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 readingMental Health
Off-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).
Continue readingThe Last Unshakeable Pillar Of My Life
There are times, more or less often depending on my mood and the state of my mental health, that I find myself thinking, usually unprompted, about how I have very little in my life other than my job. It is a difficult idea to refute. After all, I spend fifty hours a week working at this job of mine and spend nowhere near that much time on any other single thing. I don’t even sleep that much over seven days, most weeks. Outside of work, I don’t really have much in the way of variety. I have video games, which include a mix of solo games or some that I play online with friends, though I do most of my game playing by myself since I work late, most of my friends are in different time zones, or my friends play games I don’t have the energy for. I also have this blog, but it mostly feels like I’m shouting into a void and slowly realizing that the faint echo I hear is probably using my voice (along with the voices of many others) to learn to be a more massive and culturally destructive doppelganger than anyone ever feared there would be when they came up with the idea of doppelgangers. It feels bad to continue shouting when I still haven’t had the time or energy to come up with a reasonable alternative. Beyond those things, I’ve got my tabletop games but those are difficult to enjoy the way I’d prefer since they’re scheduled less regularly than I’d like and, as is true of probably ninety-nine percent of gaming groups, plagued with scheduling issues, cancellations, and the busy lives of the people involved asserting themselves in a way that demands whatever came up take a higher priority than fun. It’s disheartening to think through this all because I can never actually tell myself that these thoughts are wrong.
Continue readingPosting Through A Depression Spike
It has been a while since I’ve written about it as anything other than a tangent on a post, but I’m still struggling with my now months-long depression spike. It has definitely helped that I rarely leave work while it is still fully dark outside and that I’m able to get more sun than ever during my walks (though I’m needing to wear sunscreen now, which is not my favorite, since one of the medications I’m taking makes my skin incredibly sensitive to sunburn). That’s not enough, though, since I’m still struggling to get enough sleep and the constant grind of stress and long work days at my job are more than counteracting the positive effects of the longer days and greater exposure to sunlight. Not to mention that I feel like I’ve been struggling to connect with my friends lately and while that is probably just the depression talking, I still feel like I’m not as socially active as I used to be. I’m also struggling to make space for my own creativity and what space I do make (mostly these blog posts) feels tainted by all the stress and frustration I feel with the shit WordPress’ owner keeps trying to pull. I’ve still got my tabletop games, but most of those don’t meet as regularly as I’d like and they all have their own stressors as I try to avoid getting caught up in anxiety spirals around stuff my players said or did that could be interpreted as them not enjoying themselves.
Continue readingSongs To Correct The Course Of My Mental Health To
Content Warnings for general discussions of mental health with a focus on mental breakdowns, trauma, depression and surviving abuse.
Continue readingOne Busy Weekend Has Made A Huge Difference
Last week ended with me feeling incredibly overwhelmed and struggling to deal with what had mostly been a week full of good things [and I am once again reminded of the downsides that come with writing these things a week ahead of when they post since the week before this got posted went VERY DIFFERENTLY than the week before I wrote this]. A four-day work week, a week totaling only forty hours of work instead of my usual fifty, getting to leave work while it was still light out, some major changes at the company I work for, and even a new work computer and related peripherals. The whole week had a lot going for it, even if the exchange I’d negotiated with myself was that I could take it easy for a week in exchange for doing my taxes and taking care of the final receipt submissions for my 2023 Flexible Spending Account, and I got to end the whole thing by spending my weekend buried in video games with my friends, prep work for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and then a successful (and incredibly delightful) first session of that Dungeon and Dragons campaign. Unfortunately for me, this did not fix my burnout. It did lessen my mental load by a huge amount [to be honest, I probably would have had a mental breakdown if I hadn’t had this weekend before everything went to shit], since I was able to take care of a bunch of tasks that where weighing on me (like activating my new FSA card, dealing with some junk mail, sorting through the records I needed to keep to close out my pile of 2023 documents, and ordering some replacement items for stuff that had worn out and I’d been meaning to replace for almost a year), but it was definitely not restful.
