Please, if you know the answer, tell me. I’m desperate. As of writing this, it has been almost a week since I finished this momentous task, this three hundred forty hour undertaking, and nothing compares to the soaring highs and wonderful emotional lows (that were also soaring highs, let’s be real, because I love a tear-jerker) of Veilguard. I’ve tried playing other video games, things I set aside to brute-force my way through Inquisition, and none of them seem fun. I’ve tried to read, but my mind can’t focus on something that doesn’t feel as real as Veilguard did. I tried taking a night off, to do something other than play a Dragon Age game, and yet I found myself unable to focus on anything but thoughts of how nice it would be to start a new file. Nothing compares to the depth of character and delight I felt while blissfully escaping into this latest Dragon Age game, so how can I tear myself away from the fresh character I made on my second night after beating the first one? How can I deny myself what my entire being desires so deeply and clearly?
Continue readingBurnout
November Without A Writing Project
Today is the first day of November. The eighth, as you’re reading this, I guess [it got bumped due to election bullshit]. Normally, I’d be deep in my feelings about my writing challenge for the year or how I had to set it aside due to personal issues happening in my life. This year, though, is different. I’ve already written about how National Novel Writing Month has compromised their integrity in a number of unforgivable ways since the start of 2023’s NaNoWriMo, so I’m not going to rehash everything in too much detail, but suffice it to say that they sold out to Large Language Model garbage (still masquerading as “AI”), decried pushback against allowed generated text by saying that not allowing it would be classicist and ableist, doubled-down, and then fell apart as people withdraw from supporting the organization. All of which is terrible but doesn’t come close to the harm done that came to light in 2023–NaNoWriMo hadn’t been protecting its youngest writers, allowing them to be groomed by people who were representing the organization in location-based chats and writing groups, not doing anything about it until the community blew up about it in the middle of November that year. Both of these events were real shitshows, to put it lightly, and a lot of people, myself, included, have sworn off participating in any future NaNoWriMo events. I stand by the decision, of course, but I do find myself missing the excitement and distraction the yearly writing challenge usually brings me. I wasn’t aware of how much I relied on it to buoy my spirits as fall and its attendant early nights come crashing down on the Midwest.
Continue readingTaking A Day Off: The Ups And Downs
You might think that, given how much I’ve been struggling to sleep and how I’m still fairly recently returned to the land of full consciousness and awareness after more than a month of forgetfulness and grey fog, I would take it easier on myself at work or even make use of my ample time off to cut myself some slack at work rather than continue to push myself to do as many fifty-hour work weeks as I can physically handle. You would be wrong, unfortunately, since my whole fifty-hour schedule exists for a multitude of reasons, only some of which have to do with the demands of my job. Sure, there’s tons of work to do and I currently need a bit more time every day to do the same amount of work that I used to do in shorter weeks, but I also need to cover my rent, buy groceries, and pay my bills as a single adult living alone. It’s expensive to do that in my city and in this modern era. I can’t tell you how many times my coworkers have expressed shock at how my monthly rent payments are higher than their mortgages because I stopped counting years ago when it became spiritually exhausting to hear that common refrain. So, in order to have any kind of comfort and to live in a space that won’t make me feel trapped and miserable constantly, I work longer weeks and have to carefully ration the weeks when I don’t get my ten hours of overtime since they inevitably result in a significant drop in income. It’s usually better to take full weeks off than partial ones since I won’t be getting overtime anyway, unless the day(s) off in question is a holiday, so I can actually get an extended rest. After all, if I’m not going to be able to get overtime for the rest of my days (I’d merely avoid the need to spend paid time off for taking a day away from work), what does it matter to me, financially, if I’ve worked some or all of the days in that week?
