My Recovery Journey: FINCH APP

On a journey of recovery you will probably experience lots of different strategies to help you go to where you need to be. So why not talk about how these work for me. 

*THIS IS NOT A SPONSORED POST! I AM SIMPLY SHARING MY THOUGHTS ON SOMETHING I AM USING FOR MY PERSONAL JOURNEY*

Let's begin with the FINCH App which you can download to your phone. You can use it as a free app, which I do because I'm still getting to know whether or not it is actually making a real difference. But there is an option to subscribe to the service to unlock more features. I feel the features on the free version are helpful enough for now so that is what I am sticking with. 

So you get introduced to your little baby finch which you can colour, assign a name and even pronouns. This is MINT, and I always like expressing gender fluidity. Even though I myself identify as She/Her I always feel that there is nothing wrong if someone were to call me he/him because I see nothing harmful about being a boy. But everyone reacts to gender differently, and their identity, and to me personally it isn't if you are male or female it is if you are kind to me. That's what matters. And that is what I want to also teach my daughter, that there are a variety of pronouns out there and we should be respectful of those. 

Mint started off as a baby (sorry I didn't get screenshots back then I didn't see myself writing this in the future to prepare) and the idea is you are given goals. Now with these goals you can either select from a lovely organised list of predetermined goals or create your own. I tend to do a mix, adding in things they recommend for the different categories, and then things I know I need to do in my own life. It also means you can break the goals down into smaller steps. For example it says "Do Laundry" but I then add, put laundry on spin, hang outside, bring inside, put away. Because all the tasks together feels a lot and I want to feel the small wins. So yeah the laundry pile hasn't gone back in the wardrobe but I did the other steps, or yay I turned on the washing machine today! 

Plus the more tasks you do the more energy you earn. And the app kind of centres around this idea of energy. Because you want to be able to send your finch on a journey, and you can't do that until you have completed so many tasks. Then on the journey they find something, which is supposed to be a reward type element. So you collect, stories, stones and eggs. 

The stories you can mould to fit more your personality and journey as it asks you to respond with different options. Which creates the little graph of your pet you can see in the first image. As you can see Mint is very much like me in that they don't have a lot of confidence and aren't very logical. Compassion is what is most important to Mint. 

Honestly I do not care too much for the stories, even though I do find the interaction amusing, and am overjoyed we both have distain for the film Frozen. To me all I care about are the stones and the eggs. So let's talk about those a little more. You get an egg you need to hatch, and you select a task to attach to the egg. For example right now I am trying to hatch an egg by saying thank you to myself once a day for 7 days. Obviously you don't have to do it daily, but the longer you take to get to the number of days, the longer you wait to hatch the cute little pets! Not really sure what impact they have, aside from just being adorable, and I just want to be Ash and CATCH THEM ALL! 

My main love is the rainbow stones, because with them you can purchase things for your pet. So you can get furniture to decorate your birds nest, or outfits to dress up in, or plane tickets to travel to different locations. You have a generic shop of items, but every day you have a small selection of "special" items which I imagine rotate and all that. Now some of these are pretty cool, others I do not care for, so it is good that logging in daily reveals different things, plus travelling to new locations unlocks different items, and each month they hold an event with themed items. You can also sell things you don't want, so I had a coat I liked but then found this other thing I wanted more and didn't have any more tasks for the day so I sold the coat.  

As you interact more with the app you can unlock more features and there is so much to do. They have the option to add friends, who you can send things to and they send you things, and if you want you can share goals and chat to them. I'm not quite at that level yet because I am embarrassed by my goals, but I like the idea of being in it together. They even set up a discord page for support which is pretty adorable. Even when you open the app they provide affirmations, positivity quotes, and get you to give an emoji to how you are feeling/motivation, so you can look back at your breakdown over the day or week or whatever.  Which I think is a good reminder for me as I can see that even if I don't start of the day well, I can find happiness along the way. Or there are days which are the complete opposite, but then I can start to figure out if there are patterns. Are certain days, certain times, certain tasks more of a trigger? 

