You might know about this but https://youfeellikeshit.com/ is really helpful to self-diagnose.

I would also suggest you write “disaster reports” where you ask yourself what happened and why it happened 5 or more times. Preferrably write it out by hand on a piece of paper.

Example:

“I couldn’t sleep last night. Why? Because I couldn’t calm down. Why? Because I felt too tired to consciously steer myself to calm down. Why? Because of the conversation earlier. What happened there? I was forced to pretend everything was okay when it wasn’t.”

You can keep going after this until you feel satisfied with your answers.

Afterwards, I also like to write something similar to this:

“Conclusion: tough conversations overdrain energy. Next time I should strive to mask less/plan recovery activities afterwards, etc.”

Finally, labeling emotions is a skill that will come to you after persistently working on it. Don’t give up! And read as much as you can about it.

Beads has a special mode with its own wavetable banks, so you can use it as a granural synth basically. Although, if you know how to play with feedback well, you don’t really need to feed it too meaningful of a material to get gnarly sounds out of it. In addition, you can feed standard line level signals into Beads, which means that it’s compatible with virtually any audio device.

Yes, I’ve been into VCV rack and Cardinal for a while. My primary use case is idea/sample generation and it’s spectacular for that.

Maybe once I learn the sequencers I’ll make whole tracks in it.

By the way, you should not be afraid of modular hardware. Get a versatile effects module (for me, Mutable Instruments Beads) and use it as an effects processor.

I tried to get into IRC, but it lacked a lot of things that are basic nowadays, such as the ability to view past history of the chat and embedding media. I didn’t want to sit around for hours just to see what people would write about.