There are days, more and more lately, where I am heartsick at the state of the world or floundering and unable to escape the vortex of my own personal miseries. Unfortunately, the world does not give you space to have days like that. Life must still be lived. Bills mut be payed, money must be earned, food must be bought, and the necessities of life require you to carry on despite how much you want to take a moment to just reel at the enormnity of it all. How do you do that? What can you do to make some distance, create a little space, and find a way to take the next step forward because you have to no matter how much your heart demands you lay face down on the ground? There’s plenty of self-care tips out there for this sort of thing: log off, stay hydrated, make sure you eat, get some fresh air, ground yourself in the present moment, find ways to be active locally, in-person, so you can provide yourself with some measure of control to fight back against the feelings of powerlessness that are often at the center (or at least near it) of these overwhelming moments. That doesn’t always do it, though, because sometimes you also have to clean your apartment or deal with other people who are making reasonable requests of you or you need to find a way to write about something, anything, to help break your mind out of the paralysis gripping it. What do you do for that extra boost, the tiny bit of impetus required to break out of the rut you’re in so you can do the things you really should be doing today but don’t really NEED to do today? You can’t leave it all for tomorrow, you know? Tomorrow will have it’s own things, it’s own trials and miseries to make doing things difficult, so stacking up more and more important-but-not-necessary effort is only ever going to add more weight to your shoulders.
Continue readingMusing
Nowhere Left For Escapism
Once upon a time, I used to take breaks from the work I was doing to go on social media. I’d see some art, look a whatever had gone viral, post back and forth with some friends, maybe idly browse for a bit, and then return to whatever I’d been doing. It was fun. It was enjoyable. It was a small hit of happiness during my long, often-boring days. Nowdays, I feel like I do everything else in my life as a break from social media before I eventually have to return to doom scrolling so I can keep up with whatever hellacious, objectively evil thing has happened since I last looked. There is no joy to be found there and, more and more frequently, not even any escapism. All I can count on getting from the internet these days is at least a modicum of despair and yet my brain keeps telling me to go back and check again. After all, maybe this time I’ll actually get that little bit of serotonin I’m craving. Maybe this time I’ll just see some nice art or a funny joke or an announcement about something of interest to me and not spend an hour scrolling up and down the page as I trepidatiously follow whatever unfolding disaster has occurred (such as “law enforcement” of various types killing someone in what can only be reasonably described as an execution or the various media and government personal talking about just how reasonable it is for Trump to consider acquiring Greenland through whatever means he desires). Nothing I have seen on social media in the last year comes even close to making up for how much absolute misery I’ve experienced as a result of scrolling around and yet I can feel the need to scroll, to bear horrified witness to these unfolding tragedies, tugging at my attention despite not wanting to see yet another post about how surely, this time, they have gone too far.
Continue readingNew Year, Same Problems
I went into my two and a half weeks of vacation thinking that, by the end of it, I’d have found my voice again. That, after enough rest, even interrupted by the holidays, I would find myself gravitating towards the blank page that used to speak to me. Instead, I spent the weekend before the end of my vacation thinking about what I’d do today, the day I’m writing and posting this, since I hadn’t written anything and all I really felt as a result of my time off was more doubt than ever. I came up with a couple good ideas related to that, but whatever they were vanished into the haze of my incredibly disrupted sleep schedule and the emotional lassitude that followed an entire afternoon and evening of fun and rewarding roleplaying with some people I’ve gotten closer to over the last few weeks. This morning, as I prepared for work, I had some kind of idea about directing my writing in such a way that it was more of a means of giving voice to specific ideas rather than just giving voice to my otherwise silent thoughts and feelings, but my exhaustion from not sleeping well and the busyness of my workplace has caused whatever distinction I came up with to slip from my mind. I am running around empty-handed as the hours of the day tick past and nothing I can think of feels like more than the usual complaining and navel-gazing I leaned on so heavily before my break. Which begs the question, did taking my break actually change anything? Did all that rest actually result in some amount of recovery? Eighteen days have passed and did I do anything other than pass through eighteen days of time?
