It’s insane that by the end of this week, August will be here. I haven’t been to school this whole year, and I will begin in September. I’m still unsure if I’ll be able to handle it — physically and mentally. Especially with work in the mix. My mom says we’ll go to the doctor before it begins, but she never really fulfills her promises.

We’ve been walking together most days of the week. There’s a large plot where people can rent smaller plots and start their own vegetable/flower garden. It’s very beautiful to see what others are growing, and my mom wants to own one herself since they’re not too expensive. Though the waiting list is over two years.

She’s stopped smoking and we’ve been spending more time together recently since she needs a distraction. We just sit in the living room together while I read or write, and sometimes play games, and she watches the news or some reality tv-show she’s obsessed with. Life is quiet, and I’m always afraid that it won’t last long.

There is always so much in my mind. I recently read Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz and my favourite quote, the one I still think about is: “I wonder if I'll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.”

I hate how unfair life is, every age of life is important and yet older teens and adults are expected to set theirs on pause for things such as school and work. Why can only kids and older people be creatives? I want a job as a scientist, but I’m afraid that this path will take up all my time, and I’ll never be allowed to stray again. I want to work in a hospital laboratory, but I also want to write and read and make things. I know full time artists are a thing, and I respect them greatly. But I feel like people who want to go a different route are just expected to keep going that way. It’s black and white thinking — if you don’t want to be a fulltime artist, then you must not want to be an artist at all, so just don’t waste your time doing anything creative and focus on your actual work. What I’m trying to say is, hobbies are dying and so are the people. I want to be twenty-nine and in a lab, but I also want to be twenty-nine and sitting at a desk with my laptop and an empty document in front of me. Why shouldn’t we be able to do both without running ourselves dry? Why should one thing be much more important than the other? When both work and hobbies are extremely important to our lives.

My worst fear is dying and only having science to my name. Science, to me, is something that tames us, something that just works in one way and tells us to follow it. Art is the opposite, we dictate everything that happens underneath our fingertips, there’s a complete understanding. Like, for example, with math you don’t have to know why, you just have to know that a circle is 360 degrees and that a + b = c. It’s like this with every kind of science, people made the rules and you just have to follow it. I do like this quite a bit, I like following rules and contemplating how to use a formula. Ever since I was a kid I was kind of bad at math (without a calculator), but I loved it when I — after painstaking minutes — finally found the solution, the correct answer.

Though I also love making my own rules and following my own heart. I think that this is why I’m put off by people who are against either art or science. And it’s especially why I hate people who put down artists in order to push up scientists. They’re two completely different things that need two completely different skill sets. If you’re an artist, I want to remind you that there are so many different subsections of science, and there will surely be one for you to take interest in. And for scientists, there’s certainly an art that you will love learning about. People don’t have to do art or science if they don’t want to — and it’s completely natural to be “bad” in one or the other —, but if you’ve ever felt the need for something different I strongly advise to look on the other end of the “spectrum” and incorporate things from that other side into what you already do.

There are many talented people who use science as an art itself, an example is Dasha Plesen, who grows mold on petri dishes and creates stunning works of art with. Another example is the book “Interesting Facts About Space” which includes, as you might have guessed, a lot of facts about space.

It certainly is difficult to balance things in this day and age, but I think that a lot of people would benefit if they stopped thinking in such a black and white way. Just because art and science are in many ways different, doesn’t mean that they can’t overlap and mix. They definitely should. You don’t have to be perfect at anything just to try it or do/learn it for fun.

I took a sudden off day today — there were too many people planned, so when asked if some wanted to remain home I offered — and I’m glad I did so. I overslept by nearly two hours, because I slept late and woke up in the middle of the night.

My mom’s going to a festival of some sort a few cities away, so me and my brother will be all alone for the day. We might go to McDonald’s or something, since our half-brother gave us money earlier in the month to do so. We don’t have a strong bond with him, and before our father passed we hadn’t seen him in a few years. It was very kind of him, but I do feel like he’s trying to use money to make up for lost time. We also got some money from our sister. I’m thinking of going to the city soon, to buy some more books. I like e-reading, but I do miss having something physical to read. I do have 1984 by George Orwell, but I don’t really feel up to it right now.

I quite like it when my mam leaves, not because I don’t enjoy her company, but I do like writing at the dinner table without any interruption.

I’m nearly done with Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, and hope to finish it today. I have so much to say about it, and have many things I need to make my mind up about. I do recommend it, but certainly not for anyone. It won’t have as good of a rating as Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, and it honestly felt quite jarring to go from that book to this one. The writing style is very different, and so is the genre of course. It isn’t exactly what I expected either. I have so many videos saved on TikTok of literature recommendations, and I really want to go through those soon as well. So I can finally make a definitive TBR.

This period of my life reminds me of the time I went through last summer after my graduation. Because of exams, I already started my break early (partially) and I didn’t go to school to study at all.

