Despite having about an entire week off–a Tuesday through Monday kind of deal, which unfortunately means I didn’t get to have my desired nine-days-without-work vacation–I’m still not in the shape I wanted to be. I’m still tired, still struggling to feel rested, and while a lot of that can be placed at the feet of the medication I’ve been taking, not all of it can be. I’m still incredibly burned out. A week away from my work responsibilities was helpful, but not enough to recover from over a decade of endlessly pushing myself. Which is why I’m writing this a week after my final day of vacation, in the middle of the afternoon, on the day it was supposed to go up. Despite my efforts, I still haven’t been able to rebuild my blog buffer. I just don’t always have the energy for it or the focus required to get through typing out my thoughts without drifting towards social media and the doom spirals that inevitably follow. The world’s in a rough situation these days, not just my particular geographic chunk of it, and it’s difficult to avoid letting my mind wander over towards the various horrors when it gets distracted and I’ve been struggling to find good distractions for when I’m at my desk, working. Maybe I should just double-down on work and stay even more busy than usual, but that doesn’t really work anymore since I’m almost always still struggling with my flagging energy levels.

I don’t have a good solution here or else I’d have implemented it. Maybe I need to rework the patterns of my life a bit in order to build in a more balance progression through my day. Maybe I need to force myself to be in bed by certain times even if I’m not feeling particularly sleepy so I can maybe train myself into better sleeping habits. Maybe I need to get my exercise routine back into the regular shape it used to be in. Maybe I should take some time off Final Fantasy and spend some hours on writing (or just build writing time into my every evening so I can push myself into rebuilding my blog buffer). I don’t know. I’ve tried most of those and failed a lot because I’ve spent the last year or so just struggling to feel alright, to feel rested, and to feel like I’ve got the energy I need from one day to the next. It’s discouraging and has me feeling like there’s some kind of broader change I need to make in order to turn things around, but I’m not sure what I could change that wouldn’t just be trading one difficult situation for another. It’s not like any other job would necessarily be better. Different, sure, but probably not better.

A lot of this is just the stress of being alive in this day and age, as sweeping change sprints across the US every other day or two, fueled by the prejudices and whims of the worst people in the country. It doesn’t help that I’m probably about to live through my third or fourth economic recession. Or that I’m worried about the well-being of so many people I care about. Or that I’m concerned about my (metaphorical) neighbors getting snatched off the street just because they’re not white or have tattoos some cop doesn’t understand or just because some cop doesn’t like the way they looked. It’s incredibly discriminating, incredibly unjust no matter who it is, and there’s so much to keep track of these days not just because it’s happening out there but because I’m trying to be mindful of my own safety and the safety of those I care about. And now I’ve also got to be super mindful of what I’m going to buy at the grocery store since prices are probably going to skyrocket as tariffs come into effect, the supply chain is snarled up, and local production fails to make up the difference. It’s going to be hell, I’m sure, because when has anything happened under a republican administration that didn’t do the work required to make things as miserable as possible for their least-favorite portions of the population.

I don’t know what the rest of the week is going to bring, productivity-wise. Maybe I’ll write multiple posts tonight and this will mark the start of me fixing my messed-up buffer. It hasn’t worked before, but maybe it’ll stick this time. Maybe I’ll go back to the way things were in 2017 and 2018 when I first started regular updates to this blog and I often wound up writing each post the day it went up and editing it the following morning. Who knows. I sure don’t. I don’t even have a lot of drive anymore since it feels difficult to dream of a future amidst the slowly tumbling ruins of all the dreams I had before. It’s difficult to pick yourself up when you’re both not sure which direction is “up” and you’re busy preparing yourself for whatever shock is going to send you tumbling in a new direction. I am fine, mostly. In this moment. As a person existing. Caught within the endless present. I don’t know how long that will last or how I’m going to start working on my future again, but for now it’s about all I can do to roll with each new shift. I’d rather be fighting them, trying to change things, but right now it’s all I can do to roll with it an minimize the damage. That’ll have to be enough for now.