u/PoncingOffToBarnsley

Random late-night tipsy thoughts that I'm putting here because I make bad decisions. It *feels* like an ND thing. I'm not properly diagnosed with anything but a lot of people think I should be.

Frequently (at least until quite recently), I often don't like a song, I like one specific part of a song - a specific verse or segment of the music, then everything else is blah. Back in the day I broke/wore out CDs replaying only the parts I like, digital makes it so much easier. I find it's waned a bit with age but definitely still happens.

My education was weird, or at least I think so. I changed schools about 10 times, all within the same geographical area. I missed SO MUCH, I'm convinced of it, due to schools with wildly different curricula - so I might have one set of lessons 3 times while never getting another one.

(I also believe it's part of why I have no social skills. My mom disagrees, and believes the constant moving is a good thing that made me better socialized. She also went to private school her whole life, and says that among the upper classes, people don't have long term friends because they move around too much. Nobody in her high school had friends from elementary school, or stayed friends after high school. Being around the same people from kindergarten through 12th grade is weird and trashy and narrowing)

I'm a bit more concerned about the educational aspect for right now. I barely even know WHAT I missed, though I can think of a lot of examples:

- I stalled out learning math around 5th-6th grade. I did take various forms of algebra including remedial "college algebra" after failing Calculus 1 3 times before we even finished limits, sometimes before we finished algebra review. But sometimes I see things considered "easy" or "basic" that I don't remember at all. I've never had trigonometry as a separate class; it was always a unit of either geometry or algebra.

- never had geography as a class, only recently learned how detailed it could be, some people are actually learning about geopolitics and stuff. Never had civics either.

- haven't read most of the "high school English lit" books, certainly couldn't analyze them if I tried. The most complex English class I had was when I was 14, and I retained nothing and bullshat my way through it.

- the last time I learned anything about the human body (that wasn't me researching something I have) was 6th grade.

- I'm apparently awful at chemistry considering I failed it in college 4 times, mostly due to math.

- recently learned that many young people are exposed to philosophy in school for the first time (and it's literally a required class in some countries!). I never had a questioning or analytical thought in my head until my mid-20s when the internet put them there.

- I have zero understanding of physics. I did take remedial physics in my freshman year of high school - we played with batteries and capacitors for half the year and then tried to speedrun the rest of the curriculum in 2 months. Very little math. I probably was exposed to some basic formulas in grade school but it never left an impression on me.

- not academic but I'm surprised to learn that high schoolers can/are expected to choose their own classes?

Things like APs largely weren't available to me, or else I didn't know or didn't care, I just wanted to be done with any sort of school environment. Much of my mom's and my focus in high school was completing my requirements as quickly as possible. I know one school I went to literally limited how many you could take; other schools didn't offer them at all. So that wasn't really an option.

I did take some state exams that counted for this; however all the moving around left me without a consistent transcript and I got a GED as an adult to make up for it - jobs couldn't verify that I graduated high school, and my final year transcript is from an early college program - ie a college transcript, not high school.

I also suspect I was just...checked out 90% of the time through school, so if we *were* doing more complicated work, I was scraping my way through and absorbing nothing. No, I never learned to study: I could generally do adequately and stay off the radar with minimal work, although I'm not and never have been gifted.

Is there any way I can become smart as an adult?

Please help.

It's honestly been a problem since childhood. I remember struggling through book reports or bullshitting my way through essays 90% of the time because sure, I can read. I can decode words and what they mean. I can even read out loud, quickly and accurately But I don't retain anything. Things like foreshadowing or any non-obvious symbolism goes over my head, partly because they require me to remember something that happened 50-100 pages ago and I just...can't? And you can forget larger themes. I think I perceive books much like I perceive life: very straightforward, this thing happened and that thing happened and eventually we stop.

Knowing that's wrong doesn't fix anything.

