The day I planned to write this, I arrived at work an hour into a five-alarm fire (a metaphorical fire, not a literal one). I spent the entire day running around, doing heavy physical labor, and didn’t stop to sit or rest until half an hour before I’d planned to leave for the day. I had accomplished nothing I’d planned and, worst of all, probably lengthened my illness by pushing myself too hard. Too hard for my own health, anyway, but only just barely hard enough to handle the problems plaguing my team. So, instead, I’m writing this during what I’d originally planned to be my first week off from blog writing. I’m taking time off for the winter holidays and giving myself a bit of a longer break than usual. I wrote just last week that I need some things in my life to change and I’m still not sure what that means for me, for my writing, and my game running, so I want to take some time away to figure that out. And what better time to do that than over the winter holiday season? Which means that there will be no more blog posts between today, December 19th, and January 5th when I will probably resume my normal schedule. Or at least something like it. Who knows what I’ll come up with while working through my feelings over the next couple weeks. I’m too tired and worn out today, from poor sleep and illness, to come up with much other than “something” and I already had that figured out last week.

Something these past two weeks of illness have taught me, coming so quickly on the heels of my trip and my day of largely uninterrupted reflection, is that I was right. Something needs to change. What I didn’t realize at the time is that I’m no longer capable of putting it off. A cold, which can be a serious illness and even kill people if its bad enough, should not have laid me as low as it did. But I’m not sleeping well, I’m not getting the physical rest I need, and I have done nothing in response to this illness but work harder in order to maintain my desired progress in Final Fantasy 14, to earn the money I know I need, and to do the work my employer is demanding of me. I got sick enough to need a lot of rest and wound up just working harder since I can’t really afford to rest at the moment. I either had to work less or give up on the stuff I’ve been doing for fun and looking forward to for months, so I chose neither and have sacrificed some amount of my health as a result. It hopefully won’t be anything permanently damaging or anything like that, and it should not be since I wasn’t that sick and am not getting worse again (or at least that much worse: it’s hard to tell these days since I’m getting differently sick rather than fully better), but I know I can’t keep this going the way I have been. The last few years have taken too much out of and I’m just not able to bounce back as quickly. If I can at all, as it often feels.

I’m sure some amount of this is me being in my mid-thirties, but I also can’t emphasize how much the isolation of the last few years started the burnout that probably peaked when I was taking that medication that wrecked my body and has now left me in a much depleted state even if things aren’t actively getting worse anymore. They’re just differently bad. I’ve managed to avoid health issues prior to this thanks to isolating myself from various illness vectors and masking to eliminate most of the rest, but I’ve kinda figured something like this was coming. I don’t have any particular insight into my condition or my general well-being, but I can tell from how worn down I feel most days that I’m taking on a lot of risk by not investing the time and money I’d need to in order to recover from all this. Not like I can afford either, anyway. It’s not really a conscious choice so much as an aceptance of fact. Still, I can get smaller amounts of rest and really need to focus on getting that over the next couple weeks. Rest, recovery, and hopefully a new direction for myself and what efforts I can afford to put forth.

In the meantime… Well, there’s plenty of poetry in my backlog. Thirty-some chapters of a science fiction story. Plenty of flash fiction. Various other fiction. I’m probably not going to hit two thousand blog posts in 2026 since I only update five times a week and will be taking some breaks as well, but I’m getting pretty close to it and that’s a whole lot of blog for you to read if you’re looking. Check out the categories, use tags for similar posts (though I will freely admit that I didn’t really lock in to a specific tag methodolgy until a couple years ago, so there’s a lot of useless tags out there), and spread the word about what a great source of all-natural, human-created writing this place is. Most of it is likely inane blather by anyone’s standards, but there’s definitely plenty of good bits all around that. Especially if you want a glimpse into what it’s like to play almost exclusively Final Fantasy 14 for year. I’ve got plenty about that since it has completely comsumed my attention and half of my waking thoughts.