Continue readingReflections After A Failed Attempt To Rest
I was born early in the morning on the last day of August and I’ve had mixed feelings about it ever since. I mean, I’ve had mixed feelings about being born on and off throughout my life, but I’ve had mixed feelings about August and being born at its end pretty much constantly for my entire life. Most of that is due to the unfortunate coincidence that a lot of the most traumatic events of my childhood were concentrated towards the end of the summer every year, but a much more immediate and relevant part of that is due to my birthday frequently being overshadowed by people’s Labor Day plans. Sure, the trauma stuff hangs around and occasionally rears its head, but I can go to therapy about that and grow more capable of dealing with it. Being overshadowed by everyone’s favorite end-of-summer holiday is a yearly struggle that I’ve been unable to work around despite my thirty-three years of life. Hell, even on the years when my birthday isn’t connected to the weekend that includes Labor Day, I still struggle because that means I have to celebrate before my birthday rather than after it. I almost never manage to make plans in the years when it’s actually on Labor Day weekend because, no matter how far ahead I try to make my plans, everyone else winds up being busy. It’s a popular weekend! People are camping, grilling out, visiting relatives, or otherwise trying to enjoy the last gasps of summer before fall arrives in the Midwest. Even when I try to settle for having ANY kind of plans that weekend, for my birthday or otherwise, it rarely works out for any number of reasons. At this point in my life, after a decade and a half of trying, I’m mostly given up. There’s only so many time you can put up with people canceling on you or being unavailable despite your attempts to plan things super early. My bar has lowered enough that all I can really hope for is that people will remember to wish me a happy birthday.
Continue readingSaving My Inspiration For Later
It has been a long time since I was last struck by inspiration. Most of the time, when an idea “comes to me,” it’s the result of me chewing something over in the back of my mind for a long time before coming up with whatever thought or idea will form the center of what thing I’m going to produce. Poetry, short stories, a novel draft, all these blog posts… None of them are the result of inspiration even if I’ve often claimed to have been “inspired” by something. Even those times, I came up with an idea after thinking about some media or idea for a while. Which might sound a lot like inspiration, but I would define inspiration as something external that plops a fully-formed idea into your head. All of my “inspired by” ideas are a result of my internal processing coming up with an idea based on thinking about something else. It feels like quite a thin hair to split, which is why I haven’t written about this before and am somewhat hesitant to write about it not (mostly because it doesn’t much matter to me which side of the split hair you’re on since it’s all a part of the writing process and the only person the precise definition of this stuff matters to is the person doing the defining as a part of their process). Still, this feeling of actual, true inspiration is rare enough that I feel compelled to say something about it now that I’ve been on the receiving end of it for the first time since I set up an online D&D campaign back in 2019.
Continue readingBurnout By Any Other Name Would Ache As Much
I am happy to report that I made it through a whole weekend without discovering some new wild and unprecedented thing happening in the world. Perhaps because I avoided social media as much as possible and have avoided going to look for what I might have missed, but perhaps because nothing significant and unprecedented happened! Maybe it was a normal weekend! Like any other! Just a totally average weekend that included the start of the summer Olympics as France showed off what it brings to the world. Which I didn’t watch, but heard was absolutely wild. I plan to go watch it at some point (even though I don’t really care much about the Olympic sporting events themselves) since the pageantry of it all seems incredible, but I avoided at the time so I could spend the entire weekend trying to recover from how absolutely exhausting and draining last week was. Which, of course, means that I got into work today and all of that resting immediately flew out the window, leaving me more burned out and stressed than I was last week. It is difficult to be the source of truth and knowledge for a project that a lot of people have strong opinions on when said people decide to insert themselves into said project and voice their opinions without asking to be caught up on where the project is at. It is a particularly futile brand of frustrating to spend an entire day explaining to people that you did, in fact, think of all the obvious things they’re suggesting, that you have returned to the basics multiple times, that you’ve done all the easy troubleshooting they suggested, and that your data is actually as conclusive as you’re saying even if they don’t understand it. Literally spent five hours today on that kind of work and made it exactly one iota of a step further than I was last week because of how much stuff I had to do so my coworkers could “just see it happen” themselves.
Continue readingThe Slow, Grinding Burnout Of Constantly Finding Problems
One day deeper into the week, one more day of fruitless work on a project I can’t talk about behind me. I’m not as upset about everything as I was yesterday, though I’m still a little upset and frustrated, but now I’m feeling extra worn down because we’re still unable to figure out why things aren’t working the way we want them to and how nothing we do that improves those results makes any kind of sense. It has everyone stumped and while we have been able to make slowly improving progress over the past two months, we haven’t really fixed things yet. It is exhausting to work on, mentally and emotionally, because we’re just beating out heads against a problem, and it is exhausting physically because any proposals about different methodology or improvements require a decent amount of heavy labor from me. This work has become every kind of exhausting and I can feel myself less and less able to spring back from it with every passing day. Sure, nothing I’m doing is wrong or a failure or anything like that, but it sure feels like a failure when I’ve been working on a problem this long and this consistently but haven’t been able to figure anything out. Sure, my job is to collect data and tell people that things are wrong, but I clearly understand the problems and how they play out better than everyone else (as my repeated explanations prove almost daily) so it feels like some part of the solution is my responsibility. Regardless of whether that is right or wrong, it is how I feel and these repeated days of zero progress despite my efforts have me feeling incredibly drained.
