As it turns out, it is not that easy to take a week off. Any other week would have been easier, since this last week involved the in-game bonding ceremony between my dearest friends’ Final Fantasy 14 characters (now they are married in real-life and in this video game) and I was as involved in that as I had the energy to be. Plus there was another wrestling event to record and edit, all the busyness of a “normal” workweek, the sudden extra busyness of this past week, and then the complete screeching halt of all of the work stuff for at least a day due to me twisting my ankle. And while twisting my ankle sucked, it did actually force me to rest in a way I couldn’t make myself until I actually had an unavoidable reason for it. But there’s still more celebrations tomorrow (as of the day I wrote this), the imminent return of my delayed obligations and plans, and now the exhaustion of painfully hobbling around my two-story apartment to contend with, so I’m not out of the woods yet. To be honest, given everything I’d done this week, I’m not sure I actually took a break the way I meant to and maybe just… Stopped doing as much. Which definitely counts for something, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not exactly what I was looking for with this decision to step away from things for a bit.
Continue readingBurnout
Taking A Break From Almost Everything
I hit a point last night where I just…. couldn’t anymore. Between my two workshops, my raid group farming for wings, the roleplaying wrestling league, and my two dearest friends have their characters get married in-game, I just… don’t have any more. So I spent two hours staring at my computer as I tried to figure out something fun to do last night after logging out, gave up and asked for recommendations, and didn’t get much from that, so I just hung up and… stared into space for a while. I’m so burned out, but even that doesn’t explain the depths I sank to last night (as I’m writing this, but at least a week ago as you’re reading it). Something just caused my depression to spike immensely, to the point of withdrawing from people, and I couldn’t push through it to do anything because even the stuff I normally do to stay occupied during those times felt just as pointless and boring as everything else I considered. So I moved to my couch and started into space for half an hour, intermittently crying as I tried to figure out why I felt so bad and why stuff that I generally liked doing suddenly felt so odious and awful. Because that was the thing. Minutes before this happened, one of my other friends asked how my day was and I told her “good,” but then I’m suddenly crashing and feeling like even doing the small tasks of normal preoccupation in Final Fantasy 14 were going to rip my soul out of my body if I forced myself to do them.
Continue readingBurnout And Fridays Off
I’ve been taking Fridays off of work lately. I probably shouldn’t, what with rising costs, but I’ve been so burned out that I needed to. Three weeks in a row, I was so worn out by Friday morning that I couldn’t make myself get out of bed on time or I slept through my alarms or felt so awful that I went back to sleep until I stopped feeling bad. It’s not great, to be quite honest. I really do need the money from my weekly overtime if I’m going to survive the upcoming financial crisis (in whatever form it takes) and while I haven’t spent vacation time to take my days off so far, I really need to find a more sustainable way to get through my weeks without entirely burning out by the end of Thursday. Work is demanding, sure, but I’ve also been taking a lot of burdens on myself that I don’t really need to, so maybe I need to dial it back there, or maybe I need to make sure my free time is spent better, in a way that is more rejuvenating or enriching. I really hope it’s the latter because I don’t want to do less stuff and I feel kind of like I’m on the hook for all of it anyway, considering it’s all commitments I’ve made. I could take breaks if I need to, I’m sure no one would begrudge me a week off, but I worry about the precedent that would set for myself. And that taking the time off wouldn’t actually fix things, only let me recover from them, since that means I’d be right back in the shit again the instant I went back to doing things. Work certainly isn’t going to slow down. It’s going to speed up, if anything…
Continue readingTrying To Recapture The Joy In Old Hobbies
Once upon a time, just about four years and change ago, I enjoyed little more than spending some time muttering to myself while listening to a podcast or two and putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It was very fulfilling, incredibly engaging, and a different kind of mentally taxing than literally everything else I was doing at the time. It was mostly refreshing to be quite honest, and while I would definitely make my back, elbows, and shoulders ache with how much I’d hunch over my table to participate in this diversion, it was still a net positive that fell by the wayside when I moved into my current apartment. I still have the table I used, complete with padding I’d place on top of the puzzle so I could keep using the table without needing to carefully move the partially-finished puzzle around, but I just don’t spend much time on that floor of my apartment when it comes to my own entertainment. I should spend more time down there. I should stop committing myself to my upstairs area with my video games and office and start finding ways to be more comfortable in the downstairs area. Clean off the mail couch and vaccuum the chair next to my bird’s cage more often, perhaps. Move some books from my to-be-read pile to somewhere downstairs so I’ve got stuff to read and no longer need to feel like I’m making a choice I must commit to every evening. Dig out those puzzles. Maybe even just build a lego set. Anything to get me out of that office and away from my computer. I really need to stop spending so much time in there.
