I’ve been dealing with the worst depression spike I’d had in years these last few days. I don’t think I’ve felt this bad since I was twenty-four and I was bad enough at that point in my life that maybe two people in all of existence know how poorly I was doing back then. Because that’s what always happened when I get this bad. I got quiet. I stopped talking to people. I stopped writing about it in any quantitative manner and just wrote in generalities, if I wrote about it all (back in those days, I mostly just stopped writing entirely). I would never bring up how badly I was doing out of a desire to avoid worrying people, to avoid taking up their mental space, and because I’m aware that these kinds of waves, the ones that show up and worsen without any kind of trigger, will last until they’ve over and nothing I can do but pass the time will bring them to an end. Which isn’t to say that I had no ability to influence my well-being or the frequency of those kinds of events. Over the years of my adult life, I’ve identified a few factors that contribute to these ways and worked to prevent those factors from coming into play. That’s why I almost never drink and avoid drinking to excess if I ever do. I go on regular walks for a mixture of fresh air, exercise, and sunlight, all of which contribute to a base level of well-being. I regularly exercise in order to create a firm basis for my daily routines, hone my discipline, and get myself feeling physically embodied. I also try to sleep at least six hours a night. If that last one didn’t illustrate the problem I’m having right now, don’t worry since I’m about to explain it in detail.
Continue readingBurnout
The Current Contours Of My Depression And Anxiety
I have spent pretty much my entire life dealing with depression and anxiety. I don’t remember a single time in my life that I wasn’t anxious (and I can remember back pretty early into my life) and the depression has been a constant companion since I was five or six. I developed tools to cope as a child, improved them in order to survive as a pre-teen and teen, worked to solidify them as a young adult, and then worked to heal in my twenties. I haven’t really struggled with them in almost a decade, since my mid-twenties, because I got so good at handling them that it took very little effort, at least as far as my day-to-day energy was concerned. Some days were worse, some were better, but I mostly averaged out to being fine. These days, though, that is no longer the case. Ever since last year, when I started the medication that would go on to cause me a great deal of constant pain, I’ve been fighting to keep an even keel again, in a way I haven’t had to since I left my parents’ house in 2009. Part of that is the accumulation of stress over the past five years of Covid-19’s domination of existence, a lot of that was the stress from being in constant pain, and the rest has been the gradual turn towards shitty fascism that has been really taking center stage in the US. There’s just been so much to feel stressed and depressed about and so very little I’ve been able to rely on to counteract those feelings that I’ve just had to make some kind of peace with living in this state of perpetual exhaustion, depression, stress, and anxiety.
Continue readingEnough For The Endless Present I’m Living In
Despite having about an entire week off–a Tuesday through Monday kind of deal, which unfortunately means I didn’t get to have my desired nine-days-without-work vacation–I’m still not in the shape I wanted to be. I’m still tired, still struggling to feel rested, and while a lot of that can be placed at the feet of the medication I’ve been taking, not all of it can be. I’m still incredibly burned out. A week away from my work responsibilities was helpful, but not enough to recover from over a decade of endlessly pushing myself. Which is why I’m writing this a week after my final day of vacation, in the middle of the afternoon, on the day it was supposed to go up instead of the day I planned to write this. Despite my efforts, I still haven’t been able to rebuild my blog buffer. I just don’t always have the energy for it or the focus required to get through typing out my thoughts without drifting towards social media and the doom spirals that inevitably follow. The world’s in a rough situation these days, not just my particular geographic chunk of it, and it’s difficult to avoid letting my mind wander over towards the various horrors when it wanders I’ve been struggling to find good distractions for when I’m at my desk, working. Maybe I should just double-down on work and stay even more busy than usual, but that doesn’t really work anymore since I’m almost always still struggling with my flagging energy levels.