You can also choose to reflect on the tasks, and just reflect in general. They have a section where you can find prompts to think about your life, reflect on triggers or find some gratitude. They have self soothing tasks, different breathing techniques, and even simple stretch ideas to help you along the way, and the fact I can access all that for free is pretty useful. Because sometimes I feel part of my issues is thinking that I need money to improve my life (like getting my medicine prescriptions, getting gym memberships, buying healthier food etc), so not having that feeling with this app has been beneficial. 

So far I have made a good streak, but something I have discovered about myself is that I will have a hyperfocus on something for a period of time and then I am bored and done, so I wonder how long this will last? Regardless right now it is a step in my journey and it is something that rewards me for those little steps I take, because Mint wouldn't nearly be a teenager already if I haven't been looking after myself. 

My Recovery Journey: I'm not Okay

TRIGGER WARNING *sensitive themes may be discussed*

Personally if I were you I would not watch this incoherent rambling of a woman in her late twenties talking to camera in a delusion it would heal her mental health. It won't make sense, it will be boring, and I will not be held responsible for wasting your time.

I may or may not bee sharing more of my journey in the far or near future.

Now join me in listening to some My Chemical Romance : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhZTNgAs4Fc

Journey to Elli.

What is this?

What's happening?

Someone send help because Mad and a Little Bit Weird is actually writing a blog post! I know. It's okay it's probably never going to get posted, as I have a draft from back in March that I started and never looked back on. But I guess if you are reading this it means I finally hit that publish button. Or someone else hacked my account and thought posting my drafts would be a fun trick to play. Well jokes on them because nobody cares. And something I have tried to tell myself repeatedly is that other people's opinion should not define who I am. Yet on a bad day we forget all that, but anywho... I thought now was as good a time as any to fix myself, because you shouldn't need this, I'll start on the new year or on a Monday bullshit, if you want to make a change you have to start NOW!

There are a lot of changes I would like to make to myself. So in this space I will kind of just outline why I got to this point of realising I need to make these changes. It all started I don't know when, probably deep into the seeded pit of childhood, but I used to always want people to like me, often the wrong people, and I ended up being a dick towards people who actually liked me for who I was just to please this larger group of people. Which is wrong. Something I have learnt over the last year especially is that the number of friends do not matter, it is the quality of those friendships. I look back at high school/6th form and I belonged to a group of like 20 odd people who all intertwined, and yeah the random conversations you could come up with were great, and we did all have good memories, because you had a decent amount of people to play paintball or laser tag. The only problem is when a group is so big there's so much drama, because not everyone likes everyone else the same amount. So you get smaller group break offs and people not being happy they have then been excluded, and about 15 different group chats you are trying to keep up with because some can't include that certain person, and then you end up accidentally messaging the wrong thing into the wrong group chat, and people have to take sides, and you try to think the more people you have on your side means you are the better person. But what if all the people on your side aren't good people either? Then you become this little ball of stress wondering if people are talking behind your back or agreeing to meet up with you, cancelling because they are sick and it turns out they are just going to spoons instead. Like that's all crazy and it's no wonder I crack from time to time.

So pretty much the group broke down and I now have 6 friends (and their boyfriends, but ultimately I don't really talk to them they are just extensions of my friends, but that might also be because of lock-down and not really having the opportunity for them to join a group meet up.  If you go back to like my second ever blog post, I know a proper long time ago, you can see how much everything has changed. Even in the last year my whole friendship ideals have shifted dramatically.

And the above was all written by past Elli in 2023. And guess what Internet. I still haven't found myself, and guess what, the journey looks like it is about to get even longer. So I'm actually going to hit the publish button because this needs to stop sitting in my drafts, and I actually need to start finding myself. Because I have been lost for a while, and I would like very much for her to come back.