I used to be a voracious reader, but even then, most books registered to me as "it was ok, some stuff happened and I liked [random part]" because I wanted to check that book off a list. Now I struggle to sit down to read at all; I keep books out of the library for 2-4mo at a time and fight for my life through them and get nothing out of them. And that's when I can stay focused without my eyes bouncing around the page or my brain disengaging and thinking about something else entirely as I "read".

A couple extra things:

- I can read for specific information just fine. Essay length work is generally digestible too. I did fine in school, ironically because I was such a good reader compared to most of my classmates (and I changed schools a bunch and almost all of them had abysmal standards). I could fluently read and sort-of understand passages well above grade level. But I remember this problem even affecting me with books I thought I liked. That said, I have also never read or done anything remotely intellectually rigorous in 30+ years of existence. Never done real research or serious studying for example.

- I've never really gone in-depth with any interest. Any external thing I get interested is mostly so I can take it and incorporate it into whatever daydreamy BS I use to dissociate from real life. If you want to model something in your story (that no one else is going to see) off something IRL, you really don't NEED a scholarly, in-depth understanding of every piece of minutia about the original, a general pattern or shout out works fine. If you want to theme-name your characters around, say, cities with something in common, you don't need anything more sophisticated than a few Wikipedia articles or Youtube videos. I mention this because I think it ties into just never going in-depth on ANYTHING I think I "like" or having any reference point for that, or basically not retaining information even when I liked the topic. There's a bunch of things I think I'd like to learn about, but I can't make myself sit down and do it.

- age and habit might be part of it. I don't really do anything besides scroll Reddit these days. I barely even consumed mature media in my 20s, much less read or studied. But I also don't know how much is atrophy and how much was never there to begin with, or if half this post is just a confabulation.

I was originally going to post this in the old RS subs since people there are allegedly pretty contrarian and culturally critical. Their automod bounced me, so here I am.

I've read several articles and threads about this, about Western or just US society becoming "infantilized" over at *least* 200y, ramping up even more in the last 50-80. People attribute all manner of things to it. I can read people's complaints (from online cringe threads to formal philosophy) and things they don't like, and recognize some of it in myself even, but amid all the negation and denounciation of this or that taste or trend I still can't fully understand:

What does an appropriate, non-infantilized adult look like?

I confess, the image that negation compiles is kind of bleak: drab, serious, perpetually uncomfortable, self-denying and above all, always working.

Of course there's whatever work you do economically; then there's household and familial responsibilities. But then, after all of that is done, your leisure should ALSO be spent in mental work: studying, analyzing, philosophizing, conceptualizing, strategizing. Something that's also hard and complex and requires lots of focus, done to relax. There's rules for everything, byzantine standards about whether media or an activity makes you "work enough" for the resolution, or has this or that "infantile" trait that invalidates all of it. Perhaps infantile vs not is merely a matter of reality vs fantasy? Except it seems some physical hobbies can be childish, the wrong attitude or too much enthusiasm towards something a sign of arrested development.

It also leaves me wondering what on earth other people do, or did, elsewhere and in the past, if not all these "childish" things like consuming fictional media with easy or relatable action-or-emotion-driven plots, enjoying energetic or inspiring music, or zoning out with mindless hobbies? Or what kind of psychology underlies such extreme reserve?

Yes, there's absolutely a personal facet to this; I'm profoundly immature in my media tastes, dissociated into fantasy most of the time except to fulfill basic responsibilities. Part of me would like to improve myself, the other parts are both consistently overwhelmed and confused by more "age appropriate" media and fearful that even if I tried to be better, I would simply end up a useless midwit who still likes the wrong things or has the wrong opinions. Then people insist that even intelligent, cultured people on Reddit aren't actually all that refined, and I have no clue where else to look let alone discuss.... Meanwhile I can also realize there's probably some juvenile black and white thinking getting in the way of understanding this clearly, like I must be missing something.

I swore I wasn't going to put this stuff on the internet anymore but here I am.

