This past weekend (as of writing this a week-ish before it gets posted) was not as restful as I would have liked. Between the on-going but slowly dimishing symptoms of my antidepressant withdrawal and the absolutely debilitating emotional journey of the Final Fantasy 14 content I was playing, I am going into my final day of “a restful weekend” feeling like I’ve gotten even less sleep than usual. I know that this is the fatigue from the withdrawal compounding what would have been an emotionally draining weekend no matter what, but it still sucks to have so thoroughly overestimated how much I could handle. I mean, I barely did any chore, spent most of my time sitting around in my apartment or trying to cool off my office without turning my AC on, and slept as much as I could, but I’m still starting this Tuesday even more tired than I started my weekend. All of the socializing in-game probably didn’t help, since social interaction has been incredibly draining during this period of withdrawal. It also didn’t help that I went through two heavy days of emotionally draining (in a good way) story quests in Shadowbringers and then followed that up immediately by getting absolutely wrecked by a side-quest (in a bad way) before pushing through it to do some social activities that were fun in the moment but were probably not a wise thing for me to do at that point. I had the distinct thought that I should probably shut the game down early and spend some time dealing with the experience I’d had and instead chose to avoid that and only shut down the game when the maintenance was about to start.

I should have known better than to push through it all. There were parts of the Weapon series of side-quests that were deeply triggering for me, in a “I need to go take my headphones off and stare out a window for ten minutes” kind of way. While I was able to anticipate that it was about to happen, I didn’t actually think that FF14 was about to show someone being tortured, much less depict torture involving all the other details in that scene. They’ve walked up to those kinds of lines before many times, but never actually crossed them, so I was caught-off guard when they not only walked up to the line but then started dancing back and forth across it in a way that actually made it all worse than I could have anticipated at the outset. Or at even any point prior to seeing it happen, honestly. I feel like I should have expected it, but that’s just hindsight and me attempting to blame myself for not anticipating a cutscene that absolutely should have had content warnings on it. Instead of pushing through all that to finish the questline in hopes of seeing the villain get some comeuppance (he didn’t get nearly enough, in my opinion), I should have stopped and taken a proper break, probably for the rest of the day. I, at the very least, shouldn’t have tried to be social and active with others in the game. I was emotionally fried, at that point, long before the questline ended, and attempting to be social while doing group content and a difficult raid on top of all that has left me feeling pretty miserable today.

It will probably take me a few days to recover from all that. Emotionally, I mean. I have no idea how long it’ll take to physically recover from feeling this absolutely enervated. On the emotional side of things, I’ve had a lot of practice dealing with these feelings and even the diffcult few years I’ve had didn’t erode my tools for or ability to manage these complex and difficult emotions. The problem is that all of this stuff now has a physical toll in a way it didn’t used to. I don’t know when it started, maybe during the days of my last medication, the one that absolutely wrecked my physical health, but nowadays anything that takes a heavy toll on me emotionally also tends to put my body through the wringer. Maybe that’ll dimish in time, when I find an antidepressant that works for me or just let my body recover from the various maladies imposed by the medications I’ve been trying, but right now I pay for it in every possible way when I get emotionally wrecked. I should probably be more cautious about that, or at least more cognizant of it, but I can never seem to remember until it’s too late to do anything but suffer through it.

So despite having a four day weekend to rest up and try to recover from the worst of the withdrawal symptoms, I’m not sure I’m going to feel any better coming out of this rest than I felt going into it [I did not]. I’m hoping I can keep getting a decent amount of sleep every night to keep the recovery process going, but I’m really not sure how any of this is actually going to work for me. There’s already a frustrating amount of variability in how I feel from one day to another, so who knows what’s going to happen. The only constant seems to be some level of mental impairment due to either feeling incredibly exhausted or due to brain fog settling in. I can’t seem to escape it and I’m genuinely kind of worried that putting myself through the wringer via Final Fantasy 14 this past weekend has only made it worse. I don’t much care for the thought of making negative progress on my recovery right now but I’m not sure what I could have done different since I did my best to sleep as much as possible and could barely manage more than six hours a night because I’d just feel kind sweaty, gross, and achey every morning when I woke up. I’m just so tired of constantly feeling some kind of awful… It’s really wearing me out.