Continue readingAvoiding My Reflection In Wanderstop By Not Playing It
Back when I originally conceived of my post-work-project vacation, I realized it lined up with the release date of the game “Wanderstop,” a fact that tickled me to no end since Wanderstop is about burnout and I was (and still am) incredibly burned out. I thought it would be incredibly appropo if I played the game about burnout while recovering from my own, but that was before I got into Final Fantasy 14 and developed a bit of an dependence on the escapism it provides (since it has been my sole escape for three solid months as of this post going up). Still, one of my friends was interested in it and I was in a bit of a giddy mood since the game had come out, my project had released, and I was putting my break off for an unknown amount of time, so I decided to stream it for my friend over discord. I booted it up, started playing it, got through the stage-setting stuff at the beginning, and then promptly got my ass handed to me by the game as I played it like I’d play any game and it was absolutely prepared for me to do that in ways I didn’t fully expect. It all but called me out by name as I played it for an hour and a half, to the degree that I closed the game to go to bed that night and have been kind of afraid to open it again. It’s not every day that a game holds up a mirror for you to see a perfect reflection of yourself and I’ve been so mentally and emotionally fragile lately that I didn’t think I could risk it.
Continue readingI Can Have One Week Without Schedules Or Plans As A Treat
I’ve been putting off taking some kind of vacation for a month now (as of writing this). I started this year knowing that I’d need to spend the first three months focused, working a lot of hours, and not taking any time off to rest because we had a super important deadline we all needed to meet. Then, once we met it, I’d need to stick around for a while in case anything came up during or immediately after the product’s release. That sort of thing doesn’t happen often since my team is really good about doing high-quality work and not missing problems during our first pass, but it does happen sometimes and this project was important enough that I could get called in from any vacation I was taking that didn’t involve me leaving the state. Then all of this planning became reality and I was right on the money until it came time to do the final release meeting for the project. Turns out that this release meeting was delayed for another four-ish weeks due to internal reasons I’m not going to go too deeply into (for the same reasons I don’t talk specifics about my job) while I was working from home due to being ill a week ago (as of writing this). Which means I got to come into the office after all that was done, learn that most of the people I worked on the project with were gone on vacation, and then, after a day of exhausting myself with frustrated spiraling, realize that I could take a whole week off since I’d already told my boss that I had a week of vacation time in the chamber. So I did that and now I’m sitting in my home office, Final Fantasy 14’s title screen music playing in the background, as I write this over the remains of the Chinese food I picked up from the place down the street for my lunch.
Continue readingStaggering Exhaustedly Into Another Week
Adjusting to my new medication has been rough. Not as rough as the last one was, sure, but given how long it has been since I’ve felt like I was near one hundred percent (and the fact that I started this medication as soon as I felt I could when coming off the last one), it feels maybe worse than it otherwise would. There’s a lot of emotional weight behind the thought “I don’t know how long it has actually been since I felt more than alright” and it occasionally winds up one hell of a sucker punch to throw my way when I’m feeling down. It doesn’t help that the benefits I’m supposed to be seeing from this medication haven’t really materialized yet and I don’t know if they ever will. It’s entirely possible that this one just doesn’t work for me and that I’ll have spent two months waiting for something that just won’t materialize. Or that has somehow materialized without me knowing it? It’s difficult to say, sometimes, given how much the tiredness from this medication is just sort of casting a pall over my life. That’s the problem with such overwhelming tiredness: it’s difficult to keep track of anything at all, much less how you’re feeling, when your predominant physical and emotional state is “ready to fall asleep the instant I relax” all day, every day.
