news in brief and some reading roundups are

The not-COVID I had at the beginning of the month? Yeah, it turned out to actually be COVID. Li and I were both pretty sick for about 10 days, and completely exhausted for about another week. I still get fatigued pretty quickly but thankfully we were both triple vaxxed and survived in once piece.

I got my module result for this year of my degree – for A112 Cultures I received a distinction. 86%! As you can imagine, I am over the freaking moon. So that’s my first academic year complete, 120 credits. Only another 4 modules to go, starting in October with A229 Exploring The Classical World

I’ve been playing a lot of Stardew Valley, and Star Trek: Timelines. Li managed to bring home a Wii the other day, I rediscovered my Game Boy Advance, and we’ve also set up my old SNES. There has been much retro gaming and it has been wonderful.

Of course, a lot of gaming, a slight complete addiction to Pointless, and introducing Li to the Bridgerton Netflix show has meant I haven’t done a huge amount of reading lately. The bookx I have read recently:

Matt Haig – Reasons To Stay Alive
3/5, memoir, mental health, non-fiction, psychology
Bizarrely, as much as I thoroughly enjoyed the other couple of Haig’s books, this one didn’t gel with me. I found it a little too self-help-y, a little too twee. I didn’t connect with it and felt it bringing me down, rather than uplifting me.

Mary Beard – How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith
4/5, art history, history, non-fiction, philosophy, religion
Very interesting, would have liked it to have gone a little more in-depth in a couple of places but I do love her descriptions of the art and places she’s visited and writes about, and it helps bring it to life for me. Her passion also shines through

Mira Grant – Parasite
5/5, horror, medical, science-fiction, thriller
OMG y’all, I could not put this down. It had been on my TBR for ages, finally got it out of the library and sat and read the whole thing in one afternoon. I was reacting outloud and flailing and squeaking at Li… who picked it up as soon as I finished it, also read it in one sitting – falling asleep at like 1am!

My reserves of Symbiont and Chimera have just come in and oh yes, I will be starting Symbiont tomorrow!

Holly Black – Tithe
3.5/, faeries, paranormal, urban-fantasy, young-adult
This one is very much a case of ‘I liked it, but…’ – I was disappointed, really. It was enjoyable enough but there was something missing. It was a little predictable in places, the characters needed a little more rounding and the pacing was… hmm… uneven. And even though there are more books in the series, I don’t care enough to see if the library even has them.

Melanie Cantor – Life and Other Happy Endings
3/5, chick-lit, family, friends, library, read, romance

Such a weird read, and literally lost starts with every section of the story. So it started off as this great 5-star read about a woman who found out she had 3 months to live and was telling people the things she wanted to tell them etc… only then she wasn’t dying because of a test result mix-up, and she was back to being trodden over… only then she was pregnant and yawn. She was way more interesting when she thought she was dying!

Joanna Hickson – First Of The Tudors
4/5, historical-fiction

We’ve covered my love for all things War Of The Roses, yes? And this was no exception! The story centers around Jasper Tudor, his wardship of young Henry Tudor and his relationship with Margaret Beaufort, and the intricacies of the Yorkists, Lancastrians, Tudors, and Warwick The Kingmaker. I will be checking out more of Hickson’s work – she has other stories set in the time period.