Well, my first day of work is done and while I feel like I’m way more tired than I should be from what felt like a relatively light day of work (compared to two weeks ago, I barely did anything), I’m not feeling as completely exhausted as I used to. I’ve actually recovered a bit from how tired I was when I finished the moderate labor portion of my day, which is the first time that has happened in months. Maybe more than half a year. That was the worst part of the medication I was on. Because my physical recovery period was so long, any tiring work meant that I’d still feel tired from it for at least a week. Now, today, I’m already feeling like I might be up for the household labor I’d planned for my evening back when I was feeling ambitious yesterday. I mean, it’s only folding laundry and maybe unloading the dishwasher, but I remember a time not that long ago when even those labors were beyond me on all but my best days after work. It’s good to finally be feeling better, even if now I have to keep pumping the brakes to make sure I don’t wind up pushing myself too hard during my continued recovery period. I have to make sure I pace myself and work out patterns and habits I can maintain over the next two incredibly demanding months. So, to that end, my plan for the rest of this week (last week, as you’re reading this) is to get back into the swing of things at work, stepping up my effort every day a little bit at a time. Then, next week, I’ll be doing that and trying to get in my morning workouts again. Or my evening physical therapy workouts, whichever the day demands. And then after that… Well, maybe I’ll go about trying to fix my sleep schedule. Who knows. If I can get the first two things down, I feel like anything will be within my grasp.
Continue readingMusing
A New Type Of Going Home For The Holidays
As scattered and ever-too-short as it was, it was nice to spend the holidays with family this year. I think, between finally making peace with my decision to separate from most of my biological family, processing all the emotions from that, and doing the work to start creating new habits and routines in my own life, this was the first time the holidays have felt “good” since… I genuinely don’t even know. And they weren’t even all good! I burned the shit out of my hand on Christmas Day! I overextended myself cleaning and cooking for my two siblings’ visit the weekend after Christmas! I even had to deal with the dwindling pain of a medication course that seems to have taken almost fourteen months for me to discover that it wouldn’t have any lasting effect beyond what happened in the first two months. It wasn’t a great holiday, but I’m already looking back on it fondly, which is a significant change from literally every other holiday season I’ve ever experienced where I immediately tried to forget it. I really enjoyed seeing my chosen family–the couple whose wedding I was in back in 2023–and my two remaining biological family members. I got to see friends on New Year’s Eve, meet some people I’d only ever talked to online, attend my first New Year’s Eve party in half a decade (I hadn’t gone to one since 2018 since I was feeling ill and emotionally exhausted after my first holidays away from my biological family in 2019 and then, well, because Covid for the rest of them), and got to have a great hour and a half chat with a friend after I picked her up from the airport. It was a great time, even if I’m incredibly bummed out that the demands of my work life and my careful recovery from the aforementioned medication I’m no longer taking mean that I won’t be spending much time physically around people until sometime in March at the earliest. I’m just glad I got to see so many people I care about.
Continue readingA Mixture Of Hope And Frustration: The Story Of 2025
As I spend time during the last few days of my vacation rebuilding my buffer and trying to get myself some breathing room to write (and some breathing room to miss a day of writing by loading up some posts that could be dropped in as-needed, though I’m struggling to come up with enough topics that can be dropped in without any acknowledgment of the day they were written), one of the things I’m noticing as I consider the end of this period of rest is that I’m kind of ready to be doing things again. I think I’m going to get a couple weeks in and be exhausted again, since that’s just how the last few years of my life have gone, but I am trying to convince myself that I’ve got reasons to hope for something better than what was going on before this break. After all, as of the day I’m writing this, I’m three weeks of the medication I was taking for almost all of 2024 and not only can I walk down stairs again without needing to brace myself, I’m back to healing pretty quickly and my back rarely hurts the way it used to on a “good” day. Hell, barely any part of me hurts or aches in comparison to how I felt even a month ago. My muscles and joints still ache, sure, but it’s a 1-3 ache rather than a constant 5 (numbers are out of 10 on the pain scale). It’s a VAST improvement and it is giving me hope that I’ll be able to actually feel better and rested in the upcoming busy months. Or that I’ll at least not get progressively worse every day.
