I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve hardly had the time or energy for doing anything after work other than settling down in front of my TV and not moving again until it’s time to go to bed. I had plans to start putting a puzzle together or maybe work on a Lego set at some point this week (in an effort to spend some time away from screens and take a break from books. The book break isn’t because they’re bad or they’re twisting my mind in some way (though doing a massive binge of The Dresden Files has definitely influenced my recent dreams, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post), but because I’m spending too much time hunched over things or folded up in chairs. I need some activities that let me sprawl. Or, I thought I’d need them since I planned to get a full week of daily workouts in this week. Instead, I’ve done zero workouts, stuggled to get to sleep on time, and all the energy I have for any given day has been consumed by work as I juggle projects, prepare for a company event (that has happened by the time this goes up), and attempts to sort through my feelings about a whole range of stuff.

I tried to avoid doing that last thing for a while there, since I figured I could put off some of the longer-term emotional processing until I’d managed to get my sleep schedule in better shape, but it turns out I can’t fix my sleep schedule if I’m having a difficult time convincing myself to go to sleep because I’m having nothing but weird dreams and nightmares. So I gotta do it all at once. Get more sleep so I can process shit from the last year so I can feel less anxious about waking up in the middle of the night or just plain not wanting to go to sleep as my subconscious tries to work through everything I should be considering consciously. It’s a nasty loop I’ve caught myself in and it is going to take a bit of work to extricate myself from it. Thankfully I’ve got people I can talk to as I need the support, even if I’m still feeling the lack of some of the connections I once had. I really miss the tabletop games I used to play and the people I used to play them with since I found all of that stuff fairly healing. Nothing like a bit of tangentially related roleplaying to help you step outside your emotions long enough to take a break and maybe process a thing or two by seeing something barely related play out.

I’m in a few tabletop games these days, more than I used to be (by a significant percentage), but none of them allow me the kind of roleplaying I want. One is a very fight-oriented game as we play around in an Elden Ring themed world. Another is a short (one to one and a half hours) game on week nights that is too short to really get into much roleplaying with so far. Plus, I’m new to the group and though I’ve already made a splash with my fun character, there hasn’t been enough time for me to stretch my legs beyond a bit of gently pushing the other player characters in a direction (something the GM and I worked out since he’s telling a story I already know and I’m leaning into a bit of dramatic irony in order to help keep things moving forward without me stealing the spotlight). My original Sunday Pathfinder Second Edition game hasn’t really been much beyond mechanics, fights, and trying not to let my frustration show as we discuss rules that don’t exist in that game and the GM’s partner tries to direct us all (even the GM). My only opportunity for roleplaying might be the Saturday PF2e game that I joined a couple weeks ago, but that’s only had one session and the whole thing was a fight (which mostly just ran long because we all rolled like absolute trash). It will take time to figure out the group’s dynamic and they’ve all been playing for a while now. I’m new to not just the game but the group, so it’ll be a while before I’m comfortable enough to really assert my presence.

I miss my old Friday night group. Sure, we played maybe an average of once a month (though I think we might be down to an everage of once every other month with what might wind up being our six-month sabbatical from the game), but I got to really just be this other character for a while. I got to be someone who felt a thing similar to what I felt, but with a whole different slew of problems. When I was roleplaying him, I got to think about things that were problems in my life without needing to put in the work to convince myself that they were problems worth addressing. They were Lewis’ problems, after all, not mine. That made them worthy of resolution. Even though he did some terrible things, he was still worth listening to and worthy of compassion as he worked out his own feelings and realized that maybe what he did was wrong. That maybe what he was doing was wrong. That maybe he had more of a choice in life than he thought and that, just maybe, there were things worth working towards that weren’t his own selfish desires. He was a complex, interesting character and it felt so good to just feel and figure out someone else’s problems.

It’s also a lot easier to put his problems away between sessions than it is for me to put mine away. I’m not grappling with his trauma still, despite decades of work. I’m not dealing with his various mental health tics, sleep disruptions, and complex relationships with the people around him. I’m dealing with mine and it is so much work to just approach one of them for long enough to parse and recongize the emotions involved, let alone work through them. I might believe that I deserve as much kindness, empathy, and care as other people do, finally, but I’m so used to denying myself those things that I have to clamp down on the reflex every time I do some introspection. It’s frustrating and exhausting and impossible to resolve without just doing the dang thing enough times. That’s the only way to break old (and bad) habits. You have to overwrite them through sheer repetition. It’s exhausting even to write about this stuff because I keep bumping into feelings and thoughts I need to legitimize and make space for, all before I can even begin to address them.

I think that’s about all I’ve got in me for today. Work and not getting enough sleep has me so exhausted that time feels like it is slipping through my fingers. I know exactly where today went, but I’m really not sure how it all got there so quickly. I could type out a list of everything I’ve done today and it would add up to the hours that have passed, but I still feel like I blinked and missed most of an entire day. I had things I meant to do that did not get done and so many things I didn’t expect got done instead, all on a day that started out with me thinking to myself “I think my mind is rotting” since I felt so foggy and lost despite six hours of sleep last night. Caffeine fixed it, mostly, but it’s a rough note to start such a busy, demanding day on.