I wound up staying up until about 2am Friday morning, since I only finished building my character and all that in Baldur’s Gate 3 at about 11:30 Thursday night. It took a long time to download and I had a D&D game I was playing in during the earlier hours of the evening, so I was faced with either going to bed without playing BG3 or staying up a bit to play just the intro. I chose the latter, which turned into playing for about two hours. That, plus a bit of research I did following my introduction to Gale is what informed last Friday’s post since I wrote that during work breaks in my morning and then finished it between chores Saturday morning. I was pretty busy for pretty much the entire day and evening, so I had to get pretty focused with my topic for Friday. It’s not like I had any extra time to play more or do more research about the game that day, nor have I had much since then.
From pretty much ten in the morning until about nine in the evening that Friday, I was on my feet and rushing around at work, attending to the work event I’d signed up for. After that and the bits of cleanup we needed to do that night, I went grocery shopping and then finally got home at about 9:30 in the evening. I put away my groceries, took out the trash, showered, dried myself off, finally watched a youtube video I’d been looking forward to for weeks (more on that in a different post), and then had a snack. By the time I was capable of playing any more BG3, it was after eleven and I opted to just watch some anime instead. I was too tired to pay attention to anything and too sore and emotionally restless to go to sleep yet. I’d been social for almost eleven straight hours at work and went from working closely with people to being by myself, so I had to deal with the emotional come-down from all that socializing and time spent with coworkers whose company I mostly enjoy.
When I finally woke up Saturday morning, it was almost noon. I shuffled through my morning chores, ate food, drank coffee, got my laundry running, and settled down to play BG3 for all of five minutes before the exhausted, restless energy I had coursing through me drove me away from my computer. I puttered around my apartment for a while, cleaning more, figuring out what I was going to do for dinner since I absolutely did not have the energy to make anything elaborate, read a book for a bit, and then it was time for my scheduled Pathfinder Second Edition game. Instead of playing much, we talked through some basics since half the party wasn’t around for the first Session 0. While useful, I felt a little frustrated that it took as long as it did, though I’ll admit that my lack of focus didn’t help much either. I was not the most egregious distractor, but I still participated in sidetracking the group.
When that ended around ten, I finally booted up BG3 again and played until almost 4am on sunday. I slept less this time, only until about a quarter to eleven, but my morning routine and chores meant that I only had an hour and a half of free time between realizing I didn’t have everything I needed for my meal prep recipe and the second session of The Ground Itself I’m playing with the Sunday group I’m leading. So, I did the responsible thing and did prep work. Only after the game was over and we’d done some socializing did I launch Baldur’s Gate 3, this time at a quarter to nine. I stayed up past two.
Today, I’m mostly fine. Tired, but functional. I could use some sleep, but I got more sleep than usual over the weekend even if the hours I slept weren’t that great, so I can handle one night of poor sleep. What’s got me out of sorts is the way the weekend feels like it slid past. As you can see, I can account for pretty much my entire weekend. There was no loss of time, no hours wasted on pointlessly browsing the internet or doomscrolling through Twitter. I made use of the time I had. I just also feel like I’m recovering from a mental wound. Thursday and Friday were incredibly busy days at work and out of it. I did so much stuff. Most of it I planned and knew to expect, but Friday was also busy and draining in ways I didn’t properly anticipate, nor did I expect the heavy emotional residue that I was left with. The last time I worked an event like this for my employer, I was with people whose company I enjoyed, but whom I had no desire to spend time with outside of the office. This time, I had a fun time between groups, chatting with some coworkers I don’t interact with much and getting to know them a little better. It was nice. And leaving to be alone in my apartment after all that time with other people, all that time talking and being friendly to the folks walking through the building, left me feeling sad and quiet and isolated. Even tabletop gaming, usually capable of patching these social holes in my heart, wasn’t up to the task. I just spent the whole weekend feeling listless and adrift. I STILL feel listless and adrift.
I can’t even dismiss this with comments about my depression being bad or worsened by a lack of sleep. That feels different. It is a stifling feeling. This is a hollow one. And yeah, I probably just need to spend some time around my friends, maybe get a hug or two, but that will only fix the social drain and blossoming isolation. None of that will fix the way that time feels like it is both stretching and conctracting. I spent all of today expecting the day to be almost over, only to discover that it is barely past noon. This despite feeling like today just slipped through my fingers somehow. Again, I can account for every hour of my day and my notebook bears the signs of an amply busy workday, but I still feel like I have somehow stepped away from time in some manner or another. I feel like I used to, back in the early days of the pandemic, when days ran together and the passage of time lost and regained meaning from one week to another. I feel like I am moving through time, leaving no mark on it and it leaving no mark on me. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, after everything I’ve been doing to attempt to ground myself and relax.
Maybe I should have done less stuff this weekend. I’m clearly not recovered from the last nine months yet and I definitely overextended myself badly with the work event last Friday. This whole set of days feels like the times when I’ve overspent my spoons the worst. I mean, I’ve always struggled with the Spoons metaphor since I knew I could borrow spoons from the future and that kind of breaks the whole thing apart, but I’ve also know that I could push past my limits on any given day by borrowing from the future, so long as I was ready to pay a hefty amount of interest when paying back what I borrowed. Usually, I only overspend by a little bit, scraping just a touch off the top of the next few days. This time, I feel like I spent an entire weekend’s worth and then had to keep borrowing from the future to pay down my day-to-day debts and remain a functional adult. I’m still borrowing from the future, just to get through today. I told one of my coworkers that I was having trouble mustering enthusiasm about my experiences with BG3 because I was in low-power mode due to being just overall exhausted and while that’s definitely accurrate, I left out the part about only having power at all because I am preparing myself to have a rough week by trying to avoid as much social contact with people after pushing myself to be in the office and talk to my coworkers even a little bit.
It would have been nice to work from home today. To sit quietly, to putter around my apartment during breaks, to unload the dishwasher as I made lunch or fold laundry while trying to figure out how to organize some new test cases I’m working on. To attend to my life and to invest in my space while I also did my job, instead of sitting in this useless office all day where I can only retreat to my phone when I’m tired of looking at my monitor. I am very tired of jobs that force me to be in the office. To be located in a space near people who can make demands of me without any ability to create distance in space or time by saying I’m busy or can’t talk right now. I miss the comforts of my home office and my own space.
I think I just need a couple quiet days to myself. It will be a while before I get those, seeing as I have more stuff planned for this upcoming weekend (the one following the day I wrote this but prior to the day this goes up). Some of it will be nice. Some of it will likely be odious since I’m still not willing to entirely withdraw from that Sunday evening PF2E game that happens the weeks my own game does not. I told myself I’d give it two more sessions, to see if things improve once we’re in the campaign proper, and I mean to keep to that. I just wish I had an empty, quiet weekend before I had to go back to doing stuff. I’ll have to get what rest I can between things on my weekends and in my evenings after work. It will be slow, but as long as I don’t have any particularly taxing days this week, it should still be effective.