I had a busy weekend. A wrestling event in Final Fantasy 14 Friday evening followed pretty immediately by editing the recordings, a few hours of sleep before I had to be awake and aware for roleplaying, catching up completely on Trigun Stargaze, hanging out with my usual Saturday crew, the absolute inability to sleep until around 4am, up again in time for plans that fell apart pretty much immediately since everyone else no-showed, a long couple hours of dealing with my frustrations, the start of a tabletop campaign, and then an evening of lingering frustration capped with, once again, the inability to fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning. Which is why I took a day off. It’s going to absolutely scuttle the roll I was on in terms of my income, but I was so exhausted and bent-out-of-shape by everything that I needed the time to resettle myself. Time that grew from one day to two days to two and a half days. Turns out that mixing a dose of frustration that is slow to leave into the tulmult of my unsettled life only exacerbated the problem. Which, you know, isn’t entirely on the frustration or exhaustion from a busy weekend. I’ve made very little progress on any of the larger problems I’m facing and that has entirely ruined my resilience to the point that things which wouldn’t normally be a big deal become one. I really need to get some of this stuff resolved so I can get any kind of feeling of control back in my life, so I can maybe stop feeling like cracked glass, emotionally speaking, but that remains easier said than done.

This is perhaps the most pervasive and problematic (for me) result of my burnout, to be quite honest. I dislike feeling so emotionally fragile. I spent my entire childhood building up a thick calloused hide at the hands (literal and metaphorical) of my brother and parents until I got to the point where I could brush anything off. It would still hurt of course, but it meant very little to me. Contrast that to now where things hurt way more than they used to and each one feels like an immense violation. I understand, intellectually, that things aren’t as bad as they often feel or look, but that has done little to help me get any kind of control over how I feel. It feels like the place the dull, all-encompassing ache of my depression once lived has been replaced by a soft, delicate piece of spun glass that is constantly shattering and slowly piecing itself back together, with the added benefit that every minute the artifact of glass is cracked or broken feels just as bad as my depression did in a similar and yet different dimension. I do not like it. I do not like how easily hurt I am these days. Life has little room for this degree of fragility and the delicate ways I must treat myself to avoid undue distress, but I find myself with few viable alternatives other than to engage in this cycle of easy pain, long recovery, and delicate engagement with my fragility. It’s not like I’m going to cut myself off emotionally, not after all the work I’ve done to unbury myself from the places I went to survive my childhood. I just also wish I had at least some of that durability still.

It has been difficult to get out of bed, lately. Even setting aside my own emotional fragility and distressed feelings, I find myself desperate to put off another day of struggling to moderate how I feel in response to the injustices of life and constantly striving to eke out even a tiny bit of progress on the various problems I need to solve. It would be easier if I could set aside an entire weekend to just solve all my problems, or even a whole week of vacation. But that’s not going to land me a job. That won’t make my landlord respond any faster or more likely to respond in a way that I’d interpret positively. That won’t fix the open question of what do I do about my work situation in the meantime, now as the way the company is run looks like it might begin to shift and yet my personal situation is unlikely to change any time soon. There’s so much that I need to address or change or do and the sheer amount of it all is overwhelming, making it that much more difficult to act. Do I spend an hour hunting for more jobs? Do I spend it looking around at rent prices in my area in hopes of finding something reasonable? Do I just go play video games and hide from those problems because I already spent the day working eleven hours and then went grocery shopping afterwards? How much effort in a day is enough when it all hurts to do? How do I draw the line to mark that I’ve done enough when it all feels like too much? Just another problem to solve.

It certainly doesn’t help that I’m randomly unable to sleep, still. Nothing like laying awake in bed for hours at a time, cycling between trying to distract myself from not sleeping, occasionally getting out of bed to walk around, and staring at my ceiling or the wall in the hope that this time I won’t start awake again or that my brain will wind down enough for me to sleep. Getting enough rest wouldn’t fix things, but it’d be helpful. Everything would feel so much more doable. I bet I’d even feel less emotionally fragile, too, since a lack of good, consistent sleep always contributed to or even started my worst bouts of depression. Everything would be easier to handle if I could just get back to sleeping a normal, healthy amount. And yet this bout continues on and I find myself dreading going to bed once againg since there is little that sucks more than a sleepless night in isolation. I hate knowing what would help and being entirely unable to provide it to myself. Just one more problem to solve that is beyond the scope of my ability to influence.