I don’t know what my time and effort are worth. If you ask my job, it’s $31.53 an hour and one-and-a-half times that after forty hours in a single week. If you look at my gaming time, it’s probably not worth a whole lot considering how much time I spend on Final Fantasy 14 and how little I pay for it (each hour equates to about seventeen cents spent, by my calculations). If you look into my game files, my time is probably worth an average of eight hundred thousand gil (Final Fantasy’s in-game currency) since that’s about what I make when I’m actively working on stuff. On average, anyway. I tend to do a lot of work in that game that doesn’t ever get paid out for anything. Making gear and consumables for friends, providing materials and consumables to my Free Company, organizing things, etc. So when someone asks me to make something where the material cost is neglible and wants to pay me “for my time,” I don’t really have a good answer for them. What is my time worth? Not a lot, sometimes. Quite a lot other times. And I usually don’t know which of those is true until I’ve picked the wrong one and am upset about it. Probably because I keep picking “not a lot” and yet I somehow still feel ill-used or taken for granted a lot. Not just in Final Fantasy 14, either. At my job, with the friends I hardly see any more, and even in some of my non-video-game-but-still-digital social activities. It would probably go a long way to resolving those feelings if I could get that particular question worked out in some way, if I could figure out what my time is worth, since I’m spending it so freely and… well, unjudiciously at the moment. I really need to get past my reflexive “Sure! Let’s make it happen!” response when it comes to people asking things of me and actually take a moment to check in with myself about how I’m feeling before I answer.

I have spent my entire life being fully and unrestainedly giving of my time. I rarely refuse someone or deny them access to me or my efforts, either, especially if I’m close to them. A childhood of being taught that I must earn love from people by doing things for them, reinforced by video games depicting relationships as being rather transactional and our entire culture of “you [masculine person] just have to try harder, nonstop, to earn love from the target of your affection if they deny you,” have left a deeply seated pattern of behavior in me that is difficult to overcome at even the best of times. If I’m already tired and worn out or just not feeling my best? I will absolutely do whatever is asked of me without reservation or anything kept in reserve. It’s really not a healthy way to live my life and while I’ve tried to take time to think or checked my reflexive answer many times in the past, especially the last few months, it hasn’t really made much of a difference beyond slowing down how quickly I agree to whatever people want. So, this time around, I’m going to start by deciding how much my time is worth, how much my effort is worth, and then do my best to actually figure out if someone is asking too much of me or even just not assigning the right value to my time and effort.

Unfortunately, as you might have guessed from the various references for the value of my time I gave above, I’m not sure how to do that. Assigning a monetary value to my time feels bad overall and really isn’t a great way to approach things stemming from interpersonal relationships. After all, it’s not like I’d charge my friends $47 for an hour of my time. I’m GIVING them my time. It’s a gift! A thing to be treasured and shared! I just… Well, I just figured it out there. Real-time. And not just “I should only give people my time if I feel treasured” or whatever you might think because it was one of those “click” moments where something snapped into place. I should be giving people my time if I value them. I should not give my time to people I do not value without some kind of reciprocal exchange. I should also practice saying “no” to people I care about because I’m sure they wouldn’t want me to give more of myself than I can afford. And, well, if they do want that of me, I should definitely know that. All of which sounds incredibly obvious as I write it out there and think about how to do it. Unfortunately, since a lot of that depends on me being able to do what I’m already doing (being giving of my time and effort), just in a more healthy manner (without giving more than I can spare), it isn’t really a viable strategy. If “just be better” was a workable solution, I’d have run out of personal issues long ago considering how often I’ve checked to see if things could actually work out positively with nothing more than a simple assertion to “be better.”

Honestly, what I probably need to do the most, especially when it comes to Final Fantasy 14 stuff, is figure out how to stop feeling so much fomo (“fear of missing out,” if you’re not familiar). I want to be invited along to everything and my general fear of not being invited in the future or missing out on a fun time with fun people has me saying yes to everything unless I’m too tired to sit at my computer anymore or otherwise captured by a strong emotion that I would rather deal with. I don’t want to miss a chance to spend time with people I like and the nature of time zones and work schedules and all that means that I have to spring when the time is right. Or, well, that I feel like I have to, anyway. I don’t really need to. I just… I spend so much of my days giving of my time to people who don’t really value it in ways that I can’t really control because it’s my job to do this stuff and while I could just not do my job, I do need my job to be able to continue living, so it’s not really much of a choice. So I want to do something fun and rewarding and joyous in my time away from it and that means I tend to just go along with what other people want whenever they voice something because I have spent so much time in the last few years trying and failing to make stuff happen myself. So I just do what other people want and get to do things instead of trying to get stuff together that I want and not get to do things with people. Which… Has given me a lot to think about and, of course, discuss with my therapist. At least the time spent writing this blog post was valuable. I got a lot out of this.