One week from today, I’ll be getting myself to my local Best Buy so I can pick up my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before returning home to lose myself in a brand new game. I’m very excited for this game, enough so that I’ve had to convince myself not to buy a digital copy of the game as well, so that I can start playing the game the instant it becomes downloadable. It’s difficult to wait, even though there’s literally nothing I can do to make it happen sooner. All I can do is try to be patient as I try to distract myself from the slowly ticking clock. The flip side of this is that time will continue to pass no matter what, so it’s not like I have to do anything in particular to make progress. I just need to work on passing time gracefully.
Continue readingBurnout
Getting Too Detached From The Clock
There is only one room in my home in which a clock is visible. In fact, you have to actually enter the room to see the time. You can’t see it unless you’ve gone out of your way to peer into the room or pause as you’re walking past it to look at the only clock visible from the hallway. This room is the kitchen and it has three clocks because my oven, my microwave, and my coffeemaker are all fundamentally attached to time in a way that I no longer am. It is a privilege, to be sure, to largely not need to run my life by the steady ticking of the second hand or the silent but swift change of a digital clock, and I appreciate the many factors of my life that make it possible. My largely malleable sleep schedule (I need a few days to change now, sure, but I can get used to any repeated pattern), my lack of a specific schedule at work (my boss only cares that I do my work, not when, so long as I keep it reasonable and don’t miss meetings), and a pretty accurate sense of the passage of time (I can usually tell how much time has passed within a few minutes over one or two hours and within ten to fifteen if it has been more than two hours). As a result, I’ve gone from marking the passage of my day via the steady counting of hours and instead mark it by events.
Continue readingTrying To Actively Fix My Burnout
I’ve been battling burnout for years now. I was driven away from my last job because of the demands placed on me and how all my work was punished because it didn’t fall neatly into the metrics my new manager used to rate my performance (despite how my old manager had approved of and supported my work). My new job was better for a while, but years of dealing with one of the most difficult people I’ve ever met and a great deal of institutional indifference to new ideas, modernization, and change in general have slowly ground me down. Since it is a slower process, I’ve been able to work to counter it, but there’s only so much to do when you’re also in the middle of a pandemic and the economic system you live in is doing it’s best to extract every single penny it can get from you and people like you. There’s no time to rest, little space to get a breather, and almost no ability to create either one of those since the only thing that will let me potentially escape in the future is working as much as my health will allow me to. It is not a great situation to be in, honestly.
Continue readingDisinterest and Burnout: The Slow Death of a D&D Campaign
It turns out that not every single one of my tabletop groups is excited about the idea of playing something new. One group, now that Wizards of the Coast has walked back some of their fuckery, is not very interested in playing other games. At least one person in the group found a reason to be disinterested in everything I suggested and while they said they’re willing to consider some stuff if I give them a bunch of information and some time to think about it, I’m not exactly expecting them to embrace anything new at this point. I’ve been running a game for this group for a few years now and I’ve known them for even longer, so I feel pretty confident when I say that they’re not exactly the most flexible group. Historically, they’re one of my most draining groups to run for. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy our time, just that I feel like I have to do a lot of work to keep the game going.
Continue readingA Fresh Can of Whipped Stress and Chopped Anxiety on This Burnout Sundae
I’m really starting to think that I am, in fact, cursed. Every time I take a vacation from work, something happens immediately after that vacation ends that seems to completely destroy all of the rest I got while away from my job. This time, it didn’t even wait that long and then doubled-down. I had an anxiety attack that lasted a few days, wrecking my sleep for most of my second week away from work, and then, when I had finally recovered from that (so much as I can in less than a week) and went back to the office, I wound up with a whole pile of emotionally draining and difficult events scheduled within a thirty-two hour period. All of which felt incredibly trite and inconsequential after I learned of some awful news impacting a dear friend. The first two weeks of 2023 were one hell of a start to the year.
Continue readingMidweek Check-In
This upcoming weekend is my first weekend off in what feels like months. It has been long enough since I’ve had a weekend without commitments that I would have to carefully backtrack to figure out when it was and I’m currently too tired to do that, which means it has definitely been a while. I also technically don’t have zero commitment this weekend, either, because I’ve got three or four tabletop things planned (four if my Friday group meets), for a grant total about ten hours of tabletop gaming. More than half of which I’m running. Plus, most of my “relaxation” plans for this weekend are about cleaning my apartment since I haven’t had a chance to do much of that lately. Not that I’m living in filth or anything. My kitchen is clean and my bathroom is as clean as most bathrooms ever get, but it’s been a long while since I’ve done anything other than spot dusting and vacuuming. So I’ve got a lot more going on than pure relaxation this weekend.
Continue readingAll It Took To Combat Worsening Burnout Was A Lot Of Effort
As I’ve mentioned an untold number of times on this blog, I’m struggling with burnout. The problem with burnout is that it isn’t solved by a simple vacation. Or even several simple vacations. It is a process of years to recover from the constant exhaustion, the anxiety, and the need to continue the grind. A process that frequently doesn’t ever play out for people in my society, much less for those who are less privileged than I. After all, I’m not going to be able to escape the burnout until I don’t need to work extra hours to make ends meet in a way that doesn’t involve bargain shopping, penny-pinching, or denying myself anything I don’t strictly need with a few exceptions here or there. Even then, I’d have to find either a new job or a way to fundamentally alter the relationship I have with my job and the way I feel obligated to continue laboring as I have in the past. So, while it is definitely possible (and even probable, given enough time) that I’ll eventually escape this cycle of constant burnout, I find myself focusing on ways that I can continue to live with it, at least for now.
Continue readingThe Benefits Of Rest
I’ve written many times about my relationship with sleep. While sleep and dreams and my ability to rest don’t occupy my mind as much as stories and tabletop roleplaying games do, they’re probably third or fourth highest on list. After all, I’ve been dealing with one kind of insomnia or another for over half my life and my experiences with it and relaxation in general have made me highly aware of the different kinds of rest you can get. This makes it easy to direct my time towards what I need in order to maintain high-function in periods of high stress or enduring periods of constant stress, but it also means that I tend to abuse this power at times when my stress levels are lower than my usual state.
Continue readingThe Fuel To Your Fire
Spite can be a powerful motivator. I can think of a huge number of things I’ve done just to prove people wrong, and I can think of times spread across my entire life that it has motivated me to act when I otherwise might not have. It is growing less and less frequent, though, as time passes. Spite burns brightly, but it burns quickly as well. Spite can be used to alleviate exhaustion from burnout, but it generally leaves me feeling worse once I’ve burned through it. These days, I’m pretty much out of everything I used to burn as the fuel that drove my work. I get by on discipline and inertia, but nothing has really stepped up to take the place of the hope I once felt.
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