I’ve been putting off taking some kind of vacation for a month now (as of writing this). I started this year knowing that I’d need to spend the first three months focused, working a lot of hours, and not taking any time off to rest because we had a super important deadline we all needed to meet. Then, once we met it, I’d need to stick around for a while in case anything came up during or immediately after the product’s release. That sort of thing doesn’t happen often since my team is really good about doing high-quality work and not missing problems during our first pass, but it does happen sometimes and this project was important enough that I could get called in from any vacation I was taking that didn’t involve me leaving the state. Then all of this planning became reality and I was right on the money until it came time to do the final release meeting for the project. Turns out that this release meeting was delayed for another four-ish weeks due to internal reasons I’m not going to go too deeply into (for the same reasons I don’t talk specifics about my job) while I was working from home due to being ill a week ago (as of writing this). Which means I got to come into the office after all that was done, learn that most of the people I worked on the project with were gone on vacation, and then, after a day of exhausting myself with frustrated spiraling, realize that I could take a whole week off since I’d already told my boss that I had a week of vacation time in the chamber. So I did that and now I’m sitting in my home office, Final Fantasy 14’s title screen music playing in the background, as I write this over the remains of the Chinese food I picked up from the place down the street for my lunch.

I have basically no plans for the next week. I’ve got some activities in Final Fantasy 14 to attend (a wrestling event that I’ll be recording for my friend who can’t make it and then a brunch event later on the weekend) and a therapy appointment on Friday, but I’m largely leaving my time unstructured. I have no plans, no strictures about how I should spend my time, and a whole lot of options available to me. If my current feelings are anything to go by, though, I expect I’ll be playing a lot of Final Fantasy 14 and, if I feel so inclined, catching up on some Star Wars: Rebels so I can start listening to A More Civilized Age again, maybe finally watch Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (so I can listen to a patreon bonus from AMCA), finish catching up on my podcasts, and who knows what else. I’ve got a lot of options and absolutely no inclination toward any one thing beyond the general inertia of how much I’ve been playing FF14 lately. I’m really hoping that having this kind of unstructured time in a limited quantity will be good for me. So much of my life has been managed through strict daily habits and patterns that I think I need to break out of those to actually relax. I set all those habits and patterns up so that I could get through my low-spoon days with as few unnecessary decisions as possible, but I think a side-effect of relying on that behavior for just over four years now is that I can’t relax unless I’m breaking out of those patterns. This is purely a hypothesis right now, but I’ve got a week off and a mind to test it out, even if I’ll need to do it again a few times to remove the potential for this to have been a fluke thanks to a confluence of events.

Every time I’ve taken a vacation, be it a stay-cation or a planned trip to somewhere else, I’ve had structured time. There have been plans upon plans. Some of that is the sort of necessary work required for trips to happen without issue: arrival times, shopping trips, departure times, and so on. Some of it has been the necessary work of home maintenance, planned so it coincides with days I’ll have the time and energy to perform it: deep cleaning before the holidays, making my apartment ready for some major delivery, being on hand to receive and assemble computer parts. Sometimes it has just been the result of making plans with others: trips into town while on vacation or traveling to visit people I haven’t seen in a long time. Even smaller breaks, three-day weekends or occasional floating holidays almost always wound up getting something planned on them. There was always cleaning to be done or the constant churn of my habits to maintain. After all, a single day of deviation isn’t much of a break and letting that disrupt my schedule often did more harm that good. This time around, though, I specifically planned to do nothing. I cleaned before this week, set myself up with groceries the night before my vacation properly began, and ultimately refused to place any limitations on how much Final Fantasy 14 I might play. After all, specifically not doing something is a form of structure and I really need to just let myself do whatever. No alarms. No meal times. Medications get taken when they get taken, I wake up when I wake up, and I go to sleep when I go to sleep. No structure.

This, of course, has the potential to backfire on me immensely. I thought I might benefit from something like this back when the pandemic began five years ago, but it wound up being incredibly unhealthy for me. While the conditions aren’t even nearly the same, there’s enough parallels that I’m a bit concerned. I am driven to this by events outside of my control. I am physically isolated (though, that said, I’m no more isolated than I’ve been at any point in the last five years, so it’ll be less of a system shock). I am immensely stressed by things outside of my control. The differences will likely make or break this for me, but I’m betting that things will go better than they did last time. Now, I’m greatly in need of a rest, I’ve got a known limit on how long this time will last, I’m no more worried for my continued existence and health than I have been at any point in the last month, and I’ve got a largely endless amount of activities to keep me occupied (at least as far as my unstructured time is concerned). I think I will get through this week without going stir-crazy, especially if I manage to stick to my exercise routine and walks. No matter what else happens, I’m very much looking forward to continuing to sleep as much as I’d like. I’ve been exhausted and sleep-deprived for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not feel tired, so this will be a real treat, even if it’s possible that I might sleep through my therapy appointment and digital brunch plans. But I meant it when I said “no alarms” and if I sleep through them, then I clearly needed the sleep more. I’m sure I’ll survive without them, if it comes down to it.