After I did my exams, I stopped stressing because I knew that I would probably pass. The weather was nice, so I went on walks all the time and sat on one of the benches near the canal to read. I was probably the most productive I had been in quite some time. I’m not reaching the same numbers now, but I’m happy with every word I write and every page I read.

Work went well today, I’m getting my pay on Wednesday and I know that I’ll get more money than I ever got before. I’ve been working here since February, and I finally got more hours since I was finally experienced enough. A colleague I dislike (she bosses me around, makes comments on things that no one else comments on because she wants to find fault in everything I do, she constantly contradicts herself in her comments and expects me to do work that isn’t mine at all), is away and I hope she’s gone for the rest of the week, minimally.

All my journal entries will probably be very similar, at least until I start school. But I do like sitting down for a moment and just writing down whatever I’m thinking about.

On Sundays I want to do weekly recaps, if possible. Maybe I won’t since my weeks don’t vary a lot currently.

I had work four times this week, and I was quite afraid that I wouldn’t be able to be productive at all. But I’m pretty sure that this week, at least since I started the habit tracker on 16.07.25, I’ve been pretty productive. I don’t read as fast as I used to — Slow Days, Fast Company took four days, in the past I would have been able to finish it in one — but I think it’s good. In the past I was never able to write such long reviews about books, and I never took time to highlight bits that seemed important/interesting or quotes that I loved. It’s a little slower, but it’s also more meaningful.

I have also decided on my writing routine, which will help me not work on just one project at a time. My writing routine is quite chaotic, and I enjoy writing both longer fiction and short stories, along with more personal pieces. With my schedule I can work on all three of these things in a week without neglecting all the stories I care about. Today I started my long story ‘So It Goes’ which has been finished once and in progress since 2024. I started and stopped more than a dozen times, but I think I can finally complete it now. It was an idiotic idea, to write a full novel when I hadn’t once finished a short story with success. But, Bathing is now pretty much completed (all it needs is editing), and I’ve found a proper way to write my stories without giving up.

I’m happy with how things went, and hope to continue like this for as long as possible.

I went out to eat today with my mom at Saison. Which is a restaurant in Dukenburg. It serves sushi and mainly Asian dishes. I love sushi. I ordered some for dinner this Friday, and my mam suddenly started craving it today. Ever since I started work, I wanted to take my mama out for dinner. She wouldn’t let me pay for her though, since she doesn’t want to “profit” from my work. So I just paid for myself only. It was a fun time.

I've been working on this site for ten days now, and I'm almost finished. I only have two pages left, then I can run it how I want to. Maybe I'll come up with more things to make, but I'm not focusing too much on that. It's a relief to finally have a singular place where I can keep track of things. Now I don't have to jump from spreadsheet to spreadsheet and from app to app. Almost everything important will be here. I hope to get it done over the weekend, since I don't have work. I'll be busier soon, in mid August and September. So it's good to get things done before that.

I'm still quite afraid of how busy things will get. This is my first job, and I've never worked while also having to juggle studying and going to school in general. To be honest, I went to my first year of college for a little over a month. Then winter came and I just couldn't handle it. In my last two years of high school I began getting amazing grades, and I kind of altered my mindset and began to believe that grades under seven were too little. I still feel a bit upset, I worked so hard my senior year and didn't even graduate cum laude because I had less than a point too little. I'm pretty sure I had 7.8 and I needed an 8. I could have redone a test, but I was already struggling with my mental and physical health and I just wanted to get it over with and start my long vacation.

I like to think that I'm very controlled and have a handle on myself. But I really don't, if I don't want to do something really badly, I just don't. I know that when I start school I will really have to push myself, but I also know I'm not the kind of person that can do this for very long. People think I struggled so much because my father passed about two weeks before school started, but I've had this problem for years now. I've been to the doctor and got nothing but help for my low iron and vitamin D. My mam isn't good with making appointments and she often promises to do it and then forgets. She won't listen to me properly, and I don't think anyone will. At some point the dead father "excuse" will pass and people will stop giving me grace, even though it never had anything to do with his passing in the first place. Maybe it exaggerated it, of course, but it's not the root.

Whatever I do, I want to get a degree and work in a lab. I want to live an adult life where I only have to focus on one thing - my work. I want to have a life where after my work day, I will finally be free to focus on my hobbies. It's the life I live now, that I have been living for months, but at least then I'll do work I actually like.

It's difficult now, since it's right in the middle of the month, to get back on track completely. But I'll just try my best for the rest of July, and hope that I've set enough of a foundation for August. It's fine, though, if I don't stick with everything for the most part. Work takes most of my day, as I find it difficult to do much in the hours before I go. But I really want to try my best. It's been nearly a year since my father passed away, and as I biked to work I felt the time passing for the first time. My life changed a year ago, everything that happened in these months has been missed by him, and every month after will be missed as well. I almost wanted to skip work, even though I was already there, but as I worked I almost forgot why I was even upset at all. It eats up so much time that it's beginning to eat me up as well, leaving me with nothing but thought and exhaustion. Honestly, not much occurs in my life, but school is on the horizon and I hope I won't lose even more of myself.