Thanks mate, I appreciate the kind words. I try not to judge myself too harshly for taking the time off, but it does help to hear it from a kind soul such as yourself. Luckily, the PTSD isn't spilling over into my other interests (games, Vale, etc) much any more so life is steadily improving!
I'm not privy to the story here, but taking eight months off to treat PTSD doesn't sound like an excuse to me, but a really important period of time that needed to be taken. I hope you're doing alright now, but don't let yourself go thinking that taking time to deal with something like that is an excuse for other things not happening - it's far more important.
Separately, I've not checked Vale out yet, but props to you for diving in on new ways of handling memory and RAII - looks really interesting and I'll be giving the language a whirl at some point soon!