Continue readingLooking Ahead At 2025
I’ll be honest: my main goal for 2025 is to make sure that all of the people I know and love are still breathing at the end of it. With the way the world is turning, bureaucracy’s inertia or not, I’m mostly concerned that people I know and care about will be targeted for simply living their lives as their most authentic selves. Pretty much everything I have in mind for the rest of this incredibly fresh year is geared toward doing what I can to make that happen. It isn’t much, given the relative imbalance of myself and the systems that might be leveraged against them (and, of course, the inability to shield anyone from the random misfortunes of the world), but I will be doing what I can. Effective activism is often a subtle thing in this day and age, especially compared to the performative stuff that fills social media. I’m not going on diatribes about what I’ll do to anyone who hurts my friends, but I am calling my senators. I’m calling my state and federal government representatives. I’m doing what I can to directly support people in dangerous positions with direct financial contributions, at least when I can afford them. It never feels like enough, it is rarely lauded, and it almost never feels even remotely effective, but at least it beats sitting on the internet, joining the chorus of voices who say they will kill/die for those being targeted but can’t be bothered to try organizing locally.
Continue readingOne Last Check-In Before The End Of 2024
Today, (the day I’m writing this, which is the 23rd of December), I had to run into the office for a little bit. There was a test I’d left running of the weekend that I needed to shut down, collect the data from, and then clear out of the test chamber. It’s a shared resource, you see, and while there’s a good chance that no one else is going to be using it in the next two weeks (no one has reserved it as of the last time I checked, a few days ago), it would not do for me to leave all that crap there in case someone else wanted to sneak a little testing in during a historically quiet time at our employer. So I went in the early afternoon, wrapped up my test and put everything away, and then left the building. Took all of half an hour, plus fifteen minutes for adjusting my time card to reflect the fact that I’d shown up and worked for forty-five minutes rather than spent a full day’s worth of vacation time. In, work, and out. Still, in that short amount of time, I still managed to run into every single one of my coworkers who was still working at that point, have a couple conversations about the project I’m working on, and get sidetracked for a few minutes as one of them tried to shove good intentions under my fingernails. It wasn’t that bad, but it was a bit annoying to be trying to quickly finish something and leave only to get bogged down in conversation. Typical, but annoying. Once I was done with it, though, I’d hoped to be able to finally relax only to still feel just as tense and keyed-up as I felt this morning while I procrastinated going to work.
Continue readingPutting The Past Behind Us: Feeling Unmoored In The Endless Present Of Tears Of The Kingdom
“When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world.” I was a child the first time I heard those words. A bipedal meerkat spoke them as the camera zoomed in on him and he alternated between gesturing at an imaginary world behind the camera and pointing an instructive finger at the young, depressed lion that was just off screen. As far as scenes go in The Lion King, it’s important for the plot but maybe not the most visually interesting. The sort of thing that would normally slip past a child of five or six, which is how old I was when I first saw it, but one of my younger siblings became obsessed with the movie and we watched over a hundred times before a new movie caught their attention. If you watch something that much, enough that you can still recite the whole movie, front to back, about two and a half decades later, you wind up taking it all in even as a child. Maybe especially as a child. It was an interesting thought to me, back then, as it was the answer that meerkat, Timon, offered in response to the suggestion that there is, in fact, something you can do when bad things beyond your control happen to you. It was a big thought for a child, but it was something I thought about constantly and so it stuck.
Continue readingCoping With The Specter Of Human Fragility
I mentioned in last week’s “welcome” post about the stress I was dealing with as I was forced to confront the fact that the products I work on and test are zero steps removed from the potential to cause significant structural damage, debilitating injury, or even death if things go wrong enough or are used deliberately incorrectly. It was all for a presentation that didn’t REALLY go the way I’d hoped it would–either completely silent as everyone grappled with the fact that the Specter of Human Fragility loomed large over all the work I do or vocal recognition of the same–but I have also been thinking about it pretty much ever since. Not constantly, mind you. I’d be pulling my hair out if I was constantly thinking about it. I can put the thoughts away for a time now that the presentation is over and I don’t have my usual anxiety constantly bringing it to the front of my mind. Which has made me wonder why the presentation made me anxious enough to think about the potential for harm inherent in my work while the potential for harm inherent in my work doesn’t seem to register nearly as much. I’ve also been polling my coworkers about how they think about it, if they think about it all, and how they handle the thought all the while. Most of them seem to handle it much like I do (just not thinking about it/working to ignore it) and the few deviations aren’t particularly remarkable in their deviation. None of us are immune to the thought. None of us are uncaring. We all live with it in our minds as we each work through our parts in making sure something horrible never happens, but it doesn’t seem to weigh on any of us particularly heavily.
