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 readingexhaustion
Anxiety That’s Lingering Just As Long As This Cough
Yesterday’s post was called “On The Other Side Of Sickness” because it was a bit of wishful thinking about the future. I wrote it on a Monday, as I went into work while still unwell, and hoped that, by the time I was editing it, I’d be better. I am not. I’m also a bit behind in blog posts because work has been so busy and I’ve been so cotton-brained and tired that I’m having difficulty focusing. It is truly awful, to feel myself mentally diminished and be unable to do anything about it at all. And yet I must soldier on because there is work to do, money to earn, plates to spin, balls to juggle, and a small legion of crafters and gatherers and combatants to lead into a new Final Fantasy 14 patch (we’re up to six people, as of the night before I wrote the first draft of this). Lots going on and very little rest to be had despite my illness, which definitely hasn’t helped me get over the last bits of this. I’d be tired and unfocused at this point regardless of having a cold, so it’s no wonder that I still feel as loopy as I do. I wish I could say it was all bad choices, but only staying up late last night was a bad choice and it was a bad choice made knowing that I spent the two previous nights unable to fall asleep. Not because of coughing or congestion or anything like that. No, this was because I was too warm or I couldn’t get comfortable or my mind just wouldn’t wind down or I kept jerking awake as I was falling asleep for some reason. I don’t really know what’s got me in such a fuss right now, but I can definitely tell that it’s my anxiety coming at me like it hasn’t in a long time.
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 readingIntrinsic Motivation Doesn’t Make Me Immune To External Discouragement
After wrapping up everything but the finishing touches on my Final Fantasy 14 gear project, I posted in my Free Company’s discord that I was planning to make myself new gear right after the patch drops with all my fancy new gathering and crafting gear. I wanted to know if anyone else was interested in participating in a fun little bleeding-edge gear crafting activity. So far, I’ve gotten one bite and a lot of silence (as I’ve mentioned before, I think most of the bleeding-edge players in my group have the in-game currency to just buy whatever they want, so they will just wait until the prices drop a little bit and buy it OR just accumulate it slowly by doing the raids and whatnot), but the bite I did get has been very interested in making this happen. It’s a player I kinda get along with and have been doing more and more with as I shift into endgame content, but he’s very combat-focused and a bit less crafting-focused. He is absolutely doing a bunch of crafting still, but he hasn’t even gotten all of his jobs to level 100 yet, so there is likely no way that he’d be ready in time given how much combat stuff he does every single day (it’s exhausting even thinking about trying to keep up with him!). That said, all of his gathering skills are at level 100 and he recently requested that I help him get somemid-tier gear for his level 100 classes. That took a little time (not much, given that I’ve done it already and have higher stats than when I did it myself), but I quickly realized that I should just get him up to the current top-tier of gathering gear. It’s a bit more work on my part, but less now that I’m using all top-tier gear and it’ll be a huge help to have someone gathering the new materials alongside me. He’ll probably still do mostly the combat stuff and I’ll do most of the gathering and crafting stuff, but it’s good to have someone ready to help out.
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.
Continue readingSurviving The Day After A Sleepless Night
Going in to work on a Monday with no sleep is a special kind of hell. I wish I could say that this was all my own fault, that I made bad choices over the weekend and wound up not sleeping as a result because then I could accept the blame and do better in the future. Instead, I’m almost falling over while standing at my desk because I exhaustedly closed my eyes for just a moment and dozed off standing up. Not because I was too wrapped up in a game or a book but because my sleep rhythm is a sensitive creature these days and the disruption of the time changing last Sunday was enough that I wasn’t tired enough to sleep when I went to bed and, instead of eventually drifting off or suddenly waking up in the morning, I just stayed awake. Long enough that I gave up and when to go do some video game chores in the hope that it would either be mind-numbing enough to let my mind unclench or engaging enough that I could stop thinking about being unable to sleep long enough to feel tired. Instead of either of those things happening, I did a lot of shopping for supplies in Final Fantasy 14. I made out like a particularly well-appointed bandit, so I have to admit that this is one of the most productive sleepless nights I’ve ever experienced, but the day after it at work? As I try to stay focused and ride the line between immediate over-caffeination, crashing, and getting kept awake from excessive caffeine intake? That sucks. Monumentally.
