Content Warning for a long, metaphor-rich discussion of my experience of depression.
Continue readingDepression
Planning My Rest Around My Exhaustion
I finished unpacking over the weekend. I still have some cleaning to do, and there’s plenty more stuff that will get done in time such as hanging lights, putting up art, figuring out if I need more rugs, and deciding what to do with my balcony. All of that is work that will take weeks and isn’t really a part of unpacking. It sort of is, in the case of the art and lights, since I packed those up for my move, but none of them are things that I feel inclined to do immediately the way I felt the need to empty boxes and get things situated. In short, I’m done with my immediate grind and while there is work to be done on the horizon, none of it needs to be done today or tomorrow or even this week. Now, finally, after an exhausting four weeks, everything is done and I can finally rest. And I’m finally out of obligations for the year, so hopefully I can actually get some this time.
Continue readingTrying To Take It All In Stride
Have you ever had one of those moments where, after telling yourself or someone else that something is fine, finally take a real look at it and realize it isn’t even sort of fine? There’s a wide range of situations that can involve this sort of feeling or experience. It could be something like thinking to myself that my headphones are fine, but then going to put them away and realizing that they’re almost unusable because one of the pieces of tape holding them together came loose and it suddenly struck me that the reason I fold them so oddly these days is because I’m trying to avoid putting any tension on any one of the many pieces of tape. Or it could be a situation like me telling someone that something I’m dealing with is fine and not a problem to the extent of it becoming a small argument only for me to go home, sit down for a bit, and realize that I’m actually completely exhausted and burned out by that thing I said wasn’t a big deal (it has been a few years since this happened, but I’ll never forget the sequence of events). There are a lot of times these little revelations can strike you out of nowhere, especially if you’re as invested in trying to get through your day as I am during times of prolonged high stress like pretty much all of 2023 has been so far.
Continue readingTotal Burnout Is Dragging Me Down
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 readingGetting 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 readingMy Coping Mechanisms Were Overwhelmed
I don’t think I’ve ever had a week that has tested my coping mechanisms as much as this past one has. 2023 has been a rough year, but this past week has been a special brand of hell. Not only have I had to deal with a few incredibly stressful events such as cancelling a flight and booking a new one, confronting my body image and gender identity issues as I get fit for a suit and buy new clothing, and trying to ramp up my performance at work even more as projects get shuffled around and my timeline gets drastically reduced, but I’ve also been trying to juggle preparations for this trip I’m going on. I have dropped every single ball multiple times this week (or had it knocked out of my hands by circumstance) and, despite wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole for twenty-four hours so I can rest and recover before cleaning up and trying again, I have had to carry on immediately. I honestly don’t think I’ve had a week where I’ve had to just suck it up and keep going when I’m this stressed and miserable since I moved out of my parents’ house.
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 readingAnxiety Is A Terrible Roommate
Some days, having anxiety is a lot like that moment in a movie where a dog starts barking about something and it is clear to the people around the dog that something is very wrong. The dog’s behavior makes in irrefuatably clear that there is a problem that needs to be corrected, but when that problem isn’t incredibly aparent, most people are at a loss for what they can do to handle whatever has caught the dog’s attention. There’s been jokes made for decades now about how people respond to a dog clearly attempting to communicate something when they don’t know what that is, everything from answering as if they know but without committing to an interpretation (“Yes, yes, I know”) to falling on popular media references from decades past (“What’s that, boy? Timmy fell down a well?”).
Continue readingThe End of The World And Coping With My Mental Health
Content Warning for mentions of suicidal ideation.
Continue readingDark Days And Long, Sleepless Nights
As I was going through some notes, I realized it has been two and a half months since this one night where I was so stressed out that I wound up staying up all night. I wasn’t exactly well-rested going into that evening, but I thought I’d be able to handle it without too much of a problem given how frequently I used to be able to go without sleep. While I did, eventually, get through the day, it was not the simple but tiring experience I remembered. Much to my chagrin, given how much I relied on this ability to carry me through my bouts of insomnia, I have slowly but surely reached the age where I can’t function without any sleep. It is an unfortunate fact of getting older, but more unfortunate is that this loss hasn’t come with a corresponding increase in my body’s day-to-day demands for sleep. I still struggle to fall asleep just as much as I used to and the impacts of losing sleep seem to hit me harder. At least until it comes time to fall asleep, again. At that point, it pretty much counts for nothing.
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