Continue readingFamilial Separation Around The Holidays
This is my fifth holiday season since I separated myself from my biological family. It is also the first one where it has started to feel like my two siblings and I have started to build some kind of tradition around our celebrations. Things haven’t changed much, between the family holidays of years gone with our larger biological family and how we celebrate them these days: we gather at someone’s residence, bring food to share, cook a bunch of food for the event, and then eventually separate. There’s usually more stuff in there that we’re still kind of working out, though. We try to gather for longer periods of time, spending at least one night wherever we’re celebrating, so we can spend time with each other outside of the harried cooking, eating, and then cleaning of the larger holiday meal. We also try to find other little things we enjoy to include, like watching movies or TV shows (which is our primary form of social contact for most of the year: gathering on discord to watch a movie or some episodes of a TV show), or bring forward other traditions from our mutual past that we want to be able to still enjoy, like taking the time to build Lego sets on Thanksgiving morning or eating sugary cereals on Christmas morning. We’re still very much figuring out those kinds of particulars, but we’ve hit the point where we’ve at least settled into a couple options at most and are, as far as I can tell, just waiting to see what sticks.
Continue readingSaying Farewell To Old Electronics
I really dislike electronic waste. I work for a company that produces electronics (coming up on my eight-year anniversary in about a month, actually) and I’ve never much cared for how much stuff gets thrown out. I have a cell phone that is over six years old because it still works alright and I don’t want to add it to the collection of useless old devices I’m holding onto because they’re all too old or too broken to be donated to any charities or to be given to anyone but I don’t want to just toss them out. I am still using a TV that is about a decade old and wasn’t even a very good TV at that, back when I got it, because it still works just fine and I don’t want to add it to my growing collection of TVs that sit in various rooms of my apartment should I ever, for whatever reason, want a TV in that room. I gave my old Switch away to a friend rather than sell it because it was old, heavily used, and I didn’t know how much more life it had in it. I still have all my old iPods. I still have all my old CD players and stereos. I don’t throw electronics out because I don’t want them to be added to the ever-growing piles of electronic waste, but I’m rapidly reaching the point where this kind of behavior isn’t sustainable anymore. So, when I built my new computer in July, I had no where to put my old computer, no desire to continue using it for anything, and I didn’t want to just throw it out.
Continue readingTwo Months Of Physical Therapy Later, I’m Mostly Sleeping Better
I’m about two and a half months into my physical therapy and sleep recovery efforts now. As I’m writing this (a while ago, actually, but I’ve done a more thorough editing pass to get it up-to-date), I’ve finally hit a point where I was able to sleep for seven consecutive hours. Which isn’t as much as I’d like, of course, but it’s nearly double what I was getting back in September and early October, when things were at their worst. Also, while I’m still waking up due to pain and soreness, I can now go do a few stretches and then go back to sleep for another two or three hours. Or least I could back when I was getting a maximum of six hours of sleep at a stretch. I’ll have spent the last few weekends trying (with mixed results) to get as much sleep as possible since the week before US Thanksgiving (the second-to-last week of November) was physically draining in a way I haven’t experienced in years, as was the week after US Thanksgiving, but that was very clearly due to work stress in a way that the aforementioned week wasn’t. I managed to get several nights of quality sleep while I was away from work, but I’ve still been dozing off at my desk every single day so it clearly wasn’t enough (or wasn’t of sufficient quality) to make me actually feel rested. As it turns out, since there is an unfortunate intermingling of issues I’m dealing with, I’ve hit the upper-limit on how much sleep I can get and the worsening of those intermingling issues has actually started to cut down on how much sleep I can get, thanks to the once-again-worsening back, shoulder, and now general joint pain I’ve got going on.
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