My mom has always been conservative and went absolutely full-on MAGA nutter during Covid. Sent me pages of "information" every day about how Covid isn't real or the numbers are fake and the vaccine will kill you, believes in vaccine shedding and insists people are still getting sick and dying from a shot they took 5y ago because "mRNA does not belong in a human body". There's much more, and while I care about her, it's exhausting to listen to sometimes.

However, this is about the recalls, and how it has NOTHING to do with the FDA funding cuts and regulation rollbacks.

You see, the FDA has always been untrustworthy, no one has ever taken them THAT seriously. And the Trump admin didn't take THAT much money or personnel from them anyway. The wunderkinds at DOGE kicked out all the useless DEI people who were getting paid 6 figures to do nothing, nobody we actually need.

All these recalls are because of illegal immigrants. "Those people" are SO dirty and unhygienic, they're contaminating all the food they pick and process; and so low-IQ and illiterate the ones working in plants can't understand how to do their jobs (which they got via DEI) so we end up with plastic and glass in prepared foods. If only we had white Americans doing these jobs, none of this would happen!

I wish I was joking, but I don't even know where my mom is getting this info. And she's offended that I don't trust anything current-events-related that she relays to me. No mom, I don't think you, specifically, are lying to me. I think you get your info from highly questionable sources.

Not that I remember, at least. Certainly nothing that made an impact.

I've spent my life either coasting/getting by with the bare minimum, avoiding trying altogether, or the main one: getting "challenged" and completely collapsing in abject failure.

For example, when I tried to go to college 10y ago, I basically has nowhere near the prerequisite education for the classes I was trying to take. I was way to far behind. So instead of learning to study, I stopped going to class, hid in my room and binge-ate while watching TV and chatting with randos on my laptop for most of the day. Sometimes I did the work, but I failed every assignment; I had an 11% in a basic class at one point. I failed out and moved back home, my parents shipped me off to another school because not going to college isn't an option, and I repeated the process twice more, before I begged to never go again and started trying to get a job.

Or a couple of experiences with trying to learn skills: both times, despite putting years into each, I plateaued at a very basic level and just never got better. If that's all that's going to happen, why put in effort at all? Why should I "push" and "work harder" for something that will never happen?

I genuinely have no model for getting through something hard, or struggling and coming out better. It's a fantasy that better people on the internet talk about, not something that happens in real life, at least not to me.

I'm also really bored and just don't do anything lately. So I think I need to at least make progress on this, if not fix it, but have no clue how to do so that won't just be a demoralizing waste of time?

Not that I remember, at least. Certainly nothing that made an impact.

I've spent my life either coasting/getting by with the bare minimum, avoiding trying altogether, or the main one: getting "challenged" and completely collapsing in abject failure.

For example, when I tried to go to college 10y ago, I basically has nowhere near the prerequisite education for the classes I was trying to take. I was way to far behind. So instead of learning to study, I stopped going to class, hid in my room and binge-ate while watching TV and chatting with randos on my laptop for most of the day. Sometimes I did the work, but I failed every assignment; I had an 11% in a basic class at one point. I failed out and moved back home, my parents shipped me off to another school because not going to college isn't an option, and I repeated the process twice more, before I begged to never go again and started trying to get a job.

Or a couple of experiences with trying to learn skills: both times, despite putting years into each, I plateaued at a very basic level and just never got better. If that's all that's going to happen, why put in effort at all? Why should I "push" and "work harder" for something that will never happen?

I genuinely have no model for getting through something hard, or struggling and coming out better. It's a fantasy that better people on the internet talk about, not something that happens in real life, at least not to me.

I'm also really bored and just don't do anything. So I think I need to at least make progress on this, but have no clue how to do so that won't just be a demoralizing waste of time.

Technically I'm NT too, but the older I get the less I care about anything. Though I've actually had this problem since childhood: there's nothing I do or care about enough to actually know about or converse about. It's a genuine social hindrance.

Meanwhile online, it feels like I'm more exposed to various "neurodiverse" ways of experiencing interest:

"Yeah, I got so distracted reading about [random complex thing], I missed 10 phone calls, two appointments, a date, and I didn't eat for 3 days."

