When I finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and wanted to relax with an older, more simple favorite, I decided to replay Spider-Man: Remastered. Since I bought a PS5 just a couple months ago and opted not to transfer my save files, I wanted to make sure I had a finished file on my console before the sequel comes out (well, besides Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which I bought and am excited to play once I’m finished with SM:R). I figured this would be a great opportunity for it, since I also wanted to catch up on my podcasts a bit and the storytelling of the game isn’t strong enough that I feel terribly compelled to follow it on a replay. Plus, I love Spider-Man. I’m a big fan and I’ve always enjoyed swinging around New York in every Spider-Man game I’ve ever played. For the most part, I’m having a great time. I’m much better at fighting enemies than I was the first time I played it (so much so that I can’t even comprehend why I used to struggle in battles since now I can handle everything with ease unless I’m going for style points and focus too much on gimmicks rather than effective combat strategy), so the main source of mild frustration I used to feel is now entirely gone. However, I have a new one and it’s odd because I think it is pointing to a change in my gaming preferences rather than a change in games as a whole.
Continue readingMental Health
Sleep Cycles And Bad Habits
I read a review by Linda Codega (the reporter who broke the Dungeons and Dragons/Wizards of the Coast OGL news back in January) the other day. They were covering Pokémon Sleep, the latest app in Nintendo’s continued pursuit of becoming a lifestyle company. The game is fairly simple, in that it monitors your sleep habits (by being open on your phone, which you’ve left facedown on top of your bed) and scores you based on how much you moved around in your sleep, how long you slept, and who knows what other data. Based on your score, you get the chance to power up your Pokémon, capture new Pokémon (via taking pictures), and advance in the game. It’s fairly simple and straight-forward and, to me at least, does not seem terribly appealing. I sleep pretty poorly, though, so maybe I’m just not interested in a game I won’t be good at. That said, what has me thinking about this fairly bland game days later is what Codega muses on in the latter portion of their article. If this app is the last thing we think about before we go to bed and the first thing we think about when we wake up, what does that do to us as Humans? What are going to be the long-term consequences of the continued gamification of life, as we turn sleep from something meant to prepare us for another day into another form of entertainment? They end the review without coming to a conclusion, saying they would need more than one night of using the yet-unreleased app to really dive into the cultural implications, but I realized that this is something I’ve already done to myself and have been doing for years now.
Continue readingOne Week Of Rest Later. Sorta.
I am officially one week into dropping streaming and specifically not replacing it with other projects. I have actually done my best to rest, even if I wound up spending an entire weekend busy and emotionally exhausted from a variety of frustrations, some disappointment (which has only contributed to my emotional exhaustion because I spent the time and energy to emotionally process it), and a very Midwestern party. I have not entirely succeeded in resting over this past week, since my sleep schedule is still royally messed up, but I actually had the energy to write two long blog posts and most of a chapter of Infrared Isolation (which will be going up the weekend after this post does, meaning I’ll have skipped another Saturday update) yesterday. It felt great to be able to work on something and actually have the mental fortitude to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Which I mostly lost between yesterday and today because I was up too late playing a game (Cassette Beasts is great and I’ll eventually be writing about it), but that will hopefully be mostly fixed if I can actually get some sleep for once.
Continue readingFilling My Free Time
As I go about planning how I’m going to spend my time, conscious of both my need to rest and my desire to fill my day with things I feel are fulfilling and rewarding, I am finding it difficult to strike a proper balance. Since I stopped streaming because I had overburdened myself, I now have a bunch of time available. Sure, it used to be filled with something that I found enjoyable, but it was also frequently more draining than it was restorative. Right now, I’m trying to keep this time clear so I can actually get the rest I need to recover from the past eight months, but I’ll admit that I’ve already begun to think about what else I could be doing with that time. It might seem like this is happening too quickly, but I’m pretty surprised that it took two whole days, one of which used to be a streaming day, for me to get to this point. Normally, I’d have expected myself to start planning what I could do with this “extra” time before I’d even made the decision to stop streaming. I dislike feeling like I failed at something, after all, and it is more difficult to feel like I failed when I stop doing something if I can convince myself that I can now do something else of equal or greater importance to myself. It isn’t more restful, though, so I’m trying to take it easy. And I mean actually easy, not “easy in comparison to my usual amount of effort.”
Continue readingRelief From A Weight I’ve Never Mentioned
I went to get a mole checked out today. I wasn’t super concerned that it might be a sign of some kind of skin cancer since I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, but it has long been an inconvenience at best since it sits right between my nose and my lip. It gets in the way of shaving, of blowing my nose, of wiping my nose, and it can interfere with sneezes if I don’t have them absolutely locked down. It tends to bleed easily, if I scrape or pinch it hard enough and it frequently itches in a way that encourages me to scrape or pinch it. If I shave too thoroughly and indelicately around it, it will bleed the next time I brush against it with anything rougher than my hands. That said, I’ve been living with it for as long as I can remember, so it hasn’t been an issue for much of my life. Only occasionally, less than once a year, will I accidentally cause it to bleed or otherwise hurt myself by absentmindedly interacting with it. It has been easy to ignore as I’ve dealt with more pressing issues because I had the tools and skills required to cope with it in an effective and safe manner.
Continue readingIntrusive Thoughts and Getting Mentally Buff
Content Warning for discussion of Intrusive Thoughts and the ways I cope with them, along with their relation to my OCD, anxiety, and depression.
Continue readingToday Was A Grey, Smokey Day Inside and Out
Content Warning for a long, metaphor-rich discussion of my experience of depression.
Continue readingAvoiding Codependency And Fighting The Habits That Enable It
Content Warning for discussion of codependent relationships and the unhealthy habits that create them; non-specific mentions of childhood trauma that makes codependent relationships seem fine; and discussion of the struggles inherent in managing those things while under a great deal of stress and anxiety.
Continue readingObligations To The Self (Past And Present)
Content Warning for: tangential discussions of cancer; more detailed but mostly non-specific discussions of abuse, neglect, and childhood trauma relating to those topics; and discussions of the results of surviving abuse, neglect, and childhood trauma.
Continue readingThe Nature of Rest and My Need for Proximity
I write a lot on here about my levels of stress, of anxiety, of exhaustion, and how difficult it is for me to deal with them in a healthy manner. I often say that I’m bad at resting or I’m not sure how to rest and recover when it comes to mental and emotional drain. One of the things I typically leave out (ultimately, anyway, since I’m pretty sure half-explanations of what is going to be the topic of this blog post are my most-deleted writing on this blog) is that I know of ways for me to get rest. I know of things that soothe me when I can’t seem to unwind or relax. The main problem is that they’re difficult for me to access in ways that keep them soothing or in sufficient quantities that I can actually recover enough that my progress doesn’t vanish the instant something stressful happens. I’ve written before about my need to escape civilization, to get far away from cities and noise and the humdrum of my daily life (I call it “Tree Time” in my head, since I associate this with being in heavily forested areas). What I havent written about is that probably the most restful or soothing thing I can do is connect with other people.
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