Continue readingEven I Struggle To Write Sometimes
I meant to write a letter to my aunt (the one who I’ve decided to stay in contact with because she’s been pretty good about everything). I even have most of it written! It’s five pages long, so far. Single-spaced. Which means it’ll get quite a bit longer whenever I edit it. Whenever that happens. I didn’t really choose to stop writing so much as… well, struggle to write it at all. It’s exhausting to talk about family stuff at the best of times and these are not the best of times. So I sporadically worked at it for a while, went on vacation, got sick, and now it has been a month and a half, at least, and I’m finally turning my mind back to it (assuming, of course, that my brain fog continues to diminish). I wish I’d been able to focus on it more. I wish I’d been able to spend more time on it. I wish a lot of things, to be honest, and none of them are going to happen. All I can do is carry on from where I’m at and hope that I can get it written by the time you’re reading this [which I’ve managed] so I’ve got time to edit and then print it before I leave my workplace for two and a half weeks. That’s the only place I’ve got access to a printer, you see, and there’s no way I’m writing all of this by hand. I lack the strength-of-writing-hand for that in any kind of quick or even legible manner. So I’m on a bit more of a deadline unless I want to let this time grow into two and a half months. I didn’t even want it to grow into three weeks back when I was still working on it, and yet it did. You would think that, given how much writing I do, something like this would be easier, right?
Continue readingAnxiety That’s Lingering Just As Long As This Cough
Yesterday’s post was called “On The Other Side Of Sickness” because it was a bit of wishful thinking about the future. I wrote it on a Monday, as I went into work while still unwell, and hoped that, by the time I was editing it, I’d be better. I am not. I’m also a bit behind in blog posts because work has been so busy and I’ve been so cotton-brained and tired that I’m having difficulty focusing. It is truly awful, to feel myself mentally diminished and be unable to do anything about it at all. And yet I must soldier on because there is work to do, money to earn, plates to spin, balls to juggle, and a small legion of crafters and gatherers and combatants to lead into a new Final Fantasy 14 patch (we’re up to six people, as of the night before I wrote the first draft of this). Lots going on and very little rest to be had despite my illness, which definitely hasn’t helped me get over the last bits of this. I’d be tired and unfocused at this point regardless of having a cold, so it’s no wonder that I still feel as loopy as I do. I wish I could say it was all bad choices, but only staying up late last night was a bad choice and it was a bad choice made knowing that I spent the two previous nights unable to fall asleep. Not because of coughing or congestion or anything like that. No, this was because I was too warm or I couldn’t get comfortable or my mind just wouldn’t wind down or I kept jerking awake as I was falling asleep for some reason. I don’t really know what’s got me in such a fuss right now, but I can definitely tell that it’s my anxiety coming at me like it hasn’t in a long time.
Continue readingOn The Otherside Of Sickness
After a year of burnout, physical exhaustion, worsening mental health, and pushing my limits as much as I could, my body gave up on me. I was taken down not by Covid, the flu, or even that time I had E. Coli. It was the common cold that laid me low and while I was able to keep working through most of it, I definitely did not like doing that. Couldn’t even let myself rest while I was so stuffed up I’d go into my bathroom to steam out my sinuses at least twice a day, just to keep things manageable (nothing else was sufficient). Capitalism and modern society demands that, and going into the office today (the day I’m writing this), regardless of whose health it risks, since I am not in such a comfortable position that I can afford to take more days off in-between the holidays (or I could, but then I’d need to work during the holidays). I managed to mitigate the worst of it by putting in a hard day’s work while I was only mildly feverish (or not feverish at all while the acetominophen was working) so I could work from home the subsequent two days, but it was still not great. This is the sickest I’ve been in years. Even that time I got the flu (made more mild by my vaccination) a few years back and spent two days semi-conscious on my couch watching the freely available seasons of Pokemon on Amazon until they somehow turned into the Emperor’s New Groove on repeat was less bad than this. At least that passed [this post is going up on day 14 of me being sick, though now my ears are clogged and my brain’s still a little fuzzy rather than the “standard” cold symptoms I still had when I wrote this]. At least the medicine I had available worked. This cold, though? Nothing really helped for long and my last five days have been an endless cycle of soothing mitigations as I dealt with one symptom at a time until I somehow got a decent couple hours of coherence and decongestion before it all came back.
Continue readingI’ve Had A Lot Of Time To Think Lately
I don’t normally have a bunch of time where I’m not actively engaged in doing something. That’s an active choice I’m making, generally speaking. I’ve spent my whole life managing my anxiety and depression by keeping myself constantly busy with one thing or another so there’s no room in my mind for them to occupy. Music or podcasts while I drive, cook, and do chores. Books or TV while I eat. Video games when I’m free. Endlessly scrolling social media when I need a minute to myself at work. I’m always doing something. It’s not like I’m afraid to spend time thinking. That’s kind of what this blog post is, and my daily journaling haiku habit, but even that isn’t letting my mind be at rest. It’s an active form of thinking, a directed mode of thought. I rarely leave myself the space for my mind to wander wherever it wants since even the usual “wandering” is directed by whatever activity I’m doing. While driving, though, there’s not much else to do. Watching the road, being aware of drivers, and so on takes some of my attention, but when you’re driving a thousand miles in sixteen hours, almost all of it on one long interstate route, you have a lot of time where there’s no cars or trucks near you where you can’t afford to let your eyes wander but your mind is free to stroll about as it pleases. I rarely come out of a long drive with much in the way of clarity so much as ideas to pick at some other time, but this time I woke up the morning after my drive with a thought nestled in my head that had bubbled to the surface as a result of the time I’d spent and coversations I’d had with my friends over the days preceeding the drive.
