I have not slept much the last couple days (as of writing this). It has been difficult for me to wind down these past few days because I am currently caught in an exhausting vortex of my own creation. It isn’t video games or TV shows I’ve starting watching (though my tendency to lose track of time while doing those things certainly hasn’t helped me these last few weeks), but just my good ‘ol insomnia. My mind will not spin down in the evenings and, in fact, seems to kick things into high gear when I’m trying to go to sleep. Most of the time, though, I can attribute a period of restlessness to a spike in anxiety or stress. These days, it’s all anxiety and stress to the degree that I’ve stopped registering it as anything but “normal” everywhere except in how much anxiety and stress I can manage in a day: that just keeps getting smaller as the world around me gets messier and messier. Still, despite this, I am pretty sure I know why I can’t fall asleep easily lately (this has been going on for a while but only recently has it prevented me from sleeping for long periods of time): I am having a small-to-moderate existential crisis. I joke often about having those, or at least have joked about that once or twice over the course of this blog, but my sense of purpose and self has been relatively stable for a while. After last year’s burnout (which is continuing into this year), deciding to stop my D&D campaigns troubling my self-identity as a storyteller, and the way that my thoughts about why I stopped that D&D campaign has grown in my mind to be applicable to so many of the difficult and draining parts of my life, all my mind can do is spin its wheels and get nowhere.

I mean, where am I supposed to go with all that? What am I supposed to do about the fact that so much of what I do every single day is a product of me caring about stuff enough that I put in the work not because I want to do it but because I think someone should do it and no one else seems to care that much? Or the fact that a lot of my relationships and friendships worked the same way? That this is a core element of how I was raised to be that flew under my radar for decades, helped by me accepting that I cared more than other people to the degree that it was a part of my self-identity? Which is why being burned out has been so emotionally challenging on top of everything else these last few years: I didn’t have the energy to care about as much stuff as I used to and had to let things go. My entire life, with the exception of a few healthy relationships, my solo video games, and my few acts of isolated creation (writing, mostly) is just an unending string of me caring deeply enough about stuff getting done that I go do it and everyone else involved showing up or participating when it’s convenient. D&D games, friendships, so many aspects of my job, so much of what I do in Final Fantasy 14, half the communities I’m in (though I will admit that there is likely some element in those of me feeling the need to “earn” the space I’m occupying, so that one gets both the “wtf do I do” spiral AND the “how do I stop feeling like I need to justify my right to be here??” spiral), and so much more.

There’s no real conclusions to draw here. If I stop doing everything that I put all that effort into, what’s left in my life? It’s not like I can just FIND other people who care about stuff as much as me because if there were lots of poeple like me, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I have to find ways to care less, or to at least invest myself in fewer such uneven situations, but I’m already kind of locked in to a few of them. I learned last year that I can’t try to disengage from the extra labor I’m doing at work without negative repercussions in the form of my coworkers and boss getting on my case, and I have a whole layer of stuff to figure out when it comes to the communities I’m in before I can even begin to figure out if I am doing too much with/for them. I’m really not sure how to navigate this stuff and trying to process how I even feel about being The One Who Cares, on top of dealing with my “how do I define and think about myself as a being with purpose in this existence” existential crisis and the ever-present looming wall that is my burnout putting a hard cap on what I can accomplish in a given day, means I have a number of mental spirals spiraling at any given moment and it’s difficult enough to untangle them, let alone actually make progress on any of them. Which is probably a big chunk of the reason my mind won’t shut down when I finally stop doing things to distract myself from the mess that is my interior life and go lay in bed.

I’m sure I’ll figure something out eventually [so far, as of editing this the day it posts, the only thing that has worked has been “don’t have an alarm to wake me up once I’m asleep” and that’s not something I can do on work days]. It sucks that all this stuff is up in the air right now. It sucks that I was programmed by my childhood to instinctively try to prove my value by giving deeply in every situation I find myself. It sucks that I know this and still struggle to find a healthy balance. It sucks that I’m so tired and burned out right now that I know I’m not going to be able to do anything about this so I should just try to go to bed early since trying to escape it is only going to add to my exhaustion. I mean, I could try sitting down and actively thinking through this, write about it even, but I have slept 5 hours in the past sixty (well, almost. It’s like 57 or 58 as I’m writing this) and I’m not sure I have the mental clarity to accomplish anything. Even this blog post has taken a huge amount of work to accomplish and I created an outline for it! I organized it ahead of time and I’m still getting lost every time my tired mind wanders even a little bit. I wish I could snap my fingers and get the rest I need, or that I could take the time off to get the rest I need, but all that is beyond me and all I can do is keep limping along until I figure something out, get lucky, or live out the rest of my life. It’s just so exhausting to have all of this come up NOW, in the middle of the world burning down around our ears when I really need to have my shit together so I can respond to any crisis that happens. It really feels like it’s only a matter of time, now.