Yesterday’s post was called “On The Other Side Of Sickness” because it was a bit of wishful thinking about the future. I wrote it on a Monday, as I went into work while still unwell, and hoped that, by the time I was editing it, I’d be better. I am not. I’m also a bit behind in blog posts because work has been so busy and I’ve been so cotton-brained and tired that I’m having difficulty focusing. It is truly awful, to feel myself mentally diminished and be unable to do anything about it at all. And yet I must soldier on because there is work to do, money to earn, plates to spin, balls to juggle, and a small legion of crafters and gatherers and combatants to lead into a new Final Fantasy 14 patch (we’re up to six people, as of the night before I wrote the first draft of this). Lots going on and very little rest to be had despite my illness, which definitely hasn’t helped me get over the last bits of this. I’d be tired and unfocused at this point regardless of having a cold, so it’s no wonder that I still feel as loopy as I do. I wish I could say it was all bad choices, but only staying up late last night was a bad choice and it was a bad choice made knowing that I spent the two previous nights unable to fall asleep. Not because of coughing or congestion or anything like that. No, this was because I was too warm or I couldn’t get comfortable or my mind just wouldn’t wind down or I kept jerking awake as I was falling asleep for some reason. I don’t really know what’s got me in such a fuss right now, but I can definitely tell that it’s my anxiety coming at me like it hasn’t in a long time.

I have no idea what’s at the heart of this. I had a mild, quiet panic attack yesterday (the day before I started this blog post) and I assumed at first that it was feedback from being overcaffeinated (I cut way down on caffeine when I got sick and picked it back up again pretty sharply yesterday thanks to forgetting to switch to decaf tea after my second cup), but the feeling didn’t fade and is still present even now. It could be a reaction to the stress of the holidays and the pressure I’m currently feeling from everything I have yet to do in the next couple weeks. It could also be a reaction to the world at large and how it always finds a way for things to get worse despite how bad each successive week is. It could be a reaction to the constant buzz of the newscycle that moves from scandal to scandal without any attempts at accountability or speaking truth to power that worms it way into every corner of social media as one outraged person after another declares that THIS time they’ve surely gone too far. It could also just be my brain chemistry bouncing back and force as it reacts to the surge, drop, and then sudden resurgeance of caffeine in my system (you can’t commit caffeine crimes for long drives when you’re in your 30s without paying some kind of price). Or it could be everything. It’s all a lot and no amount of brainfog will keep it all from popping into my head multiple times a day every single day.

I keep telling myself that I need to just hold out for a couple more weeks (or a few more days as this gets posted), that I can rest and reorganize over the holidays, but I’ve never once successfully done that and my subconscious–the seat and source of most of my anxiety–knows it. Plus I’m still dealing with what feels like whiplash, going from feeling so positive and ready on the first Monday of December to feeling like hot trash the very next day due to my cold arriving with a flourish. There is precious little stability or clarity in my life right now and lacking both of those things is a sure recipe for anxiety if I ever saw one. This could all be very reasonable stress and anxiety, feeding into itself through the foggy, unexplored corridors of my mind, all exacerbated by the fact that I haven’t had a therapy session in a month and miss the grounding experience of it. My life has been absolutely buckwild lately, as all of my routines have been thrown into chaos and I haven’t had a “normal” day in what feels like a couple months thanks to work, the holidays, and now being sick. All of which is to say that it isn’t particularly surprising that I’m having anxiety problems right. Frustrating and incredibly annoying, to be sure, but not surprising. I’d probably be more surprised if I didn’t have at least a bit of an anxiety spike what with everything going on and the added pressure of what’s shaping up to be a cold, icy winter already.

So I’m going to spend a little bit more time getting organized. I’m also going to do my best to go to bed early tonight. I’m gonna try to rest, make myself some to-do lists, and maybe hold off on the podcasts and music for a bit so I have some part of each day to let my mind calm itself down, work through things, and maybe surface whatever unknown thought, feeling, or experience triggered this lingering spike of worry. Maybe it’s that I got sick at all, despite years of effort. Maybe it’s a fear that I am not going to be able to enjoy this winter due to the cold, triggering memories of my past experiences with an apartment I couldn’t keep warm as the temperature dropped, the wind-whipped into my apartment, and every inch of the floor leached in the cold from the exposed foundation of that building. There’s so many things it could be and listening to my usual distractions is only going to prevent me from actually figuring it out.