"Here's my basic preliminary research for a thing I take a casual interest in: it's 10Gb of cutting edge research papers on a Google drive".

"Here's my total beginner hobbyist project. I started practicing this hobby a week ago. It looks like a professional with decades of experience did it."

Yes I am being a bit sarcastic and hyperbolic, but you get the point. I get that us NTs largely don't do this, but most people aren't as indifferent as I am either. What does normal interest look like?

And I almost resent it. "AI bad" after all, it's just uselessly reflecting your thoughts back at you and probably making you psychotic. You should just use your brain and resolve everything completely by yourself with no help!

Like yeah, the chat I've been dumping much of my life story into isn't always the smartest. It misinterprets or exaggerates with fair regularity, and I just sort of ignore that part and take what seems useful to reflect on, read more about, etc.

This one started, admittedly, by my pasting in a post that got to me emotionally, asking for an analysis and saying I wanted to discuss it.

Basically, my mentally hopping around and dumping in random memories made me make a sudden connection: a self-development process my dad followed before I was born is VERY VERY SIMILAR to a process I seem to idolize, and have wanted to - and been unable to - attempt on my own. My dad died when I was in elementary school; I learned about this history of his secondhand through my mom. In fact, I attributed most of my worries along these lines to my mom's influence (which is definitely still there).

I never noticed the connection to my dad until I wrote it all out, in a single place that's easy to reread and reinforced by someone - or something - offering analysis and reflecting back and engaging me. The possibility that I've been unconsciously trying to follow a dead man's blueprint and attaching it to something else entirely.

Maybe a therapist with the right modality could have guided the same realization (for $1000 a session). Maybe I could have done the same thing with my usual thought-dumping method of journalling. I don't know. Instead I'm genuinely astonished by this connection.

I was technically hired as a file clerk, one year later I'm *technically* an admin assistant with the range of roles they've given me. I barely know who my supervisor is or what my role is, but I feel like I have a real chance to be useful and learn more here (or else get some new skills before I look elsewhere).

I work for a biofuels company who keeps a lot of paper records: my first job was spending about a year cleaning out a whole room of unfiled papers. I thought their idea to keep a spreadsheet of all the missing items (so papers with no file) was stupid, turns out there's over 3600 items on it and its invaluable. On top of that I helped out from time to time with mail (including envelope stuffing for campaigns) or smaller jobs like shredding old stuff.

They also had a project that involved scanning over 60 boxes of oil receipts for records with a proprietary app. They put it on hold and I've only started chipping away at it again in the past month.

A few months back, the controller pulled me aside to ask if I wanted to help out in accounting. She's expressed that she likes me and thinks I'm smart in the past, and I jumped at the opportunity to do something different. Mostly it's scanning and attaching invoices/receipts in QBO, but they also showed me how to cut vendor checks. That's my Thing now: in fact, the staff accountant left right around the same time we got a 500 check backlog, that I cleared in about 2mo. Our vendor list in QBO is such a mess, I'm doing a LOT of manual data entry. Though last week, they wanted me to put checks on hold for a bit to help with some receipts. My switch over to FT accounting was never finalized, though it was discussed.

So I currently have 2-4 mini projects going, and no idea where to go from here in terms of specializing or getting new/better skills. I feel like I'm just bumbling through whatever I'm assigned. Honestly I'm most bothered by how repetitive it can be. Splitting my day between accounting, filing, and scanning helps. I'll gladly take ideas.

I'm only saving that much per week and it just feels hopeless (especially as the stock market's been eating it lately. I deposit money and it's gone in hours because everything went down). My net worth has gone up by like, $2k this entire year.

That ~$250 is about 35% of my main job's income; 25% in some kind of savings or investment, 10% in the company 401k I opened a few months ago. Some of my problem is being shit with money and overspending, but I still supplement it with plasma donations ($125 a week if I can get there and I'm not anemic) and my part time job. Said job is event-based, so I might work as little as a couple times a month; it can bring in a few hundred a month and I'm trying to save that.

