Way back in 2015, I went on a pretty hardcore diet. I was trying to pick up running (long story) and having issues because of how hard it was on my legs (from knees on down), so I thought I’d try to lose some weight and see if running worked better. I took a severe, rather limiting approach that drove a significant lifestyle change I was hoping to maintain (that lasted until I went to a convention, slacked off on the severity of my limitations, and never picked it back up again), and it was all I could think about for a solid month. I had cut down my calorie intake to an incredibly low number and was fighting through the feelings of hunger that plagued me as my appetite slowly shrunk and my body adapted to burning stored fat rather than recently consumed food, so it was kind of at the forefront of my mind whenever I wasn’t focused on something else. It was all I talked about with my friends, in my group chats, and around my D&D group, so much so that I eventually realized it and (unsuccessfully) tried to stop talking about it. This past week of recovering my executive function has been kind of like that. Getting something back that I’ve been missing for so long–years and years–has consumed my mind and attention to the point that I’ve written about it every single day this week. I’m sure I could try to jog my mind away from this topic, but I’m not sure I want to yet since, well, this is a part of my lived experience and very important to me.
Continue readingBurnout
I’m Recovering My Executive Function And All I Got So Far Was Less Final Fantasy 14 Time
In perhaps the least-expected twist of what increasingly seems like an effective antidepressant, while I am actually regaining my ability to do things at what feels like a nigh-miraculous rate, I’m actually doing a lot less Final Fantasy 14 stuff than I expected to do. I mean, I’ve spent so much time on the game lately that a lot of my considerations for what I might do more if I had the energy was stuff like “get back to my daily level-grinding work” or “finally work through a bunch of the job quests for fishing that I’ve been ignoring because fishing isn’t fun” or “return to my old days of constant resource collection.” Instead, my apartment is (mostly) clean, my dishes are done, my laundry is folded, work is less productive than ever, I’m more tired than before, and I’m sleeping less than I should. Turns out that stuff piling up on your mental to-do list starts to reassert itself pretty heavily when you finally stop reflexively flinching away from the thought of doing any kind of extra work because even considering the act of thinking about it made you so tired you wanted to lay down on the floor and not move for a week. So now I fill my “spare” evening time with cleaning tasks around my apartment, spend more time preparing myself decent food, and then realize I had a list of Final Fantasy 14 chores I wanted to get done such that now I’m staying up even later to do those as well. I’ve spent so much time over the past few years (and probably even longer) so incredibly tired in body, soul, and mind that now I’m starting to mistake the mental drive to do things returning for the physical ability to do things. Wanting to do stuff is unfortunately not the same as not being tired, much less actually having the energy to do stuff. Which is a mistake I’ve made three nights in a row.
Continue readingStaggering Over The Finish Line After Today Kicked My Ass
Some days just kick your ass and all you can do at the end of the day is stick to the list of chores you gave yourself and hope that tomorrow will suck less. Today’s one of those days for me. Got to work a bit late (but no big deal, I’ve got no obligations so I can just stay late) and immediately got plunged into the shit. Catching up coworkers who were out, starting on things that I’ve been waiting for people to get back into the office to do, having to chase people down to get my testing setups fixed, losing hours and hours to a problem no one can figure out, having my boss skip our one-on-one meeting when I’ve got stuff to talk about, and finding out that my coworker who has been out a bunch will be out even more (and I can’t even just feel angry at him because he’s getting surgery to fix his knee, so I’m also a little scared about what this will mean for him since he’s nearly sixty and this could have a huge impact on someone who is, sure, a frequent source of frustration for me, but also someone I care about since I’ve worked literally side-by-side with him for the last eight and a half years). It’s all been a bit much today and yet I’ve still got to go grocery shopping since I won’t have a chance to do that again until thursday, I’ve still got to do my chores because I’ve got other ones every single day between now and when my friends show up (which I’m very excited for), and I still have to find time to eat dinner and have at least a little fun somewhere in there so I don’t go to bed hating my existence as much as I do right now.