Continue readingMy Severe Depression Rears Its Head Once Again
I’ve been more depressed than usual for a while now. I don’t know if my antidepressants stopped working or if, maybe, I would be worse off without them. It fades sometimes, for hours or an afternoon or an evening, which makes me think they’re still working, but it always comes back. Maybe my meds are less effective than they used to be. Maybe I’m more depressed than I used to be. The latter stands to reason, given the way the world is going, but the former is an unanswerable question so it is where my mind dwells. I do not know how I’d even begin to figure that out. I doubt that there’s a blood test of some kind my doctor could perform that would tell me and while I expect there is some way of figuring it out via brain chemicals, the actual process of testing my brain chemicals seems like it’s not the sort of thing you do to figure out if your antidepressant’s effect is weakening. And it’s not like I can ask my therapist if I seem more depressed than usual. Of course I seem more depressed than usual! Have you looked outside? Have you follow any amount of news? Why WOULDN’T I feel depressed with all that going on? I can’t even say it’s probably both because either one could have this effect on me by itself! So all I can do is wonder while I interrogate my feelings and continue getting the same “I’m too tired to feel anything” response no matter what.
Continue readingReturning To Wanderstop
A while back, I decided I was going to write on essay of some kind per week. A longer post, more contemplative or reflective than my usual pieces, with the goal of getting back to the style of critical analysis that I used to enjoy when I was still a student (and still enjoy to this day, even if I site fewer sources and never produce a proper MLA bibliography). I even did it a couple times until I started writing this post and then… Well, I ran aground on the problem at the heart of this and have been too burned out and beaten-down by life to push myself to contemplate it further. Because I started playing Wanderstop again. I got further and then, after a couple hours of play, ran into a hurdle I could not get over at the time. I still can’t get over it. And so I haven’t returned to the game despite how much I love its concept, art style, writing, and whole entire deal. No other game has forced me to confront my own habits and burnout and compartmentalized problems like this game has and it has proven more than I can handle while in the midst of… well, being stuck in a mire of problems I have no means of rapidly escaping. I cannot hide from it forever, though, and while I’m not sure my heart can handle diving back into it yet, I think I’m finally ready to return to whatever this winds up being.
Continue readingDrawn-Out Breakdown Or Recognition Of My Need For Rest
I am struggling to make it through my “normal” work weeks these days. Fifty hours of work was once the norm I lived under but now I can barely make it through a ten hour day. I know how bad that sounds, but working 50-hour weeks was my devil’s bargain for living alone in this expensive modern era. It was the thing that gave me the hope that I’d be able to pay off my student loans “early” (which feels dumb to say considering it has been thirteen years since I graduated college as of the second weekend of May). It is what has enabled me to live with the rising cost of a not-shitty apartment and my unceasing eleven-hundred-dollars-a-month student loan payments (which have finally begun to snowball thanks to paying off one loan with a particularly large quarterly bonus last year). I have depended on it for five years and counting, and I don’t know how I’m going to keep it up anymore. I’d have to move someplace much cheaper if I stopped. I’d have to trim back what few luxuries I allow myself like decent coffee, fresh chicken (that I then freeze, sure, but it’s still better than the already frozen stuff I used to buy), and enough vegetables that I sometime don’t eat them all before they go bad. And the “expensive” frozen pizzas instead of the cheap, crappy ones. But I am so burned out and tired that I can’t really force myself to keep this pace up most weeks and I’m not sure if failing to work that much is me recognizing I need rest more than I need money, or if this is a drawn-out breakdown due to overwork, stress, and isolation combining into the most gnarly, horrible burnout I’ve ever experienced.
