My Final Fantasy 14 workshop has been chugging along this week. There’s new mail in my mailbox every day as people turn items in, there’s a slow trickle of item allotments being claimed in the discord, and plenty of work for me to do as I try to keep up with what people are bringing to me. Since last week’s writing on the matter, I’ve done what I can to address the stress all this has been putting on me. Complicating that, though, is that fact that it just clicked into place that I went from passionately putting in too much work for D&D and my job to adopting a brand new cause to burn myself out on the instant the D&D stuff ended. Beucase that’s what this workshop is: I think my guild in Final Fantasy 14 should have opportunities to make in-game money and, now that the FC leader isn’t doing the work anymore, I’ve taken up the mantle. I didn’t change anything, I just swapped how I was wrecking myself. So, in order to address that, I finally started modding a bit more heavily than I did before. I would argue that it’s still “quality of life” stuff, but I know that’s not what I meant the last time I wrote about this stuff. I mean, sure, being able to update the base texture of my character’s form was huge. Getting rid of the boxiness of their limbs and fingers, a thing that has always bothered me, for just a few days has left me shocked at how bad things look now when I turn the mod off. I’ve also tried out some picture-taking improvements, a mod for trying out looks and adding things to your pictures, and the one that has made all the difference: an auto-crafter.
Continue readingBurnout
Insomnia And Caring Too Deeply And Existential Identity Crises, Oh My!
I have not slept much the last couple days (as of writing this). It has been difficult for me to wind down these past few days because I am currently caught in an exhausting vortex of my own creation. It isn’t video games or TV shows I’ve starting watching (though my tendency to lose track of time while doing those things certainly hasn’t helped me these last few weeks), but just my good ‘ol insomnia. My mind will not spin down in the evenings and, in fact, seems to kick things into high gear when I’m trying to go to sleep. Most of the time, though, I can attribute a period of restlessness to a spike in anxiety or stress. These days, it’s all anxiety and stress to the degree that I’ve stopped registering it as anything but “normal” everywhere except in how much anxiety and stress I can manage in a day: that just keeps getting smaller as the world around me gets messier and messier. Still, despite this, I am pretty sure I know why I can’t fall asleep easily lately (this has been going on for a while but only recently has it prevented me from sleeping for long periods of time): I am having a small-to-moderate existential crisis. I joke often about having those, or at least have joked about that once or twice over the course of this blog, but my sense of purpose and self has been relatively stable for a while. After last year’s burnout (which is continuing into this year), deciding to stop my D&D campaigns troubling my self-identity as a storyteller, and the way that my thoughts about why I stopped that D&D campaign has grown in my mind to be applicable to so many of the difficult and draining parts of my life, all my mind can do is spin its wheels and get nowhere.
Continue readingWaiting For Something To Change
Hell is anxiously checking for a response to a message you haven’t even typed yet, much less sent. It is having made a decision that you haven’t followed through on yet, essentially forcing you to make the decision over and over again as your mind picks at it. It is knowing that you have to keep making a decision every day for years if you want it to ever pay off, despite how far away that moment might be. It is knowing something and being unable to act on it, not now and probably not ever. It is all these moments of anixety and powerlessness and more besides. These days, I find myself steeped in such things: conversations I don’t know how to start, things I feel foolishly compelled to heavily qualify before sharing, decisions made long ago that I must stick to because nothing’s changed enough to reevaluate them, and recognitions of problems I can do nothing positive to resolve. All my other choices are worse than whatever I’ve picked, acting on anything will most-likely return bad results, and no amount of practice is going to make it any easier to start conversations I feel weird for having because I was trained to ask nothing of people and still struggle to ask for anything that might require other people to put in effort on my behalf. I hate being in these kinds of no-win-but-the-long-run situations and even my therapist agrees that my life is pretty much entirely made up of them these days. I just want problems that are easy to handle, a society that doesn’t feel like it is on the verge of collapsing, and the ability to ask things of people without feeling the need to preempt all the potential negative directions the conversation could go if I was misinterpreted.
