I took a whole week off. It was only supposed to be a long weekend, but it turned into a whole week off of work. And writing. And most personal responsibilities. I didn’t even go grocery shopping and cobbled meals together out of stuff I had around my apartment, including a meal that was two bagels and the last of my jam. I did absolutely nothing that didn’t need doing and, honestly, it was kind of nice. Between actually getting some REAL rest, with proper seven-to-eight-hour nights and having an antidepressant that is (now unequivocally) working properly, that sure solved a lot of my active problems. Not all of them, mind you. It turns out that, by my approximation, eighty percent of my stress and exhaustion was actually burnout, not depression, so a single week of rest isn’t going to fix that by a long shot. It did still help a lot, though. Between having my first genuinely good birthday in at least a decade, maybe my entire life (can’t have a bad birthday if you don’t really celebrate it), taking time to sleep, allowing myself to just do whatever I wanted (which was only MOSTLY Final Fantasy 14), and reaching a point in my rest where I felt comfortable just sitting on my balcony and reading, I think I’ve gotten the most rest I’ve had in about two years. Turns out it’s difficult to rest if you have to spend a bunch of energy every day fighting your own mind in order to not be lethargic and miserable constantly and that removing that extra bit of effort can really help kickstart your other resting efforts.

Still, because I put in extra effort before my friends visited and had even been increasing my day-job workload at the time, I know I’ve still got a long way to go before I can hope to reach any kind of homeostasis. Which isn’t to say I’ve overextended myself or anything, just that putting in what extra effort I felt I could gave me a pretty clear image of where I’m at. So now, after my first day of work following my nice little vacation, I have a pretty good sense of how much of the last week was proper recovery and how much was just loosening tension in order to make room for another week of it. It was enough that I’m not comfortable putting numbers on it and also not enough for me to want to put numbers on it, but it was still significant. I was ready for today [I wrote this on a monday]. I still struggled to get out of bed, but that has more to do with my insomnia striking last night than anything else. Turns out that going mostly off my melatonin and then getting back on it for a week can kinda fuck with my ability to fall asleep at night. Or at least that’s my working theory. We’ll see how the rest of the week goes. But at least it is not so onerous to exert myself as it was two weeks ago, even with last night’s poor sleep. At least now I can push myself a little bit, over the course of my day, to put in the effort where I think it’s required to do my job and maintain my personal life.

I’m sure I’ll run into my limits, eventually. It does feel strange to think, though, that I’m far enough away from them that I’m not exactly sure where they are. It has been early two years since that was last true. Everything since then has been carefully managed collapse or a steady game of tightrope-walking, so it does feel good to be back here. Even if I am also incredibly tired and worn out from a busy, active workday on two and a half hours of sleep. Part of me wants to say something like “I’m sure I’ll be back to being an exhausted mess as I inevitably fail to get enough sleep most nights” but I’m really going to try to avoid that. I’m going to try to take better care of myself and my life so that things don’t pile up, so that my days aren’t as draining and exhausting as they used to be, so that I can be better about getting rest on a more regular basis. It’s not going to fix things–a statement I repeat this frequently to remind myself to temper my expectations–but it will certainly help. As will getting back into my daily walks, my daily doses of sunshine and fresh air, and my morning exercises. All of that will help and it sure feels a lot less difficult to consider actually doing that stuff now that I’ve gotten some rest and my ability to function is no longer quite so limited.

Ideally, I’d be able to wrap up this post by painting some grandiose vision of the future–a picture showing just how much my life is going to change as a result of all of this and the lessons I’ve learned. I know better than that. Life will be much the same as it ever was, but I might be able to take it all with a bit more grace and serenity now that I’ve gotten my feet back under my again. Change does not happen swiftly, most of the time. It is a slow thing, a gradual shifting until suddenly everything is different. This is one such change. A small thing. A redirection of the flow of my days. It is a small effort for now and might not change much in the course of my life, but things will be different now as a result. To what degree, I cannot say. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, but definitely at least a tiny bit for the better than they otherwise would have.