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 readingDepression
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 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 readingLessons Learned While Building My New Computer
Last Friday, (two Fridays ago, as you’re reading this), the last of my computer parts (save the monitors) arrived and I began the laborious process of reading manuals, looking things up on the internet, and doing my best to put things together. I was confident that things would go better this time around (compared to my first computer build) since I’ve spent seven and a half years working at a job that involved a bunch of mechanical and electrical testing, so I’m much more familiar with how to put computers together than before. That, of course, overlooked the fact that I’m generally putting together devices that have a set list of parts that we already know work perfectly together and that my familiarity with the products my company makes gives me a very particular idea of what a computer’s interior should look like. An idea that doesn’t reflect a gaming computer much at all. Sure, I could easily find the ports on the motherboard I needed and I felt much more confident plugging in cables during this build compared to my first back in 2015, but I was still largely operating without being entirely certain that I was doing the right thing. All of which meant that I wound up missing something pretty important that meant my computer wouldn’t properly turn on once assembled and my incredible exhaustion (beyond the ability to make choices easily due to the anxiety of waiting for everything to arrive coupled with the fact that I only finished putting it all together almost six hours after I started, just before midnight) prevented me from seeing what I’d done wrong until I’d driven down to Chicago and paid a professional to take a look at it (ostensibly so I could just solve whatever the problem was an move on with my life, which is exactly what I wound up doing even if the problem was incredibly simple and kind of dumb).
Continue readingWarm Feelings And Even Warmer Weather
I’m doing better this week. I’m still depressed, exhausted, and burned out, but I’m feeling a bit better about it right now than I have in a while. Work is still busy as hell and I’m still struggling to get enough sleep most nights, but it all feels so much more manageable, even during a week when I did a bit too much over the weekend and didn’t end it feeling much more rested than the week prior. As I’ve gone through a very busy and exhausting day at work that has nevertheless felt much less emotionally taxing than previous similar days, I’ve been thinking about why that might be. Not that much has changed, after all. I’m still not getting as much sunlight as I’d like and maybe less than ever since the warm, almost-summery weather we’ve been having means I can’t take my midday walks at all and the time that the UV level has finally dropped enough that I can safely take my walks has progressed passed 5pm. Sure, I’ve had my tabletop games more regularly than usual, but that can also be exhausting. I haven’t had the time to figure out a solution for my desire to continue blogging without supporting a company that would sell my work to a plagiarism machine. I haven’t even gotten to the point of being able to fall asleep at a better time most nights since the rise in ambient temperature has made it more difficult for my apartment to feel comfortable and cool at night (and I refuse to turn the AC on when temperatures are dropping into the 50s overnight. It just feels too wasteful). So, if nothing has changed, why do I feel better about all of it?
Continue readingThe Last Unshakeable Pillar Of My Life
There are times, more or less often depending on my mood and the state of my mental health, that I find myself thinking, usually unprompted, about how I have very little in my life other than my job. It is a difficult idea to refute. After all, I spend fifty hours a week working at this job of mine and spend nowhere near that much time on any other single thing. I don’t even sleep that much over seven days, most weeks. Outside of work, I don’t really have much in the way of variety. I have video games, which include a mix of solo games or some that I play online with friends, though I do most of my game playing by myself since I work late, most of my friends are in different time zones, or my friends play games I don’t have the energy for. I also have this blog, but it mostly feels like I’m shouting into a void and slowly realizing that the faint echo I hear is probably using my voice (along with the voices of many others) to learn to be a more massive and culturally destructive doppelganger than anyone ever feared there would be when they came up with the idea of doppelgangers. It feels bad to continue shouting when I still haven’t had the time or energy to come up with a reasonable alternative. Beyond those things, I’ve got my tabletop games but those are difficult to enjoy the way I’d prefer since they’re scheduled less regularly than I’d like and, as is true of probably ninety-nine percent of gaming groups, plagued with scheduling issues, cancellations, and the busy lives of the people involved asserting themselves in a way that demands whatever came up take a higher priority than fun. It’s disheartening to think through this all because I can never actually tell myself that these thoughts are wrong.
Continue readingPosting Through A Depression Spike
It has been a while since I’ve written about it as anything other than a tangent on a post, but I’m still struggling with my now months-long depression spike. It has definitely helped that I rarely leave work while it is still fully dark outside and that I’m able to get more sun than ever during my walks (though I’m needing to wear sunscreen now, which is not my favorite, since one of the medications I’m taking makes my skin incredibly sensitive to sunburn). That’s not enough, though, since I’m still struggling to get enough sleep and the constant grind of stress and long work days at my job are more than counteracting the positive effects of the longer days and greater exposure to sunlight. Not to mention that I feel like I’ve been struggling to connect with my friends lately and while that is probably just the depression talking, I still feel like I’m not as socially active as I used to be. I’m also struggling to make space for my own creativity and what space I do make (mostly these blog posts) feels tainted by all the stress and frustration I feel with the shit WordPress’ owner keeps trying to pull. I’ve still got my tabletop games, but most of those don’t meet as regularly as I’d like and they all have their own stressors as I try to avoid getting caught up in anxiety spirals around stuff my players said or did that could be interpreted as them not enjoying themselves.
Continue readingSongs To Correct The Course Of My Mental Health To
Content Warnings for general discussions of mental health with a focus on mental breakdowns, trauma, depression and surviving abuse.
Continue readingOne Busy Weekend Has Made A Huge Difference
Last week ended with me feeling incredibly overwhelmed and struggling to deal with what had mostly been a week full of good things [and I am once again reminded of the downsides that come with writing these things a week ahead of when they post since the week before this got posted went VERY DIFFERENTLY than the week before I wrote this]. A four-day work week, a week totaling only forty hours of work instead of my usual fifty, getting to leave work while it was still light out, some major changes at the company I work for, and even a new work computer and related peripherals. The whole week had a lot going for it, even if the exchange I’d negotiated with myself was that I could take it easy for a week in exchange for doing my taxes and taking care of the final receipt submissions for my 2023 Flexible Spending Account, and I got to end the whole thing by spending my weekend buried in video games with my friends, prep work for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and then a successful (and incredibly delightful) first session of that Dungeon and Dragons campaign. Unfortunately for me, this did not fix my burnout. It did lessen my mental load by a huge amount [to be honest, I probably would have had a mental breakdown if I hadn’t had this weekend before everything went to shit], since I was able to take care of a bunch of tasks that where weighing on me (like activating my new FSA card, dealing with some junk mail, sorting through the records I needed to keep to close out my pile of 2023 documents, and ordering some replacement items for stuff that had worn out and I’d been meaning to replace for almost a year), but it was definitely not restful.
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