Continue readingLate-Winter Depression Posting
Thanks to a bit of foresight at the outset of my current surge of depression, I switched up my therapy schedule so that I’m seeing my therapist every week for the time being. I had no way of knowing during that first week that it would last this long, but I already knew that this surge felt different than most and managed to push myself through the lethargic, unfeeling haze to ask for something I felt I needed. Which, you know, is impressive on its own, considering how difficult I find it to ask people for something I want or to assert my right to take up space when I’m at my best, let alone when I’m doing this poorly (even if, in this case, I’m not really asking for a favor from my therapist so much as offering to exchange money for a service more frequently that I usually do). Still, I was able to anticipate a need before it came up and take the steps required to get that need met, all despite the overburdening press of this current bout of depression. While these sessions haven’t exactly helped me get through this extended wave of depression (there’s a reason I used to compare my experience of depression to being caught in a storm at sea with only a raft and that’s because it rose and fell in waves without me ever being able to get away from it), they have helped me figure out what combinations of influences, events, and various life factors probably contributed to it. Unfortunately, knowing why I’m currently incredibly depressed isn’t super helpful when there’s nothing I can do about it.
Continue readingUsing Kirby Music As An Antidepressant
My latest musical obsession (when I’m not subjecting myself to the 10-hour version of the “He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah” song), is a pair of videos by a music compilation channel on YouTube. The first one, appropriately titled “30 minutes of kirby music to make you feel better” is a collection of bright and cheerful tracks from a variety of Kirby games, classic and current (though it leaves out some of the latest games to avoid the litigious arm of Nintendo), that absolutely lives up to its name. The second one is the sequel to that first, wonderful video, titled “45 minutes of kirby music to make you feel even better” which also absolutely lives up to its name. There’s a lot of familiar tracks in this second one, showcasing songs by the same name that had been updated or changed for newer games, along with a collection of new ones as well. The channel can get away with these videos because it is not monetized and exists solely to create these compilations of video game music according to a central theme. There are a lot of channels out there like this one, but this one takes it all a little step further. Rather than just posting a static image, there’s a little animation of Kirby wearing headphones and bopping along to the music on the first one and, on the second one, fifteen minutes of bright and happy comments from the first video showcasing just how warmly this collection of music was received. The bright and cheerful music the compiler chose for these videos is enhanced by the cheerful and friendly nature of the comments they selected for this video and, for the most part (more so than any other video I’ve ever seen on YouTube), further enhanced by the bright and cheerful comments below the video.
Continue readingWaiting Beneath A Heavy Silence
I spent most of my idle thoughts today thinking about someone I haven’t spoken to in almost nine months. I have a lot of people from my past that I haven’t spoken to in various lengths of time, most of them greater than nine months, but this one occupies me in ways that the rest don’t. Most of the rest of these long silences are the result of walls I built or deliberate choices to make a change in my life that took me away from people. Some are the notable ends of long-running and incredibly unhealthy codependent relationships that I was unable to change for the better as I changed for the better–it takes change on both people’s parts to better a relationship like that and I’ve only ever been able to control my own behavior. Some were relationships I ended because they were unhealthy for me, because the other person only ever took from me, because it was clear I could not rely on them when it really mattered, or because I simply grew tired of needing to overlook the ways they frequently hurt me without ever learning to treat me better. Some just faded into silence as time and distance took their toll. Only one was because someone else set a boundry and I have kept my silence for these past nine months out of respect for their request.
Continue readingSometimes You Have To Argue Even When They Won’t Listen
My most popular post over the last two years is “Don’t Argue If They Won’t Listen” and I honestly find it kind of funny how perennially relevant that is to my life. I was spurred to write that post after being talked over by someone who continued to insist I was wrong despite having no evidence or relevant experience to back up their claim. They were never able to provide a reason for this assertion and their subsequent insistence on ignoring my advice (that they had solicited) on a topic I happened to know a lot about forever changed the nature of our relationship. I was no longer willing to engage with them on anything but a surface level and I let distance grow between us since, prior to that point, I was the one doing most of the work to keep conversation going and make contact. Now, we rarely talk (this greater distance helped by the fact that this person also moved away a few months later) and while I miss the friendship, I do not miss the way it made me feel all the time. Unfortunately, as I’ve come to realize in my professional life, walking away or keeping your silence isn’t always an option.
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