I’ve been dealing with the worst depression spike I’d had in years these last few days. I don’t think I’ve felt this bad since I was twenty-four and I was bad enough at that point in my life that maybe two people in all of existence know how poorly I was doing back then. Because that’s what always happened when I get this bad. I got quiet. I stopped talking to people. I stopped writing about it in any quantitative manner and just wrote in generalities, if I wrote about it all (back in those days, I mostly just stopped writing entirely). I would never bring up how badly I was doing out of a desire to avoid worrying people, to avoid taking up their mental space, and because I’m aware that these kinds of waves, the ones that show up and worsen without any kind of trigger, will last until they’ve over and nothing I can do but pass the time will bring them to an end. Which isn’t to say that I had no ability to influence my well-being or the frequency of those kinds of events. Over the years of my adult life, I’ve identified a few factors that contribute to these ways and worked to prevent those factors from coming into play. That’s why I almost never drink and avoid drinking to excess if I ever do. I go on regular walks for a mixture of fresh air, exercise, and sunlight, all of which contribute to a base level of well-being. I regularly exercise in order to create a firm basis for my daily routines, hone my discipline, and get myself feeling physically embodied. I also try to sleep at least six hours a night. If that last one didn’t illustrate the problem I’m having right now, don’t worry since I’m about to explain it in detail.
Continue readingMental Health
The Current Contours Of My Depression And Anxiety
I have spent pretty much my entire life dealing with depression and anxiety. I don’t remember a single time in my life that I wasn’t anxious (and I can remember back pretty early into my life) and the depression has been a constant companion since I was five or six. I developed tools to cope as a child, improved them in order to survive as a pre-teen and teen, worked to solidify them as a young adult, and then worked to heal in my twenties. I haven’t really struggled with them in almost a decade, since my mid-twenties, because I got so good at handling them that it took very little effort, at least as far as my day-to-day energy was concerned. Some days were worse, some were better, but I mostly averaged out to being fine. These days, though, that is no longer the case. Ever since last year, when I started the medication that would go on to cause me a great deal of constant pain, I’ve been fighting to keep an even keel again, in a way I haven’t had to since I left my parents’ house in 2009. Part of that is the accumulation of stress over the past five years of Covid-19’s domination of existence, a lot of that was the stress from being in constant pain, and the rest has been the gradual turn towards shitty fascism that has been really taking center stage in the US. There’s just been so much to feel stressed and depressed about and so very little I’ve been able to rely on to counteract those feelings that I’ve just had to make some kind of peace with living in this state of perpetual exhaustion, depression, stress, and anxiety.
Continue readingMental Health In My Doom Spiraling Era
My experience of depression has pretty much been a lifelong series of ebbing and flowing cycles. I used to compare it to floating in the ocean, with days where everything is calm and still, others where gentle waves rock you, and the occasional day of furious storms that threaten to bury you deeper beneath the surface than you could ever hope to return from. These days, or maybe these years, really, it is a much less tumultuous affair. Part of that is being more emotionally even-keeled as I’ve worked through a lot of my trauma and removed a bunch of the unhealthy relationships that added turmoil to my life. Another significant part of this more mild experience has been that I’ve learned how to handle my own internal spikes and troughs better, thanks to years of therapy and introspective work. The rest is probably settling a lot of outstanding issues that were actively causing me deep and constant pain. That said, it’s not like my depression is gone. It’s just different. I tend toward valleys and hills rather than waves and cratering depths. Little rises and falls along the way as I cross much larger rises and falls measured in a scale closer to geography than individual steps. The bad days are still bad and the good days often feel few and far between, but I have to admit that feeling less caught up in it, moment to moment, is a huge improvement.
Continue readingWhat’s Next Now That My Dragon Age Playthrough Is In The Rearview Mirror?
Please, if you know the answer, tell me. I’m desperate. As of writing this, it has been almost a week since I finished this momentous task, this three hundred forty hour undertaking, and nothing compares to the soaring highs and wonderful emotional lows (that were also soaring highs, let’s be real, because I love a tear-jerker) of Veilguard. I’ve tried playing other video games, things I set aside to brute-force my way through Inquisition, and none of them seem fun. I’ve tried to read, but my mind can’t focus on something that doesn’t feel as real as Veilguard did. I tried taking a night off, to do something other than play a Dragon Age game, and yet I found myself unable to focus on anything but thoughts of how nice it would be to start a new file. Nothing compares to the depth of character and delight I felt while blissfully escaping into this latest Dragon Age game, so how can I tear myself away from the fresh character I made on my second night after beating the first one? How can I deny myself what my entire being desires so deeply and clearly?
Continue readingAn Exchange Of Beliefs To Reflect This Upcoming Political Era
Content warning for discussion of childhood abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma.
Continue readingRose-Tinted Glasses In The Gathering Dusk Of A Quiet Night Alone
It is difficult to not look at my life from the past and not feel diminished in some way. The siren song of nostalgia is a difficult to tune resist, as I find myself feeling more isolated and alone than I have in years. I speak with fewer people on a regular basis these days. I have fewer recent conversations in all of my communication channels. I have no weekly events except the one I have laboriously scraped together every Sunday. I barely have the energy to even think about making any kind of positive changes to my life, let alone actually making any changes. I am in a rough patch and the thought that yesteryear was better is a difficult one to deny when I am watching the sun set while I fill up my water bottle for my final hour of work as the building settles into silence and darkness on a Friday evening. I am not the only one working still, but, like me, we all work in isolation and silence, largely unaware of each other’s presence. I do not know their life situations, but a part of me wonders if they, too, have little waiting for them but a trip home and a quiet weekend doing their own things. Sure, I’ll do some grocery shopping and get my weekly takeout before I settle into my apartment for another weekend, but that’s not much of a social life. The events I have this weekend will hopefully keep me from falling into the silence and isolation I’m increasingly familiar with these days, but it’s little comfort as I feel the building’s heat shut off and the temperature begin to drop while I’ve still got work to do.
