While I’m still pretty bitter about my new work schedule and wakeup time, I’ve begun trying to find a positive spin I put on it for myself. This isn’t working super well since I know I’m lying to myself about it, but at least my attempts to find silver linings are working out a bit better. The primary silver lining I’ve found as of my second consecutive day of this crap is that I’ll now be getting off work at a time where I can more easily participate in group Final Fantasy 14 activities. This is especially relevant almost immediately because today, the day I’m writing this, marks the first instance of a weekly even I helped to schedule. Last week, on a saturday, my FC (Free Company, which is the FF14 version of player guilds) wound up getting a group together to do one of the “exploration zones” for the expansion I’d just finished. Since we planned this activity out ahead of time, I was all ready to go when the event started and had a pretty good time playing around with my friends. It was fun, even if I didn’t really know what was going on since I had to skip the cutscenes in order to not hold everything up for all the players who had already done that stuff, and we wound up getting such a large group together that someone said we should try to make it a weekly event. Since there was already a different weekly event for doing the latest “exploration zone” (which was recently released and is still very new content) and a lot of chat back and forth about when it was going to happen, I decided to just set up a poll and let everyone pick what time worked best for them. Which turned out to be Thursdays, the one day each week that I’d previously reserved as my “get to work whenever and work super late to make up for any short days” day.

Now that’s not a thing for me anymore. Now I get to work by 730am at the latest and can leave at 530pm, which means I have enough time to get home and log on by the start of the event (6pm) without even cutting my day short. It also means that leaving at 430 so I can attend a thing on mondays at 5pm is a more reasonable proposition since it’d be cutting my day down to nine hours instead of the eight-or-less it used to be. My Wednesday event remains unchanged, though, since that was originally scheduled a bit later on account of my schedule and desire to participate (and has apparently become the more dependable and preferred time for the activity) in fighting old raids on “original-adjacent” difficulty. Eventually, whenever I catch up, I’ll also be able to participate in the Tuesday evening exploration activity and maybe even the Friday one if that ever gets resurrected, but I have no idea if that will happen. Heck, I might even make it happen. I’ll have the time in the evenings now, after all. Why not start to fill them with activities I was unable to participate in due to timing issues?

Well, as long as I’m not too tired by then, anyway. I’m having a difficult time adjusting to my new scheduled wakeup time and work day, so right now all I want to do is lay down and not move for twelve to thirty-six hours. Maybe sleep a bit. I dunno. The last thing I want to do is be social with people. Especially people I have to still be a little performative around (since I still don’t know everyone super well yet). I am lower on spoons than usual this week, thanks to the frustrations of the week and the effort required to change my schedule around (and my lack of sleep as my body refuses to comply with just going to bed earlier), so tonight’s going to be a bit of a trial as I try to stay focused enough to participate and find some joy amidst the haze of exhaustion currently plaguing me. I’m hoping that I’ll recover over the weekend and that, by the time next week’s exploration event rolls around, I’ll be better adjusted to my newly altered sleep schedule. Who know. Anything is possible. Hell, I started taking my increased antidepressant dose today so maybe that will have kicked in next week and I’ll be firing on all cylinders rather than limping through my days.

Other than that and the knowledge that I might actually be able to go to some of the events my local friends talk about on weeknights (which is a fraught idea as it is, given how little I hear from these folks anymore), there’s very little to find pleasant about my early morning wake-ups so far. Maybe once the weather clears up and isn’t “smoke” all day every day I’ll be able to properly enjoy sunrise like I used to. Maybe, once I’ve getting enough sleep again, this new routine will have shocked my system back into some semblance of regularity. Maybe I’ll even feel better about my life because I’ll be sticking to a proper routine again and not getting stuck in bed for hours in the morning because of my depression. There’s a lot of potential here, but I’m hesitate to hope that any of it will come to pass given the amount of frustration and disappointment I’ve already dealt with this year. Time will tell, as I’m fond of saying these days, and all I can do is live through enough of it to see what it tells me.