I spent the weekend relaxing. I did my chores, listened to podcasts, played more Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’m currently hopping between a few alternate save files as the mood strikes me), and enjoying the chilly weather. I got to sleep underneath my comforter for the first time in more than five months, maybe six, and I feel like I slept super well both nights I got to sleep past sunrise. I had a few weird dreams both nights, none of which I remember at this point beyond a few vague impressions (well, now that I’m really digging into those impressions, I remember most of one of them), but I slept like a rock. Both mornings, when I woke up, I had to carefully stagger my way to the bathroom because my body was so dead to the world that I could barely keep myself upright until I’d had a chance to go back to bed and lay around for a while, waking up slowly as I luxuriated in the comfortable sensation of being beneath a big pile of blankets and not being so warm that I was sweating through them. I’ve always appreciate a good, weighty blanket pile, but my past couple years of plastic-covered windows and desperate attempts to keep my apartment warm enough that my pipes don’t freeze and my pet bird doesn’t die meant that I couldn’t do my usual thing of opening the windows in my bedroom at night in the winter and burrowing under as many blankets as I could comfortably fit on my bed.

Exhausted though I am, writing this after a long ten-hour day at work followed by my now-usual Monday night grocery shopping trip, I feel a lot better today than I’ve felt in a while. Between two days of being stuck working at home due to feeling ill (I was sneezing constantly and coughing a ton as I worked through minor sinus pain and a distracting amount of mental fogginess) and a weekend spent unapologetically resting, I think I’ve finally shaken off the work stress of the past two weeks. I also think the wave of depression I’ve been struggling through has finally passed [well, mostly passed. There were some aftershocks of depression], which made it actually possible to rest and relax this past weekend, so I’m really feeling like I’ve started this week off on strong footing. It remains to be seen, of course, if I’ll maintain that footing throughout the week, but I’m taking it as a good sign that I had a few exciting ideas for some projects at work that my boss seemed not just receptive to, but like he has the same vision for them that I do, AND that I cracked a few preparation issues I’ve been working on for my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath. Turns out all I needed was some rest, guilt-free distraction, and time to emotionally process my past few weeks. Now I feel ready to work on all my projects, personal and professional.

It would, of course, be really cool if I could keep working at home, but I do value the physical tiredness being in the office provides me with. It is difficult to want to sleep if I’ve just been puttering around my apartment and haven’t had enough stuff going on to really tire me out. I could probably fix that by getting myself a standing desk of some kind for my home office, but that definitely won’t work in my current setup and I feel like I’d probably be better off just riding my exercise bike more or going on longer walks than making my home work environment as physically tiring as my office work environment is. It also helps keep the two spaces separate in my mind, which is important because not having that separation made my life difficult in 2020, especially when I started playing games on my computer instead of on a console and would just spend all day in front of my desk or in my bed. 2020 was a rough year for me. I will be dealing with those habits and mild trauma responses (mostly the extreme isolation I dealt with in the fall and winter of 2020 and early 2021) for years to come, but at least I’m fairly practiced at dealing with trauma, so I doubt it will take as long to work through as all my childhood and teenaged stuff has.

But none of that applies right now! Right now, I’ve got plenty of separation of work and living spaces. I even make sure to get up and leave my office more often when I’m working at home, a habit helped by the fact that most of the spaces I occupy for meals, sleep, and casual puttering tasks (building lego sets and working on puzzles) are on an entirely separate floor from my home office, which means I’ve got to actually go up and down some stairs to get between those spaces. Not to mention the fact that my office is in a closet that I make myself leave if I wind up getting distracted from my work and need a mental rest during the day. I also have a set of string lights in my office that I only turn on when I’m using it for things that aren’t work, which really helps make the space feel different. The harsh white overhead light means I’m doing work and making money while the cool amber light of my standing lamp and the warm, rosy glow of the string lights means I’m either in a therapy session, writing, or playing video games. A demarcation that proved incredibly useful while I was working from home last week, since I wound up filling my evenings with computer game time because my little office was nice and warm and cozy during the temperature drop we had.

I’ve yet to see how my apartment handles a no-heat-or-cooling environment during the fall, which will be a strong indication of how it will handle the winter. My old apartment would warm up briefly in the morning as it got blasted by sunlight and then spend the rest of the day cooling off. If my apartment is the same temperature as it was when I left it almost twelve hours ago, then it means it at least retains the warmth it has. If it is warmer, then that means it holds heat well. If it is colder, then it means that I’ll be putting in an order for more plastic window covering supplies and hoping that I can figure out a way to keep my bedroom cool enough to maintain my prefered wintery coldness in my sleeping environment without sacrificing the warmth of the rest of my apartment. It would be really cool if I could go back to enjoying winters without being anxious about freezing. It would be a great cap to a long, tiring, but positive day. Wouldn’t that be nice?