I had a busy weekend. Not the busiest I’ve ever been, but I had stuff going on every day since Wednesday (of the week before I wrote this) on top of a being incredibly busy at work every day, and it has wiped me out. Only thing making today doable is that I’m working from home due to a blizzard. If I had to be around people and at least pretend to be nice and social, I would probably have lost it before the day was even half over. It is weeks like the one that just ended that remind me just burned out I still am. After all, it was busy but not horribly so. I still had time for fun stuff and social activities. I didn’t sleep as much as I’d have liked to, but I got enough. I shouldn’t be this tired. I shouldn’t be feeling like I need a vacation to recover from five semi-busy and mentally engaging days. And yet here I am, tired as well and wondering if one day of rest is going to be enough as I cycle through various tasks, trying to find something that keeps me engaged long enough for me to make any real progress while my mind wanders and I consider what it would be like to not have a giant list of stuff that needs doing and problems that need solving. I miss the days when I could just exist. When I didn’t have to chose between getting low-quality rest and burning more energy to get something done so that I can hopefully get better rest at some unknown point in the future when all the things on my mind that are stressing me out are finally done. I do not know when those days will return again, but it surely won’t be for a while.

What probably tired me out the most is trying to do all that stuff on top of a busy/stressful week at work. I don’t really have the energy to deal with a hectic, stressful day at work and then to do things in the evening that require focus or effort or social engagement. I just don’t have the energy to keep all that stuff up these days and then, when I’m in spoon debt from that, even a normal amount of activity on the weekend isn’t going to let me undo the deficit I’ve been operating at. Gone are the days where I could recover from that stuff in a day or two of operating in what I used to call “low power mode.” These days, I need to fully shut down in order to recover from that and it’s still less effective than even the low-power mode used to be since I’m just… worse in general. Fewer spoons over all? Maybe a penalty to recovery when I overspend. I’m not sure how I’d frame it, to be honest. All I know for certain that is contributing to this nasty position I’m in is that it now takes spoons for me to avoid overspending my spoons since I need to plan my life around not asking too much of myself. I need to actively prepare in order to avoid winding up in a bad energy situation because it’s not like my workplace is willing to accomodate that, nor can I really tell the world to just cut it out and let me recover for just a little bit where there’s nothing new happening. I have to adapt to my new situation and it takes a decent amount of effort to do that.

I think I need to do nothing more often than I do. I think it’s a problem that I’ve always got something to do. Some little task, some big task, an endless list of to-dos in all shapes, sizes, and flavors. There is no end to it all. Figuring out my living situation, the Sisyphean task of job hunting/applying, taxes, paying bills, budgeting, cleaning my apartment, cooking, laundry, the dishes, things I want to do in video games, things I feel I must do in video games, books to read, podcasts to listen to, shows to watch, media to review, thematic songs to group, a world to build, a campaign to prepare, pants to fix, shoes to re-lace, a storage closet to empty, an apartment to maybe rearrange, relationships to manage, friendships to maintain, goals to work toward, and ever onward. The longer I thought about it, the longer that list grew, until I finally gave up rather than further exhaust myself by forcing myself to confront just how much all of that is. And it’s not all bad! A lot of that is good stuff. Or at least fulfilling stuff. It’s just… a lot. It’s just never-ending. So how am I supposed to do nothing? How can I justify, to myself most of all, time spent doing nothing while I’ve got so very much else to do?

I don’t have a good answer. All I can come up with, that will hopefully satisfy all conditions, is spending less time at the computer. Between work, writing, job hunting, and my main video game time being Final Fantasy 14, I spend most of my time at the computer. I even watch shows at the computer, these days, since it’s easier to eat in my chair at my desk than on my couch at my coffee table. So I’m going to try to spend less time at my computer. I’ll probably send most of that time in front of my TV, but that’s an acceptable change in my opinion. At least I’ll be out of my office. Well, for at least a bit. I’ve still got a lot of stuff to do that can only be done at my computer. Most of it, to be quite honest, is also the stuff that takes up the most space in my mind, so I won’t be able to get away from it entirel. Even if I never set foot in my office in a day, it will still occupy my mind thoroughly enough that I won’t really be able to say that I got away from it. Even if I can forget my usual passtimes, there’s also taxes, my resume, potential job applications, email correspondance with my landlord I’m too tired to respond to, this blog, my other writing, a poem I wrote the title for but can’t find the emotional focus to work on, and on and on and on. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be less full of thoughts all the time and can’t ever follow that thought process too far because it usually winds up with me jealous of people who don’t give a shit about anything, which is not a place I want to be. So, instead, I’m going to go bury my face in some snow or the corner of my couch or a deep reverie of some hypothetical past I’m not sure every really existed anywhere other than in my wishful thinking that I ever lived a life of true comfort, stability, and interior peace. One of those, for sure.