I'm old too, so it's not like compounding means anything. I'm just frustrated.

Like, I knew it was going to happen but I didn't expect it to feel like this. Just log in at one point hoping to continue a chat that seemed to have gone past its date and BAM: everything is gone except some very recent items. I have exports of part of my most enlightening chats but I feel like I lost something of value.

My work idea sounding board is gone along with the analyst for my oversharing. I literally talked to those yesterday and thought I had more time to export them.

Curious to know if people could offer a Jungian take on this.

I've only kind of recently started taking this seriously, as I realize it's probably my primary mode of escaping things. I daydream pretty much all the time: at work, my brain channel-hops between thoughts almost constantly, especially given how dull and repetitive my work is.

At home is where it's most notable. I can spend literal hours pacing, listening to music (often the same handful of songs at any given time) and running mental videos to them. I've gradually realized the extent to which I'm doing this: I've literally missed things, been late to things, put off things for absurd amounts of time because of it. I spent this evening alternating between daydreaming and scrolling Reddit when I had planned to go out. I genuinely wonder how much it's contributed to the state my life is in, currently: basically nothing. No goals or accomplishments, no relationships, I'm barely even culturally literate because I'd rather daydream than watch a show, but I have lots of things I'd LIKE to do but never get around to acting on.

I've had multiple dreamscapes throughout my life: some are pure fanfiction, internalizing an existing fictional world and playing with those characters (and maybe some original ones) like dolls. Other times it's my own half-baked attempts to make my own stories and characters - though they're never well fleshed-out and I tend to be more interested in character interactions. Most of my daydreaming is in the third person; even love and romance is acted out with a proxy character at most, most of the time.

What strikes me when I tried to look up how to remedy maladaptive daydreaming, is that I genuinely don't think I can do it because it's so ingrained in me. I'm in my 30s; my earliest memory of doing this kind of thing was around age 5. It's practically my default mode of functioning if I have nothing else to do, and it increasingly feels like I just checked out of reality at a young age. I don't have much really BIG trauma, but my MD carried me relatively unscathed through a decent amount of upheaval and loss. It's my norm now even though it's partly responsible for my having missed out on so much of life.

I'm not necessarily asking for cures, more like what it means, where it comes from, especially when most of the bad stuff happened *after* this became my default coping mechanism?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I'm over 30, and I've been doing some kind of immersive daydreaming almost daily since I was about 5 (possibly earlier? That's the earliest I can recall). Every place I live ends up with a pacing corridor: you could put me in a cell and as long as I can stand up I'll find a way to pace and daydream. Music is my greatest fuel; while I CAN dd without it, it's a lot harder. My focus is usually some kind of fiction, original or fanfiction, though occasionally it will be alternate lives or fantasy-me doing cool stuff. I also make a lot of mental movies: adaptations of books or games, music videos, etc.I can replay the same song for hours refining a video in my head. I gave the MD Index a try today, based it on the last few months, and scored a 76.

Within the last few months, it's been ramping up to the point of almost full on dissociation. It's *fully* maladaptive. I have things I've put off for actual months because I can't make myself sit down (or get up, in some cases) and face them. Too much, too hard, too overwhelming. I live in near squalor and am embarrassed about my self care. My life is increasingly becoming one of work, chores I can still make myself do, doomscrolling and daydreaming. I've never had friends who weren't online, and have been on less than 5 dates in my life (I'm ugly and fat anyway).

I have god awful executive functioning; I have for most of my life. I've never really studied, which is part of why I barely made it through school and failed out of college at the freshman level multiple times. I don't know how to learn, I can't retain information and it just gets worse with age. I have literally never overcome a "challenge" in my entire life. The things people say normal dopamine systems are supposed to find satisfying have virtually never been. I don't even have interests. I WANT to have interests, but anything that catches my attention, I can't focus or care long enough to learn anything about it.