Continue readingPumping The Brakes On Optimision In The Name Of Due Caution
After a few months of trying slowly increasing dosages of an anti-depressant, I might have finally found one that works. “Might,” being the operative word. I’m only a week and a half into this new dosage as I’m writing this, but I actually have had bursts of adequate executive function in the past few days and while the biggest bursts of it could be attributed to the common early side-effect of “manic energy,” I find myself wanting to feel cautiously optimistic about it. Well, cautiously willing to consider that this might be the medication working. I’m not sure I can call myself optimistic if I’m essentially trying to prove to myself that something other than the medication might be responsible for my buoyed mood. I mean, there’s been all kinds of studies in recent years about how eating a reasonable amount of ice cream every day can have positive effects on your health, so maybe my recent little treats of just a little ice cream every couple of days is responsible. Maybe it’s my improved sleep. Maybe it’s the fact that absolutely nothing horrible happened last week and all I have to deal with was the normal stress of a very busy work week. There’s a lot of things it could be. But its still probably the medication taking effect, even if I’m nervous about whether this feeling will last, grow, disappear, or whatever else could happen. As a teen, I had a really bad experience with mental health focused medications and my experiences so far this year have done little to resolve the general trepidation I feel at the thought of altering my mental state with outside chemicals. A trepidation I’m willing to forcefully overcome since that effort is so much less than the effort it takes to not look and feel miserable constantly that I’m spending just about every single day.
Continue readingCaught Between A Horrible Week And Another Rough One
Between this week’s cruel irony, yet more horrible back-to-back hour-long phone adventures trying to take care of problems caused by an incredibly shitty healthcare supply company, and a few knife twists at my day job in the same vein as the ones that started this worsening burnout, I have found a new depth of burnout. My back muscles are knotting up from the stress, it takes focused effort to not clench my jaw, my recently-normal indigestion is blossoming into full sourcelss nausea, and I’m so tired I could fall asleep in an instant. I am scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what I can make myself do and I still have more stuff to do that I can’t get around. I need to go buy food for myself and my bird. I can’t put off taking the trash out for another day. I need to get in my usual overtime so I can remain financially solvent. I need to actually do stuff over the weekend so I don’t spend the whole thing wallowing in misery. I also really need to go for more walks, get more sun, and make sure I’m geared up for whatever horrible weather might or might not pass through my area this weekend (there’s lots of vague warnings about potential weather events but little that is certain [and basically none of that hit my area]). All while I’m so worn out and exhausted that there isn’t a single treat, little or big, that I can think of that would improve my mood. Everything feels like an equal hassle, which is usually a sign that I’m overwraught or dealing with a nasty depression spike, but knowing that doesn’t help me any. I have to figure out how to solve this problem because it’s not like anyone else is going to figure it out for me. I’ve got no one in my life who can do that work for me and I unfortunately saw my therapist the morning before this entire week went to hell, so I’ve got another week and a half before my next appointment.
Continue readingLaboring To Make Sure My Value Isn’t Only Seen In My Labor
I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be the sort of person who, in multiplayer video games, tends to be the one doing infrastracture projects. The best example of what I mean is back in my old days of playing Valheim with some of my friends. There was a lot of cooperative labor and effort put into what we were doing in that game because the very nature of the game demands it (or at least strongly encourages it), but we all had our own time to work on individual projects and it was very telling that all of mine were things like building new bases for us to share, creating pathways to ease travel to resource clusters, and setting up various mechanic-based game features (things like resource farms and safe places to go AFK (Away From Keyboard)). I’d make roads so that, when we were mining, it would be easy to move the cart back and forth with everything we’d gathered. I’d do research into how base raids would start and what prevents monsters from spawning so I could make what we wound up calling “AFK Island” so that the server’s owner could leave it running with his character in-game so the rest of us could play whenever we wanted to (and so we could go AFK without worrying about being swarmed by goblins or dragons or whatever the current threat was). I even set up monster farms with safe sprinting paths so that we could collect resources that were normally a pain to acquire without too much fuss or danger. I’d make minecart pathways and Nether roads in Minecraft. I’d maintain the group’s purse and resource allocation in multiplayer Stardew valley. And now, in Final Fantasy 14, I’m taking it upcon myself to craft a bunch of food we use for raiding.
