Unfortunately, in the intervening week since I last wrote about my sleep problems, they have not improved. Sure, I managed to get a couple 8-hour nights over the weekend, but only by sleeping until 1pm and then 11am on Saturday and Sunday respectively. Still struggling with being unable to fall asleep and starting to get in a bad habit of giving up immediately when I don’t start to doze off after climbing into bed. It’s a frustrating self-perpetuating cycle: I can’t sleep so I get frustrated which makes it even more difficult to fall asleep which then makes me frustrated about being too frustrated to fall aslep. On top of all the anxiety and stress and stuff, of course. Just a real mess of a situation that I can’t seem to extricate myself from despite how tired and out-of-it I’m getting. I have a therapy appointment tomorrow, which I’m hoping that will help get my feet underneath me again, so to speak. I am going to need to do some work to make sure I’m ready for that therapy appointment, to get my thoughts in order and make sure I don’t miss anything in my exhausted haze or whatever I’ll be in tomorrow, but I will hopefully be able to manage it. After all, it’s not like I can stop thinking about how my life is an endless cycle of doing things because I am passionate about the cause, care enough to see that the work gets done, or feel obligated by either my sense of what is right or the feeling of needing to earn my place somewhere. Heaven forbid I stop thinking about that for even a moment.

One of my friends has been telling me that I should take a few days off work to get this sleep thing sorted out but I’m not sure that’ll cut it if I’m being honest. The weekend didn’t fix things for me, after all, or even really improve them, so there’s no guarrantee that I’ll be doing any better as a result of being to go to sleep at sunrise more than two nights in a row. Also I still need money and taking time off would hobble my attempts to make sure the two paychecks I get in February are properly meaty ones. And, like I said, I’m not sure it would accomplish anything. Better to not burn the time off if I won’t get any benefit from it. I might change my tune if my therapy appointment gives me some kind of dramatic inroad to solving this twisted mess of a problem [it did not], but I doubt that I’m going to get struck by any flashes of insight and instead will need to think long and hard about what amount of allowing my passions to drive me to do thankless and largely unappreciated work I’m okay with. Because, as I’ve said before, I can’t just stop doing things. My main driving force is my passion and how much I care, so I don’t really know how to live or do things without that in some element. It’s not like those went away! I still have all that bubbling in this twisting mix of self-doubt, confusion, stress, fear, and exhaustion. I couldn’t shut it off even if I knew I wanted to.

I mean, it’s been over a week since I realized what was happening and stopped sleeping well, but I’ve already come up with three additional things I am passionate enough about to tackle despite probably doing the work for other people who don’t care that much. I’m still feeling driven towards the idea of creating my own set of mods for Final Fantasy 14 vanilla outfits that are just upscales without dramatic body modification, even though the vast majority of people seem to want the body modifications as an implicit part of the modifications so I doubt there’s much of an audience out there for what would be a monumental undertaking (I don’t code, I don’t do 3D modeling, and graphic design isn’t even my passion, so I’d be starting from Square 1 as much as it is possible to do–not that I’ve ever let that stop me). I’ve come up with a new idea for another Dungeons and Dragons (or similar fantasy TTRPG) campaign that I’m struggling to not start collecting players about. I’ve even come up with half a dozen little ideas for the Role Playing wrestling league I’m a part of in Final Fantasy 14, which I’m sure people would appreciate but I can’t let my interest in video editing (and passion for learning) toss me into a bunch of labor that isn’t really going to matter to anyone. I mean, we don’t even have a place picked out to post the videos of the shows I’m recording. There’s no call for commercials or outside-the-match content or highlight reels beyond my own innate desire to do things because I care about them. There’s no need to do any of this stuff I’m doing in my freetime. Some of it (stuff I haven’t mentioned here) is called for, but it’s being called for by people who don’t have the willingness to do it themselves and I’m doing it because I think it’s important that SOMEONE does it, but even I can’t say that it NEEDS doing. Everyone’s survived for years without it. Nothing bad would happen if I didn’t do it.

It is more and more clear to me that I can’t let myself relax. Any time I start to think something’s under control or calming down and I’m no longer frantically scrambling to keep up with my self-assigned workload, I find new projects. I find a new cause. I follow where my passions lead and run headlong into the first wall I can find. This clearly isn’t healthy and I managed to skate by for years because I’m not terribly bothered by being miserable, function decently while tired, and have long traded my well-being for having a sense of purpose in order to silence the suicidal ideation that is a part of my OCD (this is not a thing to be concerned about, I have it well in hand and have been dealing with it for decades now, but it is sure a lot easier to deal with when I Have A Purpose). At this stage in my life it just isn’t sustainable anymore. I’m eating myself away for things that probably aren’t even worth it since half of them don’t even give me a sense of fulfillment so much as they slake the riotous clammer within me that demands I prove my worthiness to occupy the space I take up.

Now if only I knew where to begin. If only I had some inroad other than “figure out what is worth doing and do that” because I gotta tell you: it all feels like it’s worth it at first and the regret, isolation, and heart-hollowing melancholy only come once I’ve done the work and realized no one cares, much less needs or even wants it. There’s very little that stings the sudden, cavernous emptiness inside you like putting in weeks and weeks of work on something you care deeply about only to be told, not even directly, that no one cares anymore. They didn’t even care enough to tell you that they weren’t really that interested and let you do all that work by yourself rather than reach out to stop you once you got going. This has happened to me three times in the last two years and it sometimes feels like it’s happening over and over again these days, to greater or lesser extents. I’m still not sure anyone who actually needs money in Final Fantasy 14 is actually participating in the workshops I’m doing since it is, for the most part, the same handful of names showing up again and again. Maybe some more time will bear out a few more interested folks, but I’m two weeks in and it sure doesn’t feel like anyone but the usual suspects cares about it (and like I said last week, all of them, with maybe one exception, have way more money than me, so they clearly don’t need this). I don’t know. I just am struggling to feel like any of this is worth doing now that I’ve cast all of it into doubt. I really hope my therapy appointment tomorrow helps me make some sense of this…