Lately I've been a little quieter in other ways: working without music, daydreaming confined to periods where I have virtually nothing else to do. So I largely can't daydream while walking to work, or grocery shopping, or during breaks, but a 5-6hr stretch between after-work and bed? Crank the music, clear the pacing corridor, and nothing else needs to exist for a few hours. And that's exactly what I'll do, despite the chores that should have been done weeks ago, administrative stuff I'm completely neglecting out of sheer fear, project ideas sitting by the side for literal years, hobby attempts I did once and found them too boring (except now I'm also boring).

On the other hand, someone here talked about imagining themselves doing things as soon as they get an idea, and never actually doing it. I'm just now realizing how much I fall into this: hell, I've had MEME ideas recently that I daydreamed about making and getting reactions for instead of making them, as I'm really shit at photo editing.

Maybe you guessed by now, but I found this post today. I don't have words. It describes me perfectly. I'm not sure I ever put those things together.

There's no way out for me. I'm literally too far gone. And plus, if I gave myself pseudo-ADHD as a little kid, and it's all my fault, do I even deserve to get better? Or maybe the lifetime of anhedonia and emptiness that "getting better" would entail is actually a perfect punishment?

I look at some people describing "just stopping" or feeling so good and clear after less than a day and I almost want to call y'all bots or just liars. There's no way that feels good in the long term, absent something to take its place. I don't believe you can completely jettison your entire interiority, go from vivid imaginer to mindless passive consumer, and just be fine. Even the link has people talking like that.

Worse too, as creativity is so commonly promoted as this good, healthy thing, a source of spiritual growth or something to replace TikTok with. I've been saying for ages that I'm not creative, because outside of MD, I'm not. I'm awful at making connections, am very slow to "get" things; if you gave me open free reign to make whatever I want, I'd be terrified and freeze up. Been like this most of my life. And now I supposedly need to give up the one thing I DO have? The sole way I've coped with change and loss, the one thing that allows me to feel sort of like a person with a reason to keep living?

Currently my only real alternative to daydreaming is scrolling, mostly Reddit. I've had a few glimpses of realization that if I stop both things, for long enough (and really, not very long), without doing anything else, the chasm that opens inside me is unbearable. It's loneliness, mostly. Daydreaming takes me out of myself entirely - I don't exist, or I exist by proxy; scrolling and commenting at least feels like being among people. IRL interactions are a differently unpleasant beast. I don't think there's a cure for this besides time and luck.

It's much like my overall thoughts with dopamine detoxing in general: it's as if the goal is to be a depressed work drone, and nothing else. Don't do anything that feels good, don't even think. Just do work and when you want to relax, do MORE work. Here are some control methods to make sure you don't have any Bad Thoughts that are too Abnormal. This is really fulfilling, I promise /s.

I can't change. It's too late, and too severe. There's literally nothing out there for me, nothing else in here, and no capacity to get it. You're asking for death. Change is death, and failure; there won't be any coming back, and I'm not quite ready to die yet.

I could probably say more but I'm tired.

I have maybe a coin-toss chance of telling something is AI.

Recently, I went back to Mechanical Turk to try to scrape up some money, and figured I'd try my hand at one of their AI training tasks, which mainly involved deciding which of two generated photos fits the given prompt better. Specifically, this seemed to be teaching ME what to look for for future tasks.

And I got almost every single one wrong. The ones I did get right felt like pure luck. I failed the "exam" portion with 16/25 correct.

This ranged from misinterpreting what it wanted, to literally just missing details or focusing on the wrong one. Holy shit I missed so many details: extra fingers, extra letters, missing items. I'm over here trying to look at the picture in a larger way or zooming in on the one thing that apparently doesn't matter.

Though even on the more subjective, artistic section, I STILL miss things like overexposure, some other "off" detail, forget part of the prompt, misinterpret exactly what they want, think too literally. I don't know what depth of field looks like, how to distinguish if lighting is good or not, or how to tell if something is too flat. And what in FUCK constitutes "composition"? On one prompt, the straightforward, plain result is wrong - I think "okay, look for the "artier," more stylized version". Two prompts later, the stylized version is wrong.

