First Counselling Session

So I went to my first NHS counselling session on Wednesday. Im not going to go into a massive amount of detail on this blog about what we discuss in these sessions but I do want to give an overview of points of interest.

When we first met and before id even had a chance to take my coat off I was asked what I preferred to be called. Ill be honest I wasnt really expecting that question, but chose my male name since that was how I was presented. It feels weird to use a female name if I dont present as female.

This appears to be a whole different kind of counselling than what I went through before. My last lot of counselling was more or less about the here and now, and tools to help move forward. Plus, it also seemed to be geared totally around my gender problems. This time around the counseller wants to use a 'holistic approach', and wants to look at the whole package. My mood, motivation, diet, exercise, and so on. She also seems to be taking a broader view on my history as well. Previously it was again centered around my gender, where this time we have already talked about my childhood and family life when I was younger.

When we finished I was meant to go straight to work but I ended up going home (on the counsellors instruction) for 20-30 mins to chill out and let my mind settle. I certainly wasnt in as happy a place as I was when I went in and this was only the first session.

Im not the kind of person that opens up and shares my thoughts and feelings under normal circumstances anyway. I never really speak about them with an actual person, usually I just bottle things up and/or write about them on here. Because of this I can see future conversations being particularly uncomfortable.

The next session is in two weeks and in some ways im looking forward to it, in other ways im not.

Photobombed

It appears during my last set of photos that my kitten Molly decided to photobomb one of them without me realising it. She was fascinated by the camera and spent a fair bit of time trying to climb up the pole I had attached it too.

I was hoping all the way through that she wouldnt try and climb my leg like she usually does when she wants some fuss. Not only would she ruin my tights, but also my leg too! Her claws are sharp!

Landan Town

Its been a buys few weeks for me. Ive been trying to burn through the excess leave ive got to take before the end of the year otherwise I will lose it. On one hand this is great since it means I am getting loads of time off work, but on the other hand it means that when I am back in work I am having almost twice the amount of work to do since I have to catch up from the time I have taken off. This has not been easy, during my last stint in work at least 2 of the 4 days I was in I worked over 13 hours each day, and anything over 10 of that was free (the joys of being on a salary).
On the plus side, this has meant ive had loads of time off, and I have spent this catching up with making music. I recently got the latest version of Ableton and I have been putting it through its paces. Ive been finding it difficult to get back into production since being off work last year, but now I seem to have caught the bug again. In this week alone ive almost got a track finished.

Our cat has found a new hiding spot which is a bit of a nightmare for me. My laptop is setup on a stand on my desk in the spare room, and she has recently started hiding underneath it. This in itself isnt such a bad thing and is actually quite cute to see her squeezed in, but randomly she will start swiping away at my hands with her claws as I try to type away, and that gets annoying.

Over the weekend me and the other half went to London for the weekend to see a friend of ours. Over the course of out visit we did an awful lot of shopping, I forget the names of all of the places we went to but I can remember Oxford Street, Borough Market (where I had a Venison hot dog), Southbank Christmas Market, and Covent Garden. We were in one shop with our friend and I started looking through the girls clothes absent mindedly, my gf had to push me away saying: "theres boys clothes in here, why dont you look at the boys clothes". Oops, there were some nice things in there and ive kind of got used to shopping with my gf I forget our friend was there!

We were randomly wandering through Covent Garden looking for somewhere to eat and he happened to come across the Playstation Lounge, this is basically a pop up shop which Sony have set up where they have PS4s setup for people to come in and play for free ahead of its release on Friday. Of course I had to go in and have a look! Ive now seen all of the launch titles running for myself, and I also got to play the new Killzone game too which is brilliant. The new controller is fantastic too, its so much more responsive and accurate than the old one, its really made me look forward to the PS4s release. Ive got one on pre-order and since ive got such an excess of leave, I also booked the day off for that too!

I still havent dressed up, with everything thats been going on ive just been a bit lazy with it all. Theres a lot of man to trim back and im just finding it difficult to push myself past that first hurdle when it seems like a wasted effort to get all dressed up with nowhere to go. I know I need to get back into it before going out again, I need to rebuild the confidence I seem to have lost, and seeing myself all dolled up would be a good start. Plus, I picked up a cute polka dot skirt from H&M the other week, I really want to wear it! I do have a thing for spots.....

And finally, on the website side of things I really dont know what to do. I have an idea and ive found a website-in-a-box that will do most of what I want to do (and I can pay someone to customise the rest), but im just really unsure about putting the money down for it. A lot of how the website will work will rely on users updating it, so initially it might not have that much on there since it will take time to build up the database, and if I cant attract the users then its dead in the water. Im just really unsure of spending the money I need to to make it the resource I want it to be because if it fails it will just be a waste of money. I just dont know where to go from here.