Continue readingBurgeoning Burnout And Undeniable Exhaustion
It has been a difficult week. Following my therapy appointment a couple days ago, I spent the rest of that day and all of the next at home, taking time off work. Today, the day I’m writing this a week before it goes up, I’m in the office for a normal 10+ hour shift and mentally prepared to not go in to work at all tomorrow since I’d only need to spend two days of PTO at that point. If I’m not going to get any overtime this week because of how acute my burnout is and how exhausted I feel from coming face-to-face with said burnout, its causes, and the things keeping it the same size at best or growing at worst with each passing day, I might as well give myself an extra day off so I can maybe get enough rest to tackle next week without needing to cut my days short. I also just don’t want to be here. I have described, in detail, how much things at my job have wrecked me over the past two years and I can’t pretend, even for a little bit, that I’m okay with this, comfortable with what’s going on, or happy about any of it in the slightest. I mean, it’s not like I’m being actively tortured or anything, or abused by any meaning of the word. I’m just being taken for granted and have Hard Work’d my way into an untenable position where my entire team not only expects me to do a great deal of organizational labor that isn’t at all a part of my job, but will actively make my life difficult if I’m not doing it by complaining to my boss that I don’t seem to be working much at all. It’s not a great position to be in, especially because my boss agrees with them, or at least he did six months ago when he brought it up during my yearly review, and I’m not entirely sure what to do.
Continue readingCoping With A Normal, Healthy Reaction To What’s Going On These Days
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 readingNowhere 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 readingTaking A Much-Need Two-Week Break After This
The day I planned to write this, I arrived at work an hour into a five-alarm fire (a metaphorical fire, not a literal one). I spent the entire day running around, doing heavy physical labor, and didn’t stop to sit or rest until half an hour before I’d planned to leave for the day. I had accomplished nothing I’d planned and, worst of all, probably lengthened my illness by pushing myself too hard. Too hard for my own health, anyway, but only just barely hard enough to handle the problems plaguing my team. So, instead, I’m writing this during what I’d originally planned to be my first week off from blog writing. I’m taking time off for the winter holidays and giving myself a bit of a longer break than usual. I wrote just last week that I need some things in my life to change and I’m still not sure what that means for me, for my writing, and my game running, so I want to take some time away to figure that out. And what better time to do that than over the winter holiday season? Which means that there will be no more blog posts between today, December 19th, and January 5th when I will probably resume my normal schedule. Or at least something like it. Who knows what I’ll come up with while working through my feelings over the next couple weeks. I’m too tired and worn out today, from poor sleep and illness, to come up with much other than “something” and I already had that figured out last week.
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 readingI’ve Even Stopped Wishing I Could Put An Optimistic Spin On These Posts
It has been a rough… Well, couple of months in particular. Years. Decade. Etc. But the last couple months in particular have been very draining and extra exhausting. Having all of this stuff with my family hanging over me isn’t helpful at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The world looks increasingly awful as fascism continues to rise. Sure, we had a really good set of election results this past week, but we’ve got a long ways to go before anything starts to really change and the actions of various senatorial elected officials have made it pretty clear that this doesn’t change anything in their eyes despite how clear of a call to resist this should have been [I wrote this before they gave up, too, but more on that next week]. I don’t know how it could be any more clear than it is that the people of the US want our elected officials to resist every single one of Trumps moves, heinous or mundane. Throw is increasing work loads, a messed up sleep schedule, and it’s no wonder that I can’t seem to shake the dogged exhaustion I’m feeling. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that? It’s all I can do to even think about sending a letter back to my aunt, the one who responded in what I’d call a positive manner, let alone write it and manage all of the other stressors that are taking up space in my mind with no relief on the horizon. All I want to do is lay down and surrender to unconsciousness until something has happened to resolve at least one of these things because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to actually do anything about any of them.
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