I hit a point last night where I just…. couldn’t anymore. Between my two workshops, my raid group farming for wings, the roleplaying wrestling league, and my two dearest friends have their characters get married in-game, I just… don’t have any more. So I spent two hours staring at my computer as I tried to figure out something fun to do last night after logging out, gave up and asked for recommendations, and didn’t get much from that, so I just hung up and… stared into space for a while. I’m so burned out, but even that doesn’t explain the depths I sank to last night (as I’m writing this, but at least a week ago as you’re reading it). Something just caused my depression to spike immensely, to the point of withdrawing from people, and I couldn’t push through it to do anything because even the stuff I normally do to stay occupied during those times felt just as pointless and boring as everything else I considered. So I moved to my couch and started into space for half an hour, intermittently crying as I tried to figure out why I felt so bad and why stuff that I generally liked doing suddenly felt so odious and awful. Because that was the thing. Minutes before this happened, one of my other friends asked how my day was and I told her “good,” but then I’m suddenly crashing and feeling like even doing the small tasks of normal preoccupation in Final Fantasy 14 were going to rip my soul out of my body if I forced myself to do them.

Eventually, that intense intermingled sadness and mental/emotional vacancy faded, so I started cancelling what I could and putting the rest on a one-week break. The only things I can’t stop or take a break from are the ceremony and the RP wrestling. This ceremony is a one-time event and I don’t want to miss it, even if my soul feels like a gnawed-on wad of loosely-crumpled tinfoil, because I know I’m going to enjoy the moment and would be sad forever (only being slightly melodramatic here) if I missed it. And since there’s no one to take up the mantle of recording and editing the videos for the wrestling matches, I’ll still be doing those. Everything else, though… It’s on hold. Workshop sales, managing resources, house hunting for my Alt FC, wing farming, personal workshop work and sales and item collecting, everything I normally do has been stopped. I’m not even going to log in most nights, other than when I’m obliged to for the various events. All of which sucks because I’m not even sure this is the problem. Not being able to pick something to do, to overcome the executive dysfunction of this type of inactivity, is a sure-fire sign of a severe depression spike and that could be what’s making me feel like going back to Final Fantasy 14 would cause me some kind of harm. Or maybe it’s burnout and depression and stress and everything else all together, pushing me closer and closer to a mental breakdown as I try to just… find any kind of joy or happiness in the mess of my day-to-day existence. At least I’ve got therapy tomorrow and will hopefully have some kind of answers after that. Maybe I’ll even have rewritten this post in the edits to include it.

Regardless of why, I need to stop what I’m doing. I can’t push through this. This is… bigger than that. I can’t strong-arm my way through this one. I can’t bulldoze forward relentlessly, chewing up the time that progress takes with do-nothing games that occupy my entire mind. I feel like I’m coming apart at the seams and continuing to push forward is just going to make it worse. So I am dialing it all back. Less activity. Less chitchat. Less monitoring my discords. Less… everything, probably, unless people reach out to me. I don’t know how long this is going to last. I don’t know if this is just a “wait until my body adjusts to less daily caffeine” problem like I thought it was a couple days ago. Maybe my meds really aren’t cutting it anymore (which feels more and more likely as my emotional state seems to be spiking up and down rather than difting like it was when I first started on this med). Until I can figure this out, though, I need to dial everything back. I need to spend more time actively centering myself. I need to spend more time quietly by myself. I have to pull back a bit everywhere and hope my friends can spare the effort to meet me where I’m at right now.

I think I really need a break from the roleplaying wrestling thing. I haven’t missed a show in thirteen weeks. I’ve edited through approximately fifty-two hours of video recordings, at the very least. I’ve dealt with YouTube uploading problems, producing video titles and descriptions, and doing all of the creative work required to turn my simple recordings into a finished product that I’m proud of. Which means that I only get a weekend off when we do a Wednesday show and those are their own special kind of hell thanks to the fact that they’re four days after the show prior, which is barely enough time to even partially recover from the ten hours of work that go into each show for me. I don’t want to miss a show. I don’t want to lose out on a chance to preserve these performances. but I’ve put about one hundred thirty hours of work into this stuff and it is taking a toll on me. No more than any of my other commitments, mind you, this is not so onerous a burden as that, but it is still a great deal of effort to be putting in every single week. I love doing this. I truly do. I just also need to rest. Which is true for all of this stuff. I normally enjoy it all. This should be all things that bring my some degree of happiness or at least contentedness. But, instead, I only feel increasingly miserable. I really wish I knew why.