Please, if you know the answer, tell me. I’m desperate. As of writing this, it has been almost a week since I finished this momentous task, this three hundred forty hour undertaking, and nothing compares to the soaring highs and wonderful emotional lows (that were also soaring highs, let’s be real, because I love a tear-jerker) of Veilguard. I’ve tried playing other video games, things I set aside to brute-force my way through Inquisition, and none of them seem fun. I’ve tried to read, but my mind can’t focus on something that doesn’t feel as real as Veilguard did. I tried taking a night off, to do something other than play a Dragon Age game, and yet I found myself unable to focus on anything but thoughts of how nice it would be to start a new file. Nothing compares to the depth of character and delight I felt while blissfully escaping into this latest Dragon Age game, so how can I tear myself away from the fresh character I made on my second night after beating the first one? How can I deny myself what my entire being desires so deeply and clearly?

Well, first of all, I’m not. I’ve got that second file going and made some decent progress in it over the weekend between when I started it and when you’re reading this post. That said, I’m trying to be a bit more moderate in my indulgences. I let this game run away with me. I let myself and my life go a bit more than I can afford, given how everything is right now. I don’t blame myself for doing so, mind you. Life is pretty stressful these days, between work, continuing physical therapy so I can hopefully sleep without pain and get a decent night’s rest, the upcoming political era of fascism, and the realization that I’ve stopped planning for my future. There’s basically nothing I can do about most of those problems other than carry on carrying on, so I’ve chosen to spend some time focusing on the last one. After all, it occurred to me that this was what I’d done after I spent a weekend escaping and then, Monday morning while taking a shower, realized that the reason I’ve been falling behind on my blog posts and haven’t spent any time writing something bigger (like any of my novel projects or the still-on-hiatus Infrared Isolation) is because those are all projects you do when you’re thinking about the future. A blog post is something I can sit down and have done in a single writing event. A novel only really becomes a story at a point in the future when you’ve written the last words and done some editing. It takes work, planning, and forethought, all things I’ve been avoiding for about a year now.

Or more than that, really. Not quite to the same degree as the past year, but my life descending into private, personal chaos in 2020 really left me unwilling to concretely plan for my future. It was a big change, but it was either adapt or die back then and I chose to adapt to not having everything planned out to super intense detail. I was the sort of person who, at any given time, could tell you where I expected to be in five years, a piece of information I continuously updated and refused to let stagnant as I altered my plans based on unfolding reality. This, however, was too rigid still to handle seeing all of my plans fall apart in 2020 when the pandemic hit and I was suddenly paying double my usual rent while being unable to get overtime at work. Now, I’m paying almost triple my rent and have additionally committed myself to what was supposed to be an approximately six-month-long drug course to deal with some skin issues I’ve had most of my life.

It has now been twelve full months and I’m in the middle of my thirteenth, looking at a probable fourteenth (at least) before things finally wrap up. It has been rough, it has changed my relationship with my body in an incredibly negative way, and it has eliminated not only what little planning I did for the future, but my ability to blindly work toward distant, unknowable goals in the present. I’ve long ascribed to Spoon and Fork Theory, but it has never left me feeling so limited as I have this past year. My spoon count, the measure of how much I can do in a day (including things like making food, showering, getting dressed, and so on, all without mentioning the more labor-intensive stuff I do at work these days), is lower than it has ever been. My fork count, once a relatively stable measure of the things weighing on me (things that demanded my time, attention, and energy), is much larger than it ever was before as now I have to deal with daily pain, a lack of adequate sleep, the return of my eye problems, and the ever-present frustration of slow results from the medications I’m taken. I do not have much left to give and what I have to give is usually taken up by work events as whatever orderly little plans I’ve made get blown out of the water by the first non-crisis someone is working into a crisis as they toss it to me like they’ve replaced the hot potato in the game of the same name with a lit stick of dynamite. I do not have much time to consider the future, much energy to make plans, and never enough of both of make good on any of those plans.

So what am I going to do? I don’t know. Probably make my burnout worse by trying to work on a novel project between days of playing Veilguard. Probably push myself to keep trying new things so I don’t wind up returning to where I was in early 2021, when I wasn’t taking in new media or stories anymore and suffering as a result. Definitely move my blog sometime next week, when I’ve got a week off and can find a new host, get the WordPress .org software running on it, and then migrate my entire website to the new location or whatever. I don’t actually know how that works, though. I just know I can probably figure it out in three days of work, even if I’m taking time each day to deep clean my apartment. Those are my two goals for that nine-day period: make my apartment spotless and migrate my blog since my plan on WordPress .com expires on December 14th and I’m not giving Automattic another penny. That should all be achievable if I take my time, do a little bit every day, and don’t exhaust myself driving to visit my sister for Thanksgiving. If this little plan for the future works out, the whole balancing act of site migration, cleaning, and working on the one novel project that won’t leave my head no matter what, then maybe I’ll be able to build the confidence required to plan things a little bit future. To plan a little bit more. To think about a time that might be coming up soon when I don’t wake up each day feeling like my joints are going to refuse to bend and when it won’t take me three to seven days to recover from exercise instead of the twenty-four hours it used to take. What a nice future that would be. To no longer feel miserable and pained every second I’m conscious. Someday, maybe.