4th May 2025

Spring Cleaning?

Spent today putting away my clothes that I wore for the past couple of weeks. I had a massive tidy up a couple of weeks ago, which made me realise just how much lolita clothing I've collected up over the past couple of years. It's overwhelming. My thoughts are that I should probably sell some, but well, I upload pieces and they just don't sell. I want back what I paid for some of them, but I guess maybe I overpaid in the first place. For others I'm selling it for less. But I don't want to ship out of the country anymore so it's tiring. I went to a bring and buy towards the end of last year, hoping to clear a ton of stuff out, and basically barely anything sold, so it was quite frustrating. Probably I'm just too greedy, or my sense of taste is too weird.

Well, this evening, since I had a little extra time (and Infinity Nikki has been really buggy and the server timing out all the time...) I thought I'd get some stuff on my site in order a bit more. I spent about an hour or so adding a bunch of my more recent coord pics to the wardrobe section of my site. Honestly, some of my most recent ones, I'm really proud of them, and I think they look super good. I think I'm starting to get the hang of wearing clothes that look flattering and good on me. Well, sometimes I don't want to pick based on what is flattering though, and I want to pick unflattering pieces too. But nowadays it feels more like an intentional decision than an accidental outcome, if that makes sense. At some point I'd like to go back and add some of my older pictures too, since I think it's good to look back on my growth over time.

Started on my new team at work

I started on my new team earlier in the week, I don't remember whether I mentioned or not but I applied for a internal move at the company I work for. I took an interview, the interviewers liked me, and I got the job. Now I'm no longer a "Front End Software Engineer" (a technicality as my previous team deprecated all their backend projects) but back to being just a "Software Engineer" of the same level. It seems like my new team will be an interesting one, it is brand new, and we're starting to look into the work we will be doing for the first time on Tuesday, after the bank holiday. So far everyone on my team seems really nice, which is great. On my past team, one person on the team had been giving me and a couple of other team members a really hard time, so it had been really negatively affecting my mental health at work - making it really scary to speak up in front of everyone, for fear that this person would be the one to respond. I found out later that a lot of the people on my previous team had said to my new team members that I was a really skilled developer, which was so kind of them to say, because to be honest I'd been having a lot of self doubt while on the team, and it had been really hard.

This fresh new opportunity brings me something to look forward to, and I hope that I can live up to the expectations that my previous team have created, haha. We're also going to be doing a lot more individual work, which gives me more opportunity to gain independence in my work - my previous team didn't do a lot of independent work, which overall meant it was really hard to take part in things, since I'm not very outgoing, it quickly becomes exhausting. It's going to be so nice to work on things for myself, and gain valuable experience in a fresh new area. And if it's a narrower area than my previous team, maybe I can actually become knowledgeable about the whole space that the team will be working in. I hope so, anyway.

It's easy to let the demons of self doubt settle in, but so far I think this team is a good fit, and everyone seems reasonable and kind and respectful, which is great. I don't feel out of place, I feel like my opinions are valuable, and like I have skills and understanding that might be useful. I hope my new teammates and I can work well together going forwards!