Well, it’s been rough. I was INCREDIBLY optimistic about the course this month would take and I think I hit my primary daily writing target only once so far, let alone my daily secondary target of getting enough words to exclude my blog posts from my daily writing totals. I’ve been so busy with work and then so burned out from how busy I was that I when I finally go home and eat dinner, I’ve only got enough time and energy to spend an hour listlessly trying to write before shuffling off to bed. Even the weekend wasn’t much better since all the exhaustion I’d been putting off since I couldn’t afford to feel tired during my incredibly busy work days came crashing back down on me. I did almost nothing but play Spider-Man (the PS4 one, since I never finished the DLC) the entire time. I did eventually finish a blog post and do my laundry, but I was so wiped out that writing the post took three times longer than it should have and I didn’t even fold my clean laundry. What little energy I had for stuff beyond all that was spent on doing my dishes, a little bit of cooking, and taking care of things like paying my bills and other such unfortunate necessities. It has been rough mentally, emotionally, and physically these past few days, and even now that it seems like the worst has passed (though it remains to be seen if this will stay true since it’s not like I anticipated the horrible, frantic, and exhausting week I’ve had since the month began) I am barely staying on my feet as I struggle to remain functional despite the exhaustion.

I’m trying to avoid pushing myself to write more than I have. Some pushing can be good and healthy, since there are times when I will benefit more from doing a bit of writing or storytelling work than from doing something more restful (writing continues to be my only means of consistent emotional and mental fulfilment), but it’s an easy situation to misjudge and the price of overestimating my ability to work is much higher than I’d like it to be. Pushing myself last weekend would have left me even more exhausted and worn out than I was at the start of this week and I am barely hanging in there despite it being only Tuesday (as I’m writing this). My only consolation is that, regardless of how things go over the next few days and weeks, it won’t be as intense as the last week has been. Sure, I have to clean my apartment in preparation for my siblings and some additional guests to come visit for the holiday, but I also have the entire week around US Thanksgiving off of work so I can get some sleep, unwind up a bit, and take my time with my cleaning and preparations. Not too much, of course, since my siblings are showing up a few days before Thanksgiving for a longer visit, but enough that I’m not worried about needing to cram it all into a single day or two. I might also look into hiring a cleaner, just to save myself some time and energy, but that feels like a luxury that I should go without for the time being. I’m a fairly practised cleaner and my apartment isn’t so big or so dirty that I couldn’t jam through a whole deep clean in one very productive day if I absolutely had to.

What all this means for National Novel Writing Month remains to be seen. Sure, I met my writing goal yesterday, but I’m somehow even more exhausted today and have just as many words to write as I did yesterday. Perhaps in more time, since I don’t have to stay at work until incredibly late, but I don’t know how I can expect myself to get any work done at home when I’m already have trouble staying awake at my desk at work. Which is a standing desk. There’s little that feels as alarming as dozing off while you’re standing up and entirely unsupported by any useful corners or walls. It’s like that sensation of falling in a dream that causes your body to lurch in bed, waking you up, but you’re actually falling over and can only hope that the wake-up lurch pushes you in the right direction to stay standing up. And, you know, that no one in the office noticed your goofy ass nearly falling over while standing at your desk. I don’t know if I’d ever live that down.

I’ve been trying to correct my sleep schedule a bit to help alleviate this exhaustion, but my new bedtime routine (a change necessitated by how this new medication I’m taking absolutely dries me the hell out) takes longer than I always think it will and I keep starting it later than I ought to. Partly because I keep waiting until I’m tired enough to sleep in about thirty minutes (which is how long my old routine takes) and partly because my attempts to meet my NaNoWriMo goals usually have me working until midnight. Which means I can’t really do more than continue to survive on a bit over five hours of sleep.

This is a familiar catch-22. If I was better rested, I could write more quickly, get more done during the day, get out of bed earlier, and actually have time in the evening to do things other than eat and collapse into exhausted sleep. Unfortunately, I need all of that stuff to create the space I would use to go to bed earlier in the evening and I can’t get all of that unless I start going to bed earlier in the evening. A single night of skipping my writing goals won’t help either, since I got two very good eight-hour nights over the weekend and it was only just enough to make me presentable and cogent on Monday, so this is a whole interlaced system of bullshit that is going to only unravel when I’ve got some time commitments that I can fully set aside. Which will hopefully be happening two weeks from now as I host people for the holidays during my week off of work. Which I’m super excited about since it will be nine days in a row with no work, no time-sensitive obligations, and (hopefully) multiple nights of good rest in a row. The thought of feeling properly rested for the first time since the start of 2023 because I went to bed at a reasonable time, woke up at a reasonable time, and got a reasonable amount of sleep is honestly all that’s keeping me going right now. Even if I wind up falling short of that and can only get enough nights in a row that my I’m no longer in a sleep debt hole, I will be satisfied.

In the mean time, I’m just going to have to continue doing my best with NaNoWriMo and hope that I can slowly make up for lost ground–r at least not lose any more–as I try to balance work, rest, and writing. I’ve never been super good at getting all of those in healthy amounts, but I feel like I’ve learned a lot over the past year about respecting my limits, not adding to my mental burden when I choose to rest, viewing rest as a long-term project rather than something I can do once and be done with, and finding ways to interject personal projects into my life without putting other things on hold (mostly by doing them in the way I write this blog: in tidbits during breaks from the work I do at my day job). Maybe, once the hectic, higgledy-piggledy pace of my job has returned to its normal (but still rather high and demanding) level, I’ll actually be able to prove just how good I’ve gotten at balancing everything by working fifty hours a week, sleeping at least six hours a night, maintaining my blog, and writing my NaNoWriMo project, all without having to give up on the other things I do during the weeks like my tabletop games or my attempts to plan video game based hangouts with my friends online. That sure would be nice, even if I don’t actually hit my goal for NaNoWriMo.