I’ve been taking Fridays off of work lately. I probably shouldn’t, what with rising costs, but I’ve been so burned out that I needed to. Three weeks in a row, I was so worn out by Friday morning that I couldn’t make myself get out of bed on time or I slept through my alarms or felt so awful that I went back to sleep until I stopped feeling bad. It’s not great, to be quite honest. I really do need the money from my weekly overtime if I’m going to survive the upcoming financial crisis (in whatever form it takes) and while I haven’t spent vacation time to take my days off so far, I really need to find a more sustainable way to get through my weeks without entirely burning out by the end of Thursday. Work is demanding, sure, but I’ve also been taking a lot of burdens on myself that I don’t really need to, so maybe I need to dial it back there, or maybe I need to make sure my free time is spent better, in a way that is more rejuvenating or enriching. I really hope it’s the latter because I don’t want to do less stuff and I feel kind of like I’m on the hook for all of it anyway, considering it’s all commitments I’ve made. I could take breaks if I need to, I’m sure no one would begrudge me a week off, but I worry about the precedent that would set for myself. And that taking the time off wouldn’t actually fix things, only let me recover from them, since that means I’d be right back in the shit again the instant I went back to doing things. Work certainly isn’t going to slow down. It’s going to speed up, if anything…

So far, most of my days off have just been idle days. Opportunities to lay in bed for a while, to do a few scattered chores that I haven’t had the energy or inclination to do (it’s a lot easier to push myself to do household labor when I’m not just getting home from 10 hours of at-work labor), and to try for three nights of decent sleep in a row. I’ve not managed that last one, at least not in the form of three 8-hour nights, but having the extra night definitely increased my average hours slept and gotten me out of “eyelid twitch” territory. I’ve also gone back to walking around my neighborhood again, since now one of my week days is at home, and that’s been nice even if the tree pollen is getting intense. I haven’t taken off a Friday that turned out to be absolutely gorgeous weather yet, but I expect that I’m going to wind up taking off the first such friday we get if only to be able to enjoy the weather before the heat of the summer fully sinks in (which it might already have, considering the heat today, and the temperatures showing up in the ten day forecast).

I keep thinking I should use this time to read more, to do some kind of different activity, but my depression has been bad enough that I’m not really in a place to do new things. It’s a struggle to play Final Fantasy 14 most days and it has been my “I don’t know what to play so I’ll just log into Final Fantasy 14 since nothing sounds fun but at least that has some amount of progress for me to pursure” distraction for so long now that I don’t even have my old timer-passers installed on my computer anymore. Which isn’t great. I can feel myself wearing thin with regards to Final Fantasy 14 and I don’t know what I’m going to do if I stop playing that. I can’t go back to Satisfactory, now that I know I’m not interested in its late game and just play it to pass time until my depression spike lessens, and Stardew Valley has a similar problem, even if the connection isn’t as strong. I know I’ll wind up spinning my wheels eventually and that feels worse than doing nothing because it’s actually putting time and effort into things that feel meaningless. Which you could argue applies to Final Fantasy 14, sure, but at least I’ve never played through all of the available stuff it contains and I’m doing it with other people rather than being isolated in yet another singleplayer runthrough of a multiplayer game. That counts for a lot.

I really wish I could make this a regular thing, or just go back to working forty hour weeks again. I don’t know that it would fix my burnout eventually, but it would definitely stop it from getting worse. Three day weekends are nice, as are their four-day variants, which is what’s coming up since next week (as of this posting) starts off with a holiday and then I’ve formally put in a vacation day for after that, which means I’ll also be working only eight hour days for the rest of the week, too. Maybe, between all these fridays off (not the day this posts, though, I’ve gotta get at least one week of overtime in the mix asap) and this four-day weekend followed by three relatively short days, I’ll feel a bit less tired all the time. It sure would be nice. Gotta make sure I get actual rest and don’t stay up stupidly late every night like I’ve been doing (as part of a viscious cycle of “stay up late, sleep in, not tired enough for sleep at a normal time so I stay up super late again and then sleep in super late as well” that I’m really not liking). Eight hours from 4am to 12pm is not the same as eight hours from 12am to 8am. I’m going to try for more of the latter than the former, but we’ll see how it goes what with my obligations this weekend…