After a few sessions without much in the way of stuff to work on, my physical therapist and I decided to change our appointment schedule to every-other-week (starting with a three-week skip due to scheduling issues). Since I stopped taking that medication that was making me physically miserable, I’ve had fewer and fewer problems that I’ve needed to work on with my physical therapist. At this point, as I’m coming up on two months off the medication, I’m still dealing with some lingering stuff, but most of what I’ve got going on is due to the physical demands of my job and the somewhat uneven muscle usage those demands result in. Other than stretches and starting up my exercise routine in earnest again, there’s not much to do for now. Thus the every-other-week appointments. We’ll let some time pass, see if getting back into my exercise routine helps fix my lingering problems, and then hopefully either end our appointments or set me up with a better workout and stretching routine and THEN end our appointments. Either way, I suspect I’m less than half a dozen appointments from being done. Which is great, let me tell you. I still remember just how awful last fall was, even if a lot of those days blur together in my memory, and no matter how tired or sore I feel nowadays, I can take comfort in knowing that it will pass in a couple days if I stretch and get enough sleep. And destress a bit. I’m still struggling with that part, but I always have so I doubt I’m going to fix it any time soon.

This will probably be my last update about myself for a bit. I’m trying to get back to my whole “don’t post about being miserable” thing for the sake of my own mental health. There’s too much stress and negativity out there already and I’m absolutely going to drown in it if I let too much of that creep into my blog. My well-being will, of course, still come up as a topic from time to time, but I’m going to try to avoid complaining about my life or the on-going horrors of being a US citizen living under the Trump/Musk regime of absolute horse shit. I really don’t need that kind of negative energy. Especially because my reflexive sneer at that thought of the phrase “Trump/Musk Regime” caused a muscle to twitch uncontrollably in my face in what might be my newest stress-induced facial tic. It will join my long-standing eyelid twitches and hopefully replace the accidentally jaw-clenching I’m trying to turn from a subconscious action into a fully conscious avoidance. I really need to find a way to reduce stress beyond what I’m already doing since it is not capable of keeping up with everything going on.

If getting back into my pre-medication healthy habits works out, it will hopefully finish fixing my sleep cycle and physical well-being, giving me the energy to do things at night and on weekends other than playing video games. Don’t get me wrong, I still love playing Final Fantasy XIV and look forward to getting to a point in that where I’m ready to play other games again, but I’d also like to have the time and energy for some additional writing. Get back to writing Infrared Isolation, start writing more poetry again, maybe even get back to working on one of my novel projects. See what I can do with that. Not that I really hope to ever be a successful author of any kind at this point, but I’d like to get it done and maybe look at self-publishing should the traditional route end up as dry and useless as I expect it to be. After all, capitalism is ruining EVERYTHING, not just the government. It’s ruining books, video games, and every aspect of modern life! Why have dreams when it’s just going to destroy them? Better to find what joy and fulfillment you can outside of the capitalist system by getting your friends together on weekends for some good, free, and anti-capitalistic tabletop games and storytelling. Still, even with all that, I’d like to finish those stories and get them out into the world somehow, even if I just wind up publishing a chapter a week or whatever on my blog because they’re never going to make me any money and I’d rather share stories than profit off them if profiting off them won’t enable me to tell stories full time.

Anyway, this wound up being more neutrally hopeless (my emotional state writing this) and tonally dour (what this probably reads like) than I planned, so I’m just going to wrap this all up by saying that I’m finally finished with the biggest and most urgent problem I was personally dealing with, so now I can focus on all the other problems. Societal, emotional, intellectual, and so on. Probably only going to work on one at a time, still, but at least I can focus on something without falling asleep the second my muscles unclench. It was really rough there for a while. I dozed off at work so many times… I don’t know what the next few weeks, let alone months, will bring, but I’m hoping I’ll find the time and energy to make a little space for myself to do stuff that fulfills me. I’m really going to need it.