There are times, more or less often depending on my mood and the state of my mental health, that I find myself thinking, usually unprompted, about how I have very little in my life other than my job. It is a difficult idea to refute. After all, I spend fifty hours a week working at this job of mine and spend nowhere near that much time on any other single thing. I don’t even sleep that much over seven days, most weeks. Outside of work, I don’t really have much in the way of variety. I have video games, which include a mix of solo games or some that I play online with friends, though I do most of my game playing by myself since I work late, most of my friends are in different time zones, or my friends play games I don’t have the energy for. I also have this blog, but it mostly feels like I’m shouting into a void and slowly realizing that the faint echo I hear is probably using my voice (along with the voices of many others) to learn to be a more massive and culturally destructive doppelganger than anyone ever feared there would be when they came up with the idea of doppelgangers. It feels bad to continue shouting when I still haven’t had the time or energy to come up with a reasonable alternative. Beyond those things, I’ve got my tabletop games but those are difficult to enjoy the way I’d prefer since they’re scheduled less regularly than I’d like and, as is true of probably ninety-nine percent of gaming groups, plagued with scheduling issues, cancellations, and the busy lives of the people involved asserting themselves in a way that demands whatever came up take a higher priority than fun. It’s disheartening to think through this all because I can never actually tell myself that these thoughts are wrong.

I do a lot of work reframing them. The variety of games I have and play means that I’ve almost always got something to play, no matter what mood I’m in or how social I’m feeling. Writing is my favorite means of self-expression and shouting into the void means I don’t need to worry overly much about being overheard. My irregularity in tabletop games means I get to play or run a wide variety of games and tell a wide variety of stories. The amount of work I do means that I don’t need to worry about money, can continue working on paying off my student loans early, and can afford to fund all of my hobbies. I do not need to make compromises beyond the division of my time between my job and the rest of my life. I can do whatever I want, within reason, thanks to my prudent decisions and modest living. It is not such a bad life, to live this way.

If I do enough work, I can convince myself to focus on that thought, to buy into that framing, and let go of the thoughts about what my life could be. That spiral is never productive, is one of the most harmful I’ve ever encountered, and is completely endless. Unlike most of my thought spirals, there is no bottoming out on this one. I can only ever get free of it if I can find a way to forcibly break myself out of it. Which, thanks to years of dealing with my own anxiety spirals, my own OCD, and the various coping mechanisms that are spirals of their own, I can do that easily enough once I’ve gathered the strength required. Breaking free of this one takes a bit more than most, though, because I can’t fortify myself by denying its validity. I’m too aware that I’m reframing things that often feel negative in a more positive light in order to hopefully make myself feel better about them. I’ve worked too hard at making space for my own feelings to easily brush these ones aside, even if I know they’re only going to hurt me.

Currently, even three days later, I am still caught in one such spiral. I’ve made some progress towards the edge, but I’ve been struggling with my ability to gather the strength required to do most things over the past few months. My spoon count is lower than it has ever been, even as my fork count continues to rise. There are no quick escapes. I don’t have the energy to force change. All I can do is slowly push at the boundaries, hoping for a weak point or for the slow but steady pressure of my persistence to pay off. I’ve lived through worse, of course, so I’m well-equipped to endure. That does not make it any more pleasant, though. Callouses allow you to endure a lot more than you could do without them, but that doesn’t mean you’re not still experiencing something harmful.

It is difficult to find myself denied one of the three things that exist in my life outside of work. Video games are not the refuge they once were because of my continued depression, my decrease in spoons, my growing exhaustion due to on-going insomnia, and a much-shrunk group of online friends. I do not find them as comforting as they once were and often feel like they’re just a way to pass a few hours without needing to really pay attention to my life, which is a terrible feeling all on its own. Writing on this blog feels like it is worth less and less since I’m now restricting myself and what I might post here, on account of not wanting to post any more purely creative work until I’ve found a way to safeguard my work from the enshitification of WordPress .com and the general rise of LLM data theft. I have not held myself back from posting something on this blog since I created it. That was the point, after all. To have a place to put all the words I was concerned I could never share in my day-to-day life.

And now, as the passage of time creates demands and takes its toll on us all, my tabletop groups are dwindling. Players leave, beholden to their own lives, and I do not begrudge them that. They should be taking care of themselves and their own lives first and foremost. You need to put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help others. People cancel and, again, I do not begrudge them that. Life sometimes interrupts what we’d like to do and no one should ever feel so beholden to an activity meant for enjoyment that they have to force themselves to do it when they won’t be able to have fun or when something else needs their time and attention more. I’ve cancelled my fair share of sessions, after all. I know all too well why someone might not feel up for a tabletop game. The things we expected when we made our plans are rarely all that we encounter as we move from plans to action and whatever comes next, so I understand.

Still, I can’t help but feel sad when it happens. It is a small grief, one I typically keep to myself because, once again, I don’t blame my fellow players. I’m not mad they cancelled or withdrew, or because the GM is not feeling well enough to run a game. I know am the odd one out, in that I find these types of things restorative in a way that most people do not. So I don’t want to burden them. Usually, they feel bad enough already without me adding my own sadness to their emotional burden. But I’ve promised myself for years now that I will make space for my feelings and it never feels good when a game I was excited to play is cancelled, be it hours ahead, minutes ahead, or days ahead. So I grieve, I take my time to let my feelings run their course, and I do my best to figure out what is next. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work, much like the reframing from above, and I sometimes wind up spiraling instead. It is the one pillar that remains uncompromised as scheduling issues and cancelled sessions don’t really effect the pillar itself. When I get to apply it in propping myself up, I do not need to avoid thinking about how I’m potentially contributing to the theft of all creative work on the internet by continuing to supply creative work to a machine build only to consume and, eventually destroy. Or how every attempt at finding a game to enjoy is a gamble I can only afford to make once a month and guessing wrong leaves me without the boost of something new and exciting.

There are no easy solutions here, trapped as I am at the intersection of limited energy, limited income, and limited ability to change anything without either one of those two prior items changing positively first. Reframing is never change, after all, and telling myself that I’ll break free of this eventually, by dint of perseverance alone thanks to the path I’ve set myself on, stopped working four major setbacks and almost as many years ago. The only thing that lets me rely on it is the fact that it is as true as every possible framing of my current life and, despite bringing me no comfort, impossible to reframe in a way that might take that support away from me. Someday, this will be over. I’ll have paid off my student loans. I’ll have the ability to work less and still afford my modest lifestyle. I’ll be able to do things that I don’t dare think of right now for fear of making my spiral worse again–too many “somedays” are identical to “what ifs” for me to find any comfort there. But someday I will be free. Someday things will change. For now, though, all I can do is keep pressing on and hope that slow and steady will at least finish the race, even if I’ve long ago given up on winning it.