Continue readingA Week Of Not Rest But Recovery
Last week, to visit friends and family (chosen family) for the US Thanksgiving holiday, I drove just a shade under two thousand miles. It was broken up into two drives of five hundred miles each and one drive of a thousand miles–which came a day earlier than planned. I committed numerous caffeine crimes, ate a lot of junky travel food (and a whole lot of pretzels), gave myself sinus problems due to the elevation changes, and still started my first week back at work before the holidays feeling way more prepared for the long weeks ahead than I’ve felt in a long time. Even that week off for my birthday didn’t have this kind of effect on me and I got WAY more sleep during that week than I did while traveling. Hell, I might have gotten more sleep in half of that week than I did during the entire week of traveling and visiting people that just ended. And yet I feel so much better. Part of that has to do with getting to spend time with two people I don’t get to see and be around nearly enough, and part of it was that, despite the snowy struggles of part of my sixteen-hour drive home last Friday (two Fridays ago as this gets posted), it’s so much more relaxing to do that than to do my job. Which feels like quite a statement. Driving two thousand miles over the course of six days was less taxing than even a quiet week at my job. It stands to reason, though. That took only about thirty-five hours, which is fifteen hours less than a normal work week takes, and I only had to worry about myself and accomplishing my goals rather than a whole bunch of delicate personalities and people who only think you’re working if they see you outside your office (despite all of them having jobs that happen almost exclusively in their office).
Continue readingFinding A New Flavor Of Overstimulation
I wound up taking today off work (the day I wrote this, which is about two weeks before it got posted) because I was just so burned out and exhausted that my body physically refused to operate correctly. Which is a bad state to be in, considering that I have plans to drive about five hundred miles in two days, another five hundred two days after that, and then a thousand in a single day four days after that. I don’t need to be in tip-top physical shape going into all of that, but it would certainly help make the total thirty-two-or-more hours of driving more bearable if I didn’t feel like crap. So I stayed in, played some video games (to wrap up some Final Fantasy 14 stuff before my week away from the game), and had a mostly relaxing day. Unfortunately, it was not entirely relaxing. I found out about an event my favorite wrestling group was doing a literal hour before it was supposed to start and scrambled to reorganize my evening so I could attend the event. It was a lot of fun, but I was not prepared to record and I was not mentally prepared for the shear amount of stuff that was going to be happening. Wrestling events can be a little overwhelming because there’s two chats to watch (the Wrestling chat and the crowd chat), the action to follow, the event’s music to listen to (used to help set the emotional tone for scenes), and usually my recording to monitor (and related camera work). While I wasn’t recording this time, there was a lot more mixing of chats than usual, a lot more attendees, just as much music, and I wound up in a discord voice chat with some people I’ve been getting to know, all of which left my fried and overstimulated after the first two-hour event.
Continue readingAn Embarrassment Of Riches: Figuring Out What To Do With A Second Desktop Computer
Every year, my workplace holds a raffle to give away the computers that the IT department is retiring that are still in good working condition. I’ve participated without fail every year since I joined the company in the hopes of getting one of the actually pretty-decent computers for my personal use or a laptop that will get me through a few years of mobile computer usage (aka, writing) now that my old laptop can’t handle running a word processor on top of the OS. Eigth years in a row, I lost. There’s not a lot of computers and this is a popular program. This year, though, I almost missed it because I’ve been so distracted with other stuff going that I forgot about it completely and only managed to sign up at the last minute because the IT department sent out a message saying that not many people had signed up for the raffle. Since it was simple, thanks to the addition of a digital sign-up form, I filled it out and then promptly forgot about it again. I’ve had enough other stuff going on lately that some little lottery I wasn’t going to win didn’t seem like it was worth the mental space it would take to remember it. Which is why I was so surprised when I got the email congratulating me on winning the drawing. It took a little messaging back and forth for me to be certain this wasn’t some kind of scam or phishing attempt (seriously, both the IT and DevOps teams write their emails and messages like some kind of crappy phishing scam), but I was able to fill out the form and go pick up my brand new, 9-year-old-but-refurbished PC.
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