Continue readingThe Weight of Sleep Deprivation
As of writing this, it has been about three months since I’ve felt well-rested. July of this year, coming off a vacation, started roughly since I was struggling to get my sleep schedule under control and, in a preview of the what would wind up being the entire month of September (and an unknown amount of October), had just returned from a vacation that was nice but not terribly restful since I kept having back pain due to the mattress I was sleeping on. The stress from that first week of July just picked up from there due to work deadlines and the amount of heavy labor I had to do to meet those deadline at my job. Plus, the back pain I had over my vacation faded a bit, but never entirely went away before it start slowly growing worse and worse until August started and I realized I needed to replace my mattress. It peaked two weeks later when I woke up with such severe lower back pain that I was afraid I’d permanently damaged my spine, prompting me to go out immediately in search of a new mattress. While I was able to reduce the severity of the pain I was dealing with by putting my futon mattress on top of my old, bad mattress, it didn’t really do much more than allow me to not feel like I was breaking my back by going to bed. Then, after an exhausting month of never enough sleep, I settled down for my first night on my new mattress and then started my birthday after barely six hours of sleep due to incredible and debilitating back pain. Since then, I’ve struggled to get even an average of five hours of sleep a night thanks to similar (but not the same) back pain that has shifted around my back over the entire month of September. Now, as October starts, my only hope for relief is the physical therapy appointment I have set up the day before this post goes up.
Continue readingTrying (And Failing) To Rewatch Dexter
One of the results I’ve noticed from my decade and a half of therapy is that there are things that bother me now that didn’t bother me in the past. As far as I can tell, it’s a result of me being more in-tune with my own emotions and removing the callouses that had formed around my trauma so I could actually process it and properly heal. All of which means that certain actions in video games bother me more than they used to. Or that certain TV shows I once found fascinating at best and interesting at worst are more than I can stomach without some amount of emotional fortitude (which I am still running short on these days). Which is why I started and then quickly stopped rewatching Dexter when I ran out of stuff to watch on a really depressed day. Turns out watching a show all about a guy who ties down, tortures, and then murders people is too much for me to handle without feeling anxious and bad. Who would have thought that casually exposing myself to one of my own trauma triggers would be mentally distressing? What a surprise.
Continue readingLighting The Fires Of My Own Burnout
As a result of this past weekend’s tumult, I’ve noticed a habit in my life more starkly than ever before. I have, of course, been aware for years that I tend to deal with feeling poorly about myself or a loss of control in my life with some form of hard work. Either new projects to work on, an attempt to reassert control by just throwing myself at whatever is making me feel like I lack control, or just keeping myself working on a problem until it is solved rather than letting myself rest. This is not a new thing. What does seem new, at least to my eyes, is how pretty much everything I do comes down to this habit and how unhealthy that has gotten recently. I’ve always struggled with letting myself rest and with not taking on more work than I can handle, but I’d begun to work on doing less and punishing myself less for not doing everything I’d wanted to do in a day over the past two years, so I’d thought that I was making solid progress. Unfortunately, while I was making advancements in a few specific areas or with regards to a few specific cases (such as this blog and my personal projects), I’ve been losing ground elsewhere. The most easy examples are things I’ve written about recently. How stressed I made myself by doing what was, in retrospect, way too much work before I went on vacation. How I dropped all of my plans for two whole days to build my computer. Hell, I even spent my last week of my break pushing myself to get work done rather than letting myself actually continue to rest. Sure, all of this stuff is only as clearly over-the-top as it appears to be because I have the benefit of hindsight, but some time thinking and a therapy appointment have made it very clear that there were spots in all of those events where I should have stopped, all of which I recognized and then chose to ignore in the moment. Not only would I have been better off not doing as much work, but that nothing bad would have come of stopping to breathe or rest.
Continue readingOff-Balance Once Again And Shorter Than Ever On Spoons
I’ve spent the last few months carefully threading the needle on my work/life balance. Ever since I wrote about how busy I was back in November, things haven’t let up for more than a day or two. Even as things get less hectic, some other aspect of my job steps up. For example, while I don’t need to do as much emotional or intellectual work right now since all the big, difficult, and long-running tasks have finally been finished, I am now testing what might be the one project my company has ever done that requires significant physical labor to test. Sure, there are far worse jobs and there’s definitely jobs that require far heavier labor in the day-to-day course of their activities, but this is still a significant first for my company. For one thing, I’ve been doing “testing” even on days that I don’t have anything to test just to keep working out and growing my strength so I can be prepared for days like last Friday where I needed to not only do way more testing work than usual but also reassure my coworkers that they weren’t asking too much of me. Right now, we’re in a data-collection phase of this project and that means doing a lot of tests in a row. Frankly, it’s exhausting and I’m not really enjoying it outside of the “clear headed focus on a repetitive task” aspect of things, but someone needs to do the work and I’m probably the best suited to it due to my build, past experience, and relative youth (I’m over a decade younger than the next youngest tester).
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