Continue readingStruggling To Maintain A Healthy Entertainment Diet
Consuming new media, by reading or watching or playing or listening or whatever, is an important part of any creative person’s life. You need new input, after all, to avoid stagnating. Something fresh to liven up your mind and shake the cobwebs from your soul. The Oatmeal, of fart joke and semi-inspiring illustrated essay fame, called it “breathing in.” A whole host of other creative types have likened it to feeding your creative body/soul. I like to think of it as enrichment in my enclosure since I often feel like a zoo animal these days, pacing around my apartment as one of the last observers of the horrible illness still looming over the world no matter how hard everyone tries to ignore it, and wishing I could be free again. I struggle to keep up a healthy diet of new media, though. It’s difficult to be in the right frame of mind for something new all the time. I’m often too tired to invest myself in anything and while I do plenty of new-to-me stuff, playing a different combat class in Final Fantasy 14 doesn’t really count, nor does something Pokopia because while both are fun and stimulating, neither really feels “new” or really gives me much to think about when I’m not playing them. And not everything needs to give me that, but I really do benefit from having something new and interesting to chew on. Right now, most of that is coming in the form of Dorohedoro Season 2 and my slow rewatch of Frieren as I meander my way toward Season 2 of that. And also Trigun: Stargaze. I also have a pile of books and movies to watch, other shows on my to-watch list, and a host of unplayed video games. I just… have a difficult time overcoming the inertia of my established habits and tend to just fall back into those when I’m too tired to really figure out what I want to do.
Continue readingChased Into A New Day By Last Week’s Problems
This past weekend (as I’m writing this, anyway) was just long enough for my exhausted mind to forget everything that was going on at work. Unfortunately for me, what was going on was investigating a bevy of bugs I’d found and all of them were waiting for me when I got in on my Monday morning. As was one of the German software developers I work with (the one I get along with better, thankfully). I then proceeded to spend seven hours on the phone with him, some of them testing and some of them just shooting the shit while we waited for the very slow test (that was supposed to be much faster) showed whether or not we’d managed to eliminate the bug by changing on of over a dozen variables. It was time-consuming and exhausting work, and honestly some of the most exacting testing I’ve done in a while since the project I’ve been working on for a while now is more of a “does it feel alright? Cool, next thing” type project than a “change dozens of tiny variables one at a time and review the results of a repeated action with each set of variables, all of which must be recorded for historical purposes and further investigation by my developer coworkers. It has left me drained even after getting a couple decent nights of sleep, moreso even than I felt the week prior when I was dead on my feet from not sleeping enough at all. Mostly because the busy afternoon wrapped up with me returning to my desk to find that a recently departed (for the day, not from this mortal coil) coworker had set up a meeting for us to learn about how other departments us AI testing tools.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes: Micro Versus Macro Plotting
As I’ve been to busy to really do much active preparation for this tabletop campaign (which isn’t great considering that I’m writing this two days before our next session and I need to be ready to facilitate a game of Sanctuary), I’ve been trying to keep my momentum going by working through whatever plot I might put together for the two discrete chunks of the later campaign that I can foresee. I’ve got the outline of it locked in already, and I won’t be getting TOO specific since I need to leave room for adaptation, player input, and micro-plots, but I really need to start lining up some of the more important details. Especially for the first chunk of the campaign since that’s going to be a bit more locked-in than the second chunk by its very nature. I also need to produce a map for it as well, since that kind of location-based visual will be important for a while. It won’t be unimportant later, but it will be more important earlier to help ground everything we’ve got going on. After that, I need to generate a bunch of names, some proper nouns, work out how to incorporate a few fun little details from our games thus far, and then organize it all in some way that I can reliably use and won’t completely forget about. I’ve made plenty of GM reference documents in the past, but none in quite a while and I’ve never done anything of the sort while this burned out and tired, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
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