Continue readingBurned Out Beyond Storytelling
It has been almost a month since I ran a TTRPG session. I’ve been so exhausted that I just haven’t had the energy to plan sessions or do even a modicum of prep work, let alone actually spend the significant chunk of time and energy required to hold the session. I keep going into each new week feeling marginally better at most, so putting in the effort to run a game would leave me in even worse condition. Love of the game isn’t enough to make it happen, as much as I’d like to pretend it was, and thankfully my players have all been very understanding. I’m just coming out of my third skipped weekend in a row, still exhausted, and wondering when I’ll eventually have recovered from this burnout. In the past, when things would get this bad for me, I’d do a work from home day or two so I’d be able to sleep in later, rest more during the day, and spend a day working in comfort rather than having to exist in the constantly draining and uncomfortable environment of my office. I’m pretty good at masking so I doubt any of my coworkers know this, but the environment I work in can be very stressful and overstimulating in a way that saps me of all my energy pretty quickly, and the insistence by my boss that I spend less time in my office and more time being visible by working in the lab is only making it worse. I can’t escape the noise outside my office. I have to wear my mask (literal N95 and metaphorical over-emotive-pretense-of-neurotypicality) while I’m out there. I have to constantly watch where my coworkers are so they don’t sneak up on me and clap me on the shoulder heavily enough that I have to restrain my fight-response. It’s not great!
Continue readingThe Other Side Of My Burnout
There’s nothing quite like being stuck in what amounts to a burning bag of shit left on the world’s porch. At least, that’s what it feels like to be a resident of the US these days. I’m not proud of it, every reasonable person hates it and is right to do so, the US government seems intent only on malicious destruction that has the potential to spiral out of control, and no one is going to come out of this without also smelling like shit. Our goose isn’t cooked or anything like that. Things aren’t irrevocably broken yet. They are irrevocably changed, though. Whatever survives this period of awfulness is going to have to find a path forward where none has yet been made. Any attempts to “go back to how things used to be” will only cause things to get worse. The only way forward is through significant change. Exactly what that looks like or how that would work… I don’t know. The whole idea of things changing for the better feels so foreign to me at this point that I’m not sure I can actually imagine what that kind of future would look like. All my conceptions of things being better are just images of the past, glimpsed through a heady filter of nostalgia and a genuine lack of awareness of how the world worked before I knew how to see it working. Who’s to say what positive change would look like this days, following the destruction of so much of the good parts of the US–such that they were–and this process can’t even be described as breaking a bone again in order to set it properly. It feels very “conspiracy theorist” to say it, but it’s difficult not to be aware of how the US is finally breaking along lines that have been slowly chiseled deeper and deeper over the last fifty years.
Continue readingWorking Out My Workout Routine
The main thing I’ve been doing to combat how awful I feel lately is to put more and more effort towards my exercise routine. I’ve let it slip almost completely over the course of this year due to the bodily pain and exhaustion I’ve been dealing with and I’ve been struggling to get back into it thanks to how burned out I feel and how much I’m struggling to adjust to waking up an hour earlier every work day. I can barely get myself out of bed in the morning, still, let alone push myself to get out of bed immediately when my alarm goes off at ass o’clock in the morning and then go do my morning workout routine. Especially because I know it’s going to be miserable for the first few weeks of actually doing that. I’m out of shape and the general aches and pains of every day life aren’t going to help. Working out will, fortunately, help with those. It might even help with the neck tension and pain I’ve been dealing with, assuming I can work on my neck and shoulder muscles without straining myself–that would have the opposite effect of what I’m aiming for. I want to feel better, not worse. Which is why I started working out as extensively as I do in the first place.
Continue readingThe Worst My Burnout Has Ever Been Continues To Get Worse
The past few weeks of banging my head against the same problem at work (on top of everything else going on the last few months) has burned me out worse than ever. I really wish I could say this and, with ANY degree of confidence, tack on that this was as bad as it could get, but I keep finding new depths. For instance, I spent the whole weekend resting and don’t feel any better going into work today than I did leaving work at the end of last week. Well, I mean, I feel a little better, but only because I’ve yet to work the full day since I’m writing this in the morning instead of the evening. That hardly counts in the face of how utterly exhausted I feel every moment of every day [how right I was… Evening came around and left me feeling worse than I did before the weekend]. Whatever rest I’d gotten this past spring was largely undone by how things have been going at work, between a lack of project clarity, the loss of trust in my coworkers, and my boss being so weird and evasive about things. There’s no way any amount of feeling well-rested could have survived that particular gauntlet, much less the gauntlet the last three weeks have been as my coworker dumped a problem on my lap and then dipped out of the office for several days, so it is hardly surprising that I’m feeling worse than ever. I just didn’t expect it to go from being a largely mental and emotional problem to a physical one as well. I thought I could just stay quietly miserable in my head and suffer through things until I managed to get a new job or pay off enough of my loans that I didn’t need to work as much anymore. Turns out that I was wrong.
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