Content Warning for mentions of suicidal ideation.
Continue readingMental Health
Dark Days And Long, Sleepless Nights
As I was going through some notes, I realized it has been two and a half months since this one night where I was so stressed out that I wound up staying up all night. I wasn’t exactly well-rested going into that evening, but I thought I’d be able to handle it without too much of a problem given how frequently I used to be able to go without sleep. While I did, eventually, get through the day, it was not the simple but tiring experience I remembered. Much to my chagrin, given how much I relied on this ability to carry me through my bouts of insomnia, I have slowly but surely reached the age where I can’t function without any sleep. It is an unfortunate fact of getting older, but more unfortunate is that this loss hasn’t come with a corresponding increase in my body’s day-to-day demands for sleep. I still struggle to fall asleep just as much as I used to and the impacts of losing sleep seem to hit me harder. At least until it comes time to fall asleep, again. At that point, it pretty much counts for nothing.
Continue readingI Overstimulated AND Overwhelmed Myself at the Same Time Today
I spent a great deal of today staving off an anxiety attack. A lot has been going on lately, you know? I’ve also got a lot of stuff coming up on the horizon like an international trip, a wedding I’m a part of, job applications, needing to move this summer, and way too much more (mostly work stuff I’m not putting here because that’s transient stress/venting and I want to avoid venting about my job on the internet). Plus, I’ve have had a few long-running relationships begin to crumble over the last couple days thanks to people choosing the dumb wizard game over doing the right thing in support of someone they cared about (me, a non-binary person). It’s been wearing on me, to the point that I am a confused mass of emotions and exhaustion that vascillates between wanting to collapse and feeling mostly fine (which is mostly me coping for work since I need to be at least a little present and presentable while I’m on the clock). I need rest, I need some quiet, I need some love and support from my friends, and I need to not hyperfixate on the latest Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailer.
Continue readingThe Line Between Naivety and Forgiveness
Trust, once lost, is not easily regained. The process of losing trust can be anything from drawn out and complex to instaneous and simple, but regaining it is always a time-consuming and difficult affair. We’re seeing a lot of that play out in the world these days, on a lot of different scales. Perhaps the biggest and most difficult to define example is people losing faith in government instituions. A much smaller but still impactful example is the recent loss of trust in Wizards of the Coast. It will take decades to restore trust in government instutions, especially given how every day seems to bring more evidence that the institutions we thought were safeguarding our government are actually just there to serve and protect the most powerful and wealthy among us (not that we needed more evidence to believe that). Likewise, it will take Wizards of the Coast a long time and some pretty extreme conscessions for people to trust that they’re not simply kicking the can down the road with this latest backpedaling they’ve been doing.
Continue readingFresh Burnout and Emotional Exhaustion
After an incredibly exhausting start to my year, things are starting to calm down. All of the major events that showed up in the first weeks of this month have passed and I’ve had at least a couple days where very little has happened. Additionally, I went to my most recent session of family therapy, reflected on how it had gone for a few days afterwards, and decided that it would be my last. It was only a single hour every week, but it took up a disproportionate amount of my idle thoughts and most of my active ones as well, so I’m looking forward to thinking about things I enjoy again, such as my various writing projects, fun video games, and the other aspects of my life that I want to work on to improve myself rather than attempting to lead my parents toward growth. Hopefully I will have a chance to rest and recover from everything that’s been going on so that I can once again enjoy myself rather than continue the staving off of misery that I’ve been doing lately. And while I have made little progress on any of my major worries for the rest of 2023, I’ve done what I can for now.
Continue readingRhetorical Questions With Real Answers
Sometimes, when I sit down at my desk or stare at my blank daily checklist and ask myself what I hope to accomplish with my day, I have a pretty good idea of what the answer is. Most of my days are fairly routine, after all. The daily grind of exercise, work, and taking care of my needs (rest, food, etc) is the name of the game, most of the time. Some days bring a greater variety, of course, but not many. Those that do are rarely pleasant, these days, since variety frequently means needing to warp my schedule in one way or another, or needing to do something else that warps my day in a way I had not anticipated nor will I enjoy. Still, most of the time I know what’s going to happen in a day and most of my questions about what my goals are or what I am trying to do are rhetorical.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 19
Content Warning: mentions of depression, suicidal ideation related to OCD, death, grief, and loss.
Also, spoiler warning for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask I guess?
Continue readingPost-Nap Confusion And Peak Ambient Stress
I had the misfortune of taking a nap today. It was not a long one, thankfully, but I woke up from this accidental time jump incredibly disoriented and completely disconnected from reality. It fell at the cusp of my transition from work mode to post-work-writing mode, as I took a break to sit on my office’s couch. Since I’m working from home this week due to being under the weather and wanting to avoid spreading this respiratory bug around the office, I usually take some time to move away from my desk, do something else for a little bit, and then return to my desk. Since I’ve been ill and exhausted lately, I’ve barely had the energy to do anything after work and have thus developed the habit of just sitting down on my couch under a blanket while some music or a podcast plays and I sort through post ideas in my head.
Continue readingBad Parents, Video Games, And My Search For Catharsis
Spoiler warning: the following post contains major plot spoilers for God of War: Ragnarok and Pokémon: Violet/Scarlet. They’re in the next paragraph and form the majority of it, and they don’t show up any less the further down you go. You cannot escape them unless you leave this post now and only return once you’ve had am opportunity to beat those games to your satisfaction. I don’t really go into specifics in terms of how things happen, but there are secrets and conclusions to things that get revealed, so maybe bail out before you read those if reading them will negatively impact your gaming experience. Since I’m out of other stuff to put here, to push the spoilers further down the page, I’ll let you go with a final admonition of “you’ve been warned” and hope that you are making good choices for yourself.
Continue readingTrauma, Healing, And Family Therapy
Content Warning for discussions of trauma (non-specific), family therapy, and personal therapy.
Continue reading