Last Friday, (two Fridays ago, as you’re reading this), the last of my computer parts (save the monitors) arrived and I began the laborious process of reading manuals, looking things up on the internet, and doing my best to put things together. I was confident that things would go better this time around (compared to my first computer build) since I’ve spent seven and a half years working at a job that involved a bunch of mechanical and electrical testing, so I’m much more familiar with how to put computers together than before. That, of course, overlooked the fact that I’m generally putting together devices that have a set list of parts that we already know work perfectly together and that my familiarity with the products my company makes gives me a very particular idea of what a computer’s interior should look like. An idea that doesn’t reflect a gaming computer much at all. Sure, I could easily find the ports on the motherboard I needed and I felt much more confident plugging in cables during this build compared to my first back in 2015, but I was still largely operating without being entirely certain that I was doing the right thing. All of which meant that I wound up missing something pretty important that meant my computer wouldn’t properly turn on once assembled and my incredible exhaustion (beyond the ability to make choices easily due to the anxiety of waiting for everything to arrive coupled with the fact that I only finished putting it all together almost six hours after I started, just before midnight) prevented me from seeing what I’d done wrong until I’d driven down to Chicago and paid a professional to take a look at it (ostensibly so I could just solve whatever the problem was an move on with my life, which is exactly what I wound up doing even if the problem was incredibly simple and kind of dumb).

It was a draining twenty-four hour period that left me wrung out and too tired to even pick a game to play once everything was properly set up Saturday night (I’d just spent over an hour on hold with Microsoft Support since my computer wouldn’t activate Windows properly just prior to that and almost sixty minutes of horrible hold music had drained me of everything but a desire to rest). It was also, in retrospect, entirely avoidable if I’d just listened to myself and stopped working for the night on Friday. You see, I’d hit a point a couple hours into my build where I realized I hadn’t eaten in seven hours and decided to take a break in order to eat something. I initially meant to take a full dinner break, but I was feeling restless and unable to relax when my entire living room and table where covered in the computer parts I’d been waiting for all day, so I decided to just eat the left over pizza bagel I had in the fridge and use that snack to tide me over until I was finished. After all, I reasoned, it wouldn’t take that long and then I’d be able to relax and eat while programs updated, software ran, and my computer configured itself. If I’d stopped then, when I’d read through everything, unpacked everything, and mostly knew how to plug it all in yet hadn’t begun actually plugging things in, I probably wouldn’t have missed something incredibly basic and important. But I decided to throw my exhausted mind and weary body into the task and figured some good, old-fashioned hard work would solve any problems just as well as clarity of mind could. Which was incredibly incorrect and has given me a lot to chew on as I prepared myself for my subsequent therapy appointment.

My oldest coping mechanism is to be too busy to be stressed or anxious or afraid or upset or any other negative emotion you’d care to name and it’s one that I’ve largely built my life around. Sure, I’ve been working for a while on addressing that fact, but generally in specific ways that involve me not taking on more creative labor than I can support from week to week (like dialing back my blog to only five days now while waiting to find a better home for my creative writing, not running any weekly tabletop games, and not immediately picking up something to fill my Thursday nights now that the one TTRPG I was playing in every Thursday has come to an end). What I’ve let slip is the fact that I tend to apply the “buckle down and work harder” solution to every problem, real or imagined, that I find in my life. Which really isn’t a healthy way to live my life at all, considering how few problems I have that hard work alone will solve. I mean, some of the big ones (student debt and all its descendants) will be solved by hard work and time, but most of the rest of my life will only suffer under that. Especially given how much burnout and exhaustion I’m juggling any given week, even after the somewhat unsatisfactory vacation I had (mostly as a result of how stressful that last weekend was).

I’ve got a bit more thinking to do before I’ve sorted all of this out, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to try being more aware of when I’m actually going to benefit from hard work and when I’m more likely to cause myself problems by not resting. It’s a tricky balance to find, given that most of the examples I can think of don’t lend themselves well to a clear solution, but I think it’s worth some of my time and effort. Very carefully measured out, of course, since diving in head-first would just be giving myself a hard time for no reason. It’s not like I’ve got a deadline here since the only thing I can really afford to put effort into at all for the next few days is my job and that’s pretty much the one thing I know will benefit from plenty of hard work. I just maybe shouldn’t push myself so hard that I undo the benefits of my last two weeks of rest. Or at least avoid straining myself so much that I lose context for how tired I should be at the end of the day again, like I did before my vacation… I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. I always do. And how to explain it better, which I don’t always manage. I’ve got the feeling that it will have a positive impact on my life if I can do both of those, though I’m not really sure what that impact might be other than “not as burned out all the time.” Which isn’t a small thing, mind you! That’s a big deal. I just don’t think that’s all of it. I’m sure one of my blog posts in the next few days will contain the answers I currently seek. After all, it’s not like I’ve got anything else interesting going on this week. I’ll need SOMETHING to write about…