Continue readingOne Week Into Pursuing Stability Amidst The Chaos Via New Routines
I’m now one full week into my new stress management process and while I do not care for how much time I have to spend thinking about and planning things (despite loving to do both of those activities), I really love being done with dinner and evening chores by nine every night. Prior to this week, I’d sometimes not get home and through with dinner until ten or even eleven. It was rough, to feel like I needed to cram at least some amount of relaxing into my evenings after dinner when I’d still be finishing up at the time I should be starting to prepare for bed, but this past week has been free of that. Which isn’t to say that I’ve gone to bed at a good time every night this week. I’ve had two nights this week where I was just too stressed and anxious to relax enough to even think about going to bed at my normal time, but I think those have more to do with some emotional stuff going on in the background rather than anything to do with my new routine. What I have gotten every single night is the realization that I have enough time for at least two activities before I should start getting ready for bed, even after doing some extra chores around my apartment. It makes it a lot easier to sign off for the night when you don’t feel like you’re desperately trying to cram something into the tail end of your day so you didn’t spend the whole thing dreading work, going to work, working, and then being so exhausted from work that it took you an hour to make dinner. It’s really nice to be able to just walk into my kitchen, spend five to thirty minutes sorting out my dinner, eat it, and then get on with the rest of my evening, even on days when I had to work until eight.
Continue readingStress Management Via New Grocery Days And Ordering Things Online
Today, the day I am writing this, is the first Friday that is also a full grocery day since I sat down during my vacation to figure out how to better align my weeks to reduce the burnout effects of working the long hours I do at the pace I do. I, unfortunately, did not come up with any miracle solutions, but I did have a few ideas that would hopefully reduce the stress I was feeling from week to week before my vacation WITHOUT getting takeout or delivery multiple times a week. And, hopefully, without eating garbage frozen food all the time. Or, in some cases, eating a mix of garbage frozen food and well-prepared good food. For example, I’m making myself some delicious pasta sauce this weekend but, instead of doing all the work of making chicken parmesan, I’m just buying some frozen breaded chicken patties to toss in the oven with some sauce and cheese on top. And buying ravioli and tortellini so I can have some fun variety in my meals while still only really needing to do laborious cooking once (boiling water for noodles is only slightly more difficult than making a frozen pizza). This is the goal, after all: to produce a variety of tasty and at least moderately healthy meals for less money than it would take to eat out frequently but more money than my bare-bones frozen food, pizza, and boxed meals diet that I usually turn to when I need to avoid takeout. In a different living situation (aka, with one or more roommates or a partner), it would be less difficult to make sure I got enough variety in my diet to avoid getting takeout just for a change, but I live alone and modern life isn’t made for single people to maintain a household on their own, so I’m stuck trying to make do with the time and energy I’ve got during these increasingly busy months.
Continue readingBack To Barely Treading Water At Work
Well, we’re back in the shit again at work. Thankfully, that’s a collective “we” that actually has little to do with me and my current day-to-day, though there remains the chance that it will expand to include me as well [which has happened in the week since I wrote this, though mostly in a “you’re on your own for a bit, so don’t let any plates stop spinning” kind of way]. The crisis, such that it is, is technically another department’s crisis that has become ours as a result of what seems to be–from my moderately informed viewpoint–incredible mismanagement. I’ve been gone for two weeks and am swamped just trying to pick up from where I left off, so this new crisis that has overflowed into my department is not making it easy to figure out what the hell was going on with my project during the week anyone had attention to give it, all of which is made more difficult because the one tester who was covering this aspect of the project for me took a week off as well. By the time he gets back to work, I’ll have muddled through an entire work week without his information and whatever he knew before he left will likely be irrelevant thanks to the continued progress of this project [which is exactly how this has played out]. My only saving grace right now is that I know the project and my related testing equipment well enough that I don’t need to understand what has been going on to test the solutions for it. It’s not great, of course, but it’s all I’ve got right now and everyone else has been too busy to take the time I need to fill me in.
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