Today (the day I wrote this), I took a day off of work. I woke up feeling pretty crummy and in desperate need of more sleep, so I spent a little time debating myself about the merits of taking another day off versus going into the office and eventually agreed to let myself take a day off if I spent some time doing some chores I’d been putting off once I’d finished sleeping. It took a bit longer than normal to make up my mind because I felt kind of out of it, kind of mentally foggy, but the generally exhausted and ill feeling of my entire being that morning made it a pretty easy decision in the end. Unfortunately, sleeping didn’t really make me feel that much better. I felt a bit more clear-headed for a while, but the mental fog has returned by the evening (when I’m writing this) and though my stomach problems passed eventually, like they have every morning this week, I still felt crummy enough that I only did one of the chores I bargained with myself about. Given how I feel awful still, I’m pretty sure I’ll still have tomorrow to do the balance of them. I mean, I literally went back to sleep for another three hours and STILL felt exhausted and murky when I woke up. Almost like the sleep I got wasn’t terribly helpful, like back when my insomnia was at its worst and I’d be able to sleep a whole nine or ten hours and feel the same way as if I’d taken a very long nap. It’s not a great feeling to wake up tired, decide to take a day off so you can rest, get as much rest as you can, and then still feel tired and out of sorts.

I’ve got no idea what is going on. I haven’t changed any of my medications in the last 48 hours (which is usually how long it takes for stuff to start hitting me), nor has my sleeping schedule changed much. My diet is much the same as it always is. The only thing I can think of is that I’ve had the air conditioning turned on for the psat few days and that it has been five days since I stopped the minimal dose of my previous antidepressant. I expected some amount of withdrawal symptoms of some kind, but I expected them to better align with the side-effects I felt reducing my dose to lower amounts, and while I’d love to chalk all this up to withdrawal, there’s an awful lot listed under what is typical in those situations that I’m not feeling yet [editing this the day before it gets posted means that I’m now incredibly certain that this is a withdrawal thing, and it just took a few days to get bad, but you’ll be reading more about that next week]. This also seems beyond the potential for an allergic reaction, which is all I could think of blaming my AC unit on (given it’s tendency to accumulate dust or potential to fail to filter out pollen from the tree-heavy neighborhood I live in). I might look into getting an air filter of some kind for my apartment, just to be able to eliminate that as a possibility, since I’ve been thinking about getting one for a while already. My AC unit does do some filtering, but I don’t think it’s entirely up to the potentially horrible air quality we’ve had at least once every summer for the past two years. It’d be nice to filter out anything that gets through my AC unit and maybe get some of the heavy “pet bird that disintegrates its feathers via preening” dust out of the air before it settles on my surfaces.

Even with all this going on (not to mention the undertones of all my issues with my job lately, considering this would have been a Work From Home type day in previous months and has to be a full day off now), it’ll be nice to have finally given myself the push to get some of this stuff done. While I’ve managed to stay on top of all the stuff required to keep my apartment sanitary, in working order, and a healthy place to live, anything not required for those conditions has been set by the wayside and anything that can be delayed gets delayed until I can’t delay it any longer. So while it is a small thing, emptying my trash and recycling bins before they’re 100% full of trash and recycling feels nice, as does cleaning off my mail couch and taking out the accumulated “doesn’t fit in the recycling bin” recycling. The area I pass by multiple times a day, next to my kitchen, my stairs, and my bedroom door, is now clean and tidy. I even did some vacuuming, which is incredibly overdue. I’ve been doing spot-vacuuming as needed, but I really ought to do a comprehensive dusting and vacuuming sometime soon rather than just brushing some shelves off quick and vacuuming any obvious messes (including the areas near my shelves after I’ve dusted them off).

If my financial situation hadn’t worsened a bit, I’d still be considering hiring professional cleaners to do a pass on my apartment once a month just to take a major source of stress off my plate, but I can’t really afford that right now, between not being able to work as much (today’s vacation day means I won’t be getting any overtime this week. Again) due to sheer exhaustion and the increasing costs of merely existing in the world, I just can’t justify the expense. I mean, I could dip into my entertainment budget to pay for it, but that’s my last bit of “loose” money and I don’t want to put myself in a situation where I can’t buy books and games anymore. That stuff is the last bit of joy in my life, other than my occasional tabletop games, and I don’t want to try living without it. I don’t think that would go well for me, even if I magically got my antidepressant situation figured out and perfect tomorrow. I need to have some form of joy in my life. Some source of energy and newness and stories. I already know how poorly I do on simply replaying or rereading things I already own over long periods of time, thanks to eliminating my entertainment budget during my year of Covid isolation. Anyway, my mind is wandering a bit too much at this point as the brain fog is getting worse, so I’m going to cut myself off here and try to write tomorrow’s blog post earlier in the day, when the brain fog will be hopefully less severe and I can more coherently organize my thoughts.