It finally happened. Between burnout and the depression I’ve been dealing with (which may or may not be related to the burnout), my buffer ran out and I could not drive myself to write anything even knowing I had nothing scheduled to post the next morning. I couldn’t even make myself get out of bed quickly enough in the morning to write anything before posting time. I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for months now and have only been actually caught up on my preferred “5 posts ready to go” amount of pre-written material once or twice since sometime latter last year, so it really isn’t that surprising that it happened. Between everything going on in the world, my lifelong growing burnout, the pressure and stress of work (ten days until the project I’ve been working on is announced and I can finally talk to people about it), my always not-quite-good mental health, and my growing feelings of isolation, I just am not operating at the level I’d like to be. I mean, I’m not longer taking that medication that made me miserable, but I’m taking others that require some pretty specific timing to manage and have enough mild side-effects that I’m once again no longer comfortable most days (though these side-effects should fade in time). It’s a mess, I feel like my life is a mess, and I feel like I am a mess. It’s rough being me these days and it really shouldn’t be, so I feel kinda bad about it.

I’m trying to be merciful and kind towards myself, though. My last vacation, around the holidays, wasn’t terribly restful at all, nor where any of the ones prior to that. My summmer holiday was marred by the start of my back pain, my subsequent smaller holidays were marred by an inability to sleep and growing physical pain, my fall and winter holidays were made less resetful by pain or just the demands of being social around said holidays, and now I’m in a stretch of three months where I can’t really take any breaks because of work. There’s just so much to do and working from home doesn’t really help if I wind up getting called in to do some last-minute testing meant to address an issue that came up in beta that winds up being physically demanding enough that I’m basically down-and-out for the whole weekend. It is difficult to rest and my own personal hang-ups combined with my exhaustion mean that any changes to my planned rests wind up affecting me disproportionately. I am truly, genuinely struggling these days and while writing does bring me a measure of joy and fulfilment, it also takes energy in a way that less fulfilling but still joyful things don’t. Which means I’ve spent a lot of evenings and time over the weekend–time I could have been writing–playing Final Fantasy XIV instead of doing something more “productive” that I just didn’t have the energy for.

Which mostly means that, despite being this tired and burned out and just plain old exhausted, I’m not actually feeling that miserable. I mean, I feel miserable today, but I also didn’t sleep great last night and came face-to-face with how badly I’m burned out this morning, so that’s kind of weighing on me a lot as I’m writing this during breaks at work. Generally speaking, I’m still enjoying my days and having a good time with my friends and the community I’ve joined through this game. I have things I’m looking forward to, a way to spend my time that doesn’t just feel like kicking my exhaustion, boredom, or discontent down the road, and growing friendships with a variety of different people. I have goals I’m accomplishing, a good game to enjoy, and all the escapism I could want. Which might be starting to become a problem, considering how much time I’m spending escaping versus actually doing things. Other than my blog, though, it’s not like I’ve let anything else slip. My apartment gets cleaned, my laundry gets done, I go to work. If anything, all I’m missing out on is my exercise routine and work’s been demanding enough that I’ve been skipping partly due to that. That’s the upside to all this physical labor: I get my workouts in on the clock.

I’m going to try to get back into the groove of writing more. I don’t know what is going to make that work, but I’ve got some ideas and I’m hopin that setting aside time for writing (or at least trying to write) will be enough to get my doing it more regularly again. It is tiring, yes, but I still enjoy it and making space for it to occupy in my days will hopefully be all I need to get the ball rolling again. I should have enough energy to at least do a little. All I can do until I find something that works is hope that I’ll manage enough to stay ahead on blog posts again. Even though I know that this means writing at least two blog posts on whatever day I manage to get ahead again and I’m already worn out from work and writing this post by the early afternoon… Unfortunately, there’s really nothing else I can do right now but keep on trucking. And dangerously flirt with caffeine in the hope that it will keep my mind focused long enough to jot out a second blog post today, on the two hours of sleep I got.