Continue readingSick Of (And From) This Weather
As often happens, when the temperatures rise and fall pretty rapidly from one day to another, I’ve gotten sick. It definitely doesn’t help that I’m super burned out and exhausted from the pains of last year combined with the project I’ve been doing for so long at work that I’ve forgotten what it is like to not be constantly thinking about it. All it takes these days is a tiny disruption and I am down for the count, especially now as I’m trying a new medication and tiredness/low-energy seems to be one of the common side-effects that I’m trying to cope with. Which means I’m working from home today (the day I’m writing this) and doing my level best to actually rest a bit. I’m really not sure how much more of this I can take, if I’m being quite honest. I know I’m physically reaching a breaking point, but I’ve got maybe another week or two before the project is fully done and I can just take an entire week off from work to sleep, rest, do nothing, and try to start undoing the damage all this constant stress and burnout has done…
Continue readingIt Was Bound To Happen Eventually
It finally happened. Between burnout and the depression I’ve been dealing with (which may or may not be related to the burnout), my buffer ran out and I could not drive myself to write anything even knowing I had nothing scheduled to post the next morning. I couldn’t even make myself get out of bed quickly enough in the morning to write anything before posting time. I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for months now and have only been actually caught up on my preferred “5 posts ready to go” amount of pre-written material once or twice since sometime latter last year, so it really isn’t that surprising that it happened. Between everything going on in the world, my lifelong growing burnout, the pressure and stress of work (ten days until the project I’ve been working on is announced and I can finally talk to people about it), my always not-quite-good mental health, and my growing feelings of isolation, I just am not operating at the level I’d like to be. I mean, I’m not longer taking that medication that made me miserable, but I’m taking others that require some pretty specific timing to manage and have enough mild side-effects that I’m once again no longer comfortable most days (though these side-effects should fade in time). It’s a mess, I feel like my life is a mess, and I feel like I am a mess. It’s rough being me these days and it really shouldn’t be, so I feel kinda bad about it.
Continue readingMental Health In My Doom Spiraling Era
My experience of depression has pretty much been a lifelong series of ebbing and flowing cycles. I used to compare it to floating in the ocean, with days where everything is calm and still, others where gentle waves rock you, and the occasional day of furious storms that threaten to bury you deeper beneath the surface than you could ever hope to return from. These days, or maybe these years, really, it is a much less tumultuous affair. Part of that is being more emotionally even-keeled as I’ve worked through a lot of my trauma and removed a bunch of the unhealthy relationships that added turmoil to my life. Another significant part of this more mild experience has been that I’ve learned how to handle my own internal spikes and troughs better, thanks to years of therapy and introspective work. The rest is probably settling a lot of outstanding issues that were actively causing me deep and constant pain. That said, it’s not like my depression is gone. It’s just different. I tend toward valleys and hills rather than waves and cratering depths. Little rises and falls along the way as I cross much larger rises and falls measured in a scale closer to geography than individual steps. The bad days are still bad and the good days often feel few and far between, but I have to admit that feeling less caught up in it, moment to moment, is a huge improvement.
Continue readingI’m Not Always Making Progress, But I’m At Least Not Getting Worse Again…
Another week (mostly) down the tubes and another update on how I’m doing. Physically, anyway. And a little mentally and emotionally, of course. That’s part of it these days, given that the reason I’ve stopped making much progress in physical therapy is that I’m exhausted from work and stressed beyond my ability to easily handle. Turns out that having your entire week knocked off course by someone else’s fuckup really sucks. To put it briefly, since I’m writing this late, one of my coworkers took crucial parts of my testing apparatus without telling me, rendering it incapable of being used for the testing I originally built it for. When I found out and confronted him, I was told to just build up my gear again and fix up the testing setup that he’d dismantled and only barely begun to put back together again in a “nice” way (despite me telling him a couple days prior that I was going to need it that week and that “working” was better than “pretty”). Which means that my plans to leave work “early” to play video games with my friends got thrown to the side so I could spent seven hours fixing what he’d messed up so I could run my goddamn twenty-minute test to verify that the latest version of the software, that the developer had put out that day, was good to go so that we’d have time for fixes and more testing if it WASN’T fine. I spent most of Wednesday apoplectic about that and had the rest of the week completely disrupted by this eight hours of work and software updating I wound up needing to do outside of my already busy plans for the week.
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