I’ve been trying to treat my recent period of rest and recovery like every other one I’ve gone through in the past few years. I’ve taken some time to do nothing, found something that interests me to work on, and slowly pushed myself back into doing things the instant I no longer felt exhausted. Unfortunately for me, the last eight months are not like any other period of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much go on in an eight month period of time. I can’t even really call that period good or bad, though I can say that the negative parts of it make it probably the second worst period of my life. The positive parts don’t really make up for that so much as exist alongside it. A lot of really great stuff has also happened in that time, after all, and none of it cancels out the bad stuff. That’s not how life works. I have had a lot going on and it has worn me thin in more ways than anything but the prolonged abuse and neglect of my childhood can compare to. I feel so out of sorts that I’m not even sure how I should be feeling. All of which means that my usual methods of recovery and moving on aren’t going to cut it. Nothing I’ve experienced in the past is really going to help with right now and I’m only just now beginning to realize that treating the last eight months like any normal period of stress in my life is only going to make things worse.

I started getting back into streaming because I was lonely in my new apartment and I wanted to get the feelings of comfort, familiarity, and companionship that I felt while streaming during the month of April as the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom approached. I started working out again because I wanted to get back to both how I felt about my body and the my sleep schedule I’d maintained prior to my move. The effort of packing, moving, and unpacking forced me to break my workout routine for the first time since the start of 2022, and I am eager to get back to it because the slow but noticeable change it has wrought on me is pretty much the only positive body image stuff I’ve got. I also wanted to keep up the consumption of book, movie, and TV show type media that I started in March, when I needed an escape that video games and podcasts alone couldn’t give me. I wanted to get back to the days when I had multiple tabletop roleplaying games going at once, so I started building new groups. I wanted to expand my friend groups so I’d have people to talk to again, so I’d have relationships I wanted to invest in again, and I pushed myself out of my comfort zones by talking to new people to make that happen. As a result of all this effort, I’ve spent the last week exhausted to the point of pure, soul-deep existential weariness because I thought a week of not finishing the work of putting together my new apartment was enough to recover from the stress, good and bad, of the last eight months. It was not.

At this point, I’m pretty sure I need to dial back the amount of streaming I’m doing. Maybe one or two nights a week at most, if I continue it at all. I’m probably better off finding ways to be around people that involve doing something pleasant than trying to get my desire to connect with people met through what is mostly a one-way medium. It would be better to put a puzzle or game night together with some local friends than to try to build a community through my streaming platform. For one thing, I’d actually get to fulfill my need for promixity if I hung out with people in-person. For another, I doubt I’d wind up spending an hour or more talking to myself because no one is there. I’d at least know I don’t need to keep talking if I wound up having no one show up for a game night. Finally, it would really free up my time to do things with my online friends, most of whom I haven’t really talked to recently, if I wasn’t filling every unoccupied night or weekend with streaming. One night or weekend day is probably enough, but then the question remains of why I’m streaming and I really don’t have a good answer for it. Everyone loves attention, sure, but I also find it exhausting and streaming means I have to show up on the same day at the same time every week, so people know when to show up, and I don’t always want attention.

Now, if I had the ability to dial back other things, like my day job, I’d do that. Unfortunately, since my raise doesn’t even cover the increase in my rent, let alone how much the price of everything else has gone up since last summer, I can’t afford to go back to a normal forty-hour schedule. If anything, I probably need to get my hours up to fifty a week just to stay at the same level I was at before I started paying another two hundred dollars a month in rent. I absolutely refuse to write less, since that’s pretty much all I’ve got these days in terms of personal fulfillment. Reading books, watching movies or TV shows, and playing video games is something I need to refuel myself, so I can’t afford to cut that down any more than it already is. I need to experience new stories and to revist old beloved ones in order to keep my mind fueled and my imagination in good working order. I’d also love to get back into puzzles and lego sets and doing things away from screens and out of the somewhat cramped focal range of books. Which means that streaming is pretty much the only thing I can give up. Plus, I’ve been spending fifteen to twenty hours a week on streaming, which is a significant amount of time to dedicate to something that has a high risk of making me feel worse than doing nothing would have (there is little that feels as deflating as doing an entire night’s stream and never getting a single viewer to show up).

Maybe I’ll come back to streaming someday, when I’ve got more time on my hands or fewer demands on what time I’ve got. If I ever get to go into creative work as a full-time job, I’d love for it to include streaming in some way. Right now, though, that whole idea feels incredibly remote and even just thinking about streaming tomorrow night is filling my soul with exhaustion and dread. I need to be doing less these days, not more. So it makes sense to cut this now and, as I get the energy, to reintroduce smaller things like a tabletop game night with some local friends or maybe even my first in-person TTRPG group in over three years. It would be nice to do something with people around me.