Escaping in to Soap Opera Land

Because the real world is really too much right now

I’ve not been handling the whole extra spicy rejection very well and basically haven’t left the house for days. I was supposed to have dinner with a friend on Friday and when that got cancelled it just got added in to the whole mental bucket of “people hate being around me”, which is fair I’m pretty negative as the theme of the last few months of social media and blog posts can attest to.

Recently my sleep has been completely derailed, I’m sleeping on strange schedules or more recently being awake for 30+ hours and only getting some base level sleep before starting again. I’ve got massive back pain from not being upright and no energy from not eating, partially because I’m on mainly rice with fish and partially because I just can’t be motivated to eat, let alone go make something to do that.

Weight wise I’ve been sliding hard since March, I rapidly lost 20kg between April and June, and since the 22nd I’ve lost 5kg, between that, the dwindling mental health, lack of sleep, going through a pack of snus like lightening, stress and financial chaos, I’m not sure what is going to take me out first but I have a concern it might be very soon if things don’t change and they don’t appear to be changing no matter how hard I try.

Because of all of this, I’m trying to find a mental escape route to at least not be stuck dwelling on things I can’t change, so the obvious way out is the Soaps. I already blazed through the East Enders Ballum storyline from 2019 onwards and now just catching up on the daily updates so I needed to find something new.

For some reason I have a life long vendetta against Corrie so I went for the next one, Emmerdale’s Aaron from 2014 onwards. Right now I’m up to 2017 and let me tell you I’ve been watching this brain crack for days non-stop, which helps because I’m not sleeping between days so might as well not just stare at the dark walls all night.

Before all of this I never really got the whole soaps thing but these wild fictional lives are great to escape into. One thing has to be said is that the stories are pretty repeatitive between all the soaps but there is always their own flare in the delivery.

Considering how volatile my mental state is in, it is a bit of relief to be pushed to tears with an off again on again storyline.

Aaron Dingle