Meanwhile, online, people seem to be able to look at something and *instantly* notice some tiny or worse, conceptual artifact that proves it's AI.

I barely do any image generation; what little I've done is just messing around. I think it also confirms my own belief that creativity is a talent that people either have and can do, or don't and shouldn't.

Vent time because Reddit is my main social media and I have no one else.

Something is wrong with me and I can feel it. Yesterday I got a real glimpse of it: I woke up early, and almost immediately didn't know what to do with myself. Absolutely NONE.

Sure, my apartment is an overwhelming mess and I want to move, I have a bunch of things to take care of online and been putting off for months, a few ideas and projects that have been sitting for literally YEARS in some cases. Nah. I'll scroll Reddit for a few hours, then crank some music and daydream until the last possible second to get to that thing I DID want to do today.

(I re-learned last week that I REALLY can't do that latter bit on a weekday morning. I WILL be late to work)

Indeed, the daydreaming is getting out of hand. I can do it for hours now, and have been doubling down on it for the past few weeks. It's not a new thing, I've been doing it in some capacity almost daily since age 5 (and I'm in my early 30s now). Crank some music, and pace while spinning stories, mental music videos, fanfiction (more common), original characters and stories. At any given time I probably have the same 3-10 main songs looping. I don't even watch movies or shows at this point, I fucking daydream. A normal person would write these down and be done with it; words fail me when I try lmao, or I'm too restless.

It all feels like pure avoidance, but I just CAN'T push past it for more than a few minutes at a time.

On top of that, I'm restless a lot. I've been walking everywhere lately, and while it's made my sleep phenomenal (seriously, I bounce out of bed at times I would have struggled to hear my alarm months ago), it still doesn't feel like quite enough. I'm still scattered and can't do the things I want.

I need sympathy and maybe some advice.

I'm a fat fuck with PCOS and it took me a year to lose 15lbs, most of which was in the last 6mo or so.

More recently though, I've started walking to and from work - just under 1.5 miles each way (though I don't walk the full 3mi each day, if I have somewhere else to go after work, etc). The effects of that little effort are bizarre. I sleep SO MUCH better, I'm less of an emotional wreck and yes, I'm keeping weight off more readily. I can't get my eating under control entirely, but I'm somehow maintaining and very slowly creeping the scale down.

It's basically nothing but actually gets results?

EDIT: OMG so many upvotes??

Posting here because declutter won't let me.

I can count 5 piles of clothing that needs to be either washed or put away right now. I can think of at least 4-5 boxes of stuff crammed into my closets, NOT counting the out-of-season box.

I live in like, 20 items, most of which are heavily worn and uncomfortable. But they fit, if badly.

As you can tell, I hate 90% of what I have, but also worry about getting rid of things I need. I have a bunch of things that are either too small (bought with the intent to diet into them, OR bought when I was a different weight) or too big (because I lost weight). I wanted to sell the stuff that doesn't fit but that takes a lot of work, and a lot of time (I've tried, and had items listed literally for YEARS before they sold).

A lot of what I have is also either too dressy ("I'm going to try to dress better! Oh wait, now I have some really nice shirts and only frumpy, ill fitting bottoms to wear them with...") or too casual ("I just need simple clothes I can wear consistently....wait now half my wardrobe is "around the house" clothes...")

Part of me genuinely wants to find a perfect shirt, a perfect brand of pants, maybe a perfect skirt, and just buy each one in like, 5 colors and that's my wardrobe. I've tried, but I thrift everything so I just lose interest in the capsule wardrobe project when there's weeks or months between acquiring items.

Until then, I'm overwhelmed. I barely know what I have and everything is a cluttered mess stored in bags and piles, with the exception of my also-packed dresser and closet. But it's easily the largest source of clutter in my studio. I swear I need some kind of encouragement.

EDIT: I apologize for all the parentheticals.

Other edit: Holy shit I'm glad this is resonating with people. Thank you for the advice all!