It has been almost a month since I ran a TTRPG session. I’ve been so exhausted that I just haven’t had the energy to plan sessions or do even a modicum of prep work, let alone actually spend the significant chunk of time and energy required to hold the session. I keep going into each new week feeling marginally better at most, so putting in the effort to run a game would leave me in even worse condition. Love of the game isn’t enough to make it happen, as much as I’d like to pretend it was, and thankfully my players have all been very understanding. I’m just coming out of my third skipped weekend in a row, still exhausted, and wondering when I’ll eventually have recovered from this burnout. In the past, when things would get this bad for me, I’d do a work from home day or two so I’d be able to sleep in later, rest more during the day, and spend a day working in comfort rather than having to exist in the constantly draining and uncomfortable environment of my office. I’m pretty good at masking so I doubt any of my coworkers know this, but the environment I work in can be very stressful and overstimulating in a way that saps me of all my energy pretty quickly, and the insistence by my boss that I spend less time in my office and more time being visible by working in the lab is only making it worse. I can’t escape the noise outside my office. I have to wear my mask (literal N95 and metaphorical over-emotive-pretense-of-neurotypicality) while I’m out there. I have to constantly watch where my coworkers are so they don’t sneak up on me and clap me on the shoulder heavily enough that I have to restrain my fight-response. It’s not great!

I should probably talk to my boss about all this. I was a bit caught in the headlights the first time we talked about it, fixated as I was on the fact that he told me the concerns were coming from coworkers and the fact that he was being incredibly evasive about what I needed to do in order to, at the time, show what I was working on. I was not able to really vocalize why I could be so much more productive at home beyond “comfort” and the more relatable reasons that I felt more comfortable at home (better desk, access to windows, environmental control, etc), though I must admit that I’m not sure things would have gone differently if I’d been able to express my needs more completely. I don’t think he would have been cruel in telling me to get over it, but I think that would still more-or-less be his response. After all, I’ve been doing that for more than eight years, so why couldn’t I just continue on as I have been? Why couldn’t I figure out how to make the office comfortable? I’m really not sure he’d have been satisfied with answers like “the constant movement of other people is exhausting to watch and I can’t not watch it because my brain is wired to constantly assess all movement for potential threats due to eighteen years of childhood trauma” or “the endless noises make it really difficult for me to focus even when I’ve got my headphones on because they block a lot less noise than you’d expect, a choice I made so I can’t be snuck up on as easily.” I haven’t exactly tried to have this conversation with him, so this could all be nothing more than baseless speculation, but his track record on things he, personally, isn’t familiar with isn’t great.

So, without my old release valves for the building pressure of my job and the demands of working in a loud, noisy, busy environment that is frequently too warm for my comfort, I now need every scrap of my evenings and weekends for recovering enough to get through another day. Which means a lot of video games, some serious consideration for how long I can go without doing my laundry, and a frank assessment of what chores I can afford to do, energy-wise, and which ones I can’t afford to not do, cleanliness-wise. The basic requirements of life that have all been shuffled to the weekend leave me with little energy for anything but the least active things I can find to do, which is why I’ve been doing a lot of “grinding in Final Fantasy 14 while listening to podcasts” and not a lot of session preparation for my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Because that’s the thing. I’m barely keeping up with my blog and keep falling behind (but never fully losing my buffer, thankfully), so how am I supposed to add even more creative work when writing even just one blog post is leaving me mentally drained?

I really want to get back to these D&D campaigns. They’re all at least somewhat interesting ideas at worst and I’m invested in seeing how everything plays out, but I know that forcing myself to run them is going to drain me of energy I can’t afford to spend and sour me on actually playing these games. Which has, historically, never worked out well for me. So I want to run them but I have to make the choice to not do that every week because it’s in my best interest. If I wasn’t actively chosing, I’d just run and burn myself out until I literally couldn’t do anything. Which, unfortunately, would probably only take one session. I’ve spent so much of my adult life exhausted and yet undauntedly moving forward, so I’m well-versed in exhaustion and how to handle it, but this is a new level for me. Years of work stress, a year and a half of worsening physical pain, four months of being unable to sleep more than four or five hours a night, three months of super intense work stress, and then the release of all that tension spoiled by my coworkers complaining to my boss and my boss being unwilling to defend me despite knowing what’s going on (it still staggers me that it took less than a month for my coworkers to start complaining to my boss without ever talking to me about their concerns, especially considering that I was still getting my work done and just not doing overtime). I have nothing left to give at this point and every single day is an exhausting attempt to limp forward long enough that I can continue to afford to live, make ends meet, and keep my life in some semblance of order.

I have nothing left for telling stories, for speaking what is essentially my love language to my friends, and even the thought of writing up my FF14 character’s backstory for a dumb little website is enough extra effort to make me want to lay down on the floor. I don’t know what it is going to take to recover from this. I’m worried that I won’t be able to. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve lost the thread here because I’ve been so stressed that I’m having a difficult time sleeping, which is only making it all worse, and it’s difficult to hold a coherent thought process together long enough to write a blog post. All I know for sure is that something is going to give eventually and it is taking all the spare energy I’ve got to make sure it isn’t me.