Continue readingI Cannot Sleep For The Imagined Sound Of Roof Work
My roof was mostly replaced today. There is a bit, the only stretch of roof actually visible to me, that remains only partly finished. It seems such a small thing to be left incomplete, like an afterthought or something forgotten rather than work deliberately left until later, but I am not privvy to the minds of these roofers. I could only begin to guess why anything happened the way it did today, and it would all be me grasping at figments of my imagination and incidental observations. I did not speak to them. They did not speak to me. I barely even observed their work, instead measuring their progress in the tromp of feet above me, the grinding hum of an air compressor somewhere out of sight, the staccato five-beat pattern of their nail guns, and the occasional appearance of a worker using my balcony as a staging ground for moving materials from the ground to the roof. This happened twice–my day interrupted by the expected knock at the door and an apologetic smile from a man who probably would have felt more comfortable climbing a ladder to use my balcony rather than being told to move through the apartment building, and I still do not understand why it had to happen this way. I didn’t mind the interruption. It wasn’t like I was doing any deep or focused work, distracted as I was by the constant noise of their activity and the rattle of my apartment building as an unknown number of men walked across my roof. It was just odd, this strange set of circumstances that led to me being home all day and my brief, wordless interactions with this poor, uncomfortable roofer. None of my neighbors interracted with the roofers at all. Only me. And even then, all I did was open a door for the roofer and then lock it behind him once he was finished passing sheets of plywood up to his coworkers. It was as distant a remove as could be possible when your roof is being replaced and your balcony is needed as a halfway point for passing materials up.
Continue readingToday Is A Day For Rest
Needing to take a day to rest so soon after taking an entire week off has me thinking about my long-term plans. I typically try to space out my rest days and PTO usage a bit more, so I don’t burn through it too quickly. Plus, you get way more bang for your buck during weeks with holidays and it gives me a good reason not to work insanely long days in order to make up for not getting overtime on the day that I’m off work already (which is all part of the particulars for how my employer handles overtime and overtime eligibility). Spacing them out has been my way of maximizing my rest over the past couple years, by doing sprints instead of long marathons, but that has not stopped my burnout from slowly getting worse and worse. Taking a longer rest really hasn’t been an option at any point, though I’ve gotten close to it being an option a few times before something happened to return my financial situation to the edge of precarity. For these last few years of rising rent and cost of living, I have to carefully manage my time and energy so I can maximize the number of weeks in a year that I’m working as much as I can handle. I need the money, after all, and overtime is much more time-efficient than getting a second job. Ten hours of overtime each week gets me three quarters of a week’s pay per paycheck and none of the side jobs I can find would come even close to matching that level of income for the same amount of time. No matter what I do, no matter what numbers I crunch or how I try to rebalance my budget, there just isn’t more I can extract from myself without descending into misery. And yet, despite knowing all that, I’ve already hit a point where I can’t keep pushing myself to work and I haven’t even been back in the office working for three weeks.
Continue readingThe Burnout’s Back Already
It took about two full weeks of my normal work schedule, but my burnout and related exhaustion have come roaring back. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve been struggling to sleep due to stress about things going on in the world and the mounting anxiety that there’s something I could be doing that I’m not doing (which, by it’s very nature, is an impossible anxiety to resolve given that I’m already doing as much as I reasonably can and don’t know of anything else I could actually do that’s also useful). There’s just no escaping any of the mounting pressure I’m feeling, at work or at large in the world, and it has left me more brittle than even I expected. I had thought that, between my antidepressants and a week off of work, I’d recovered some of my resilience–my ability to endure–but that does not seem to be the case. Maybe if I was sleeping more, that would still be true. Maybe if I could get away from the stress of it all for more than a few moments here or there, it would still be true. I don’t know. Maybe if I actually got out of bed on time, maybe if I could force myself back into a proper workout routine, maybe if I wasn’t feeling sweaty almost constantly due to the one annoying side effect of my antidepressants… So many maybes and I have no certain answers. I don’t even know if I can get any more certainty than I’ve got, even, since it’s not like there’s much left for me to try in terms of my day-to-day life that won’t definitely make things worse for me.
Continue readingI’m Tired But Not Sad So I’ll Just Ramble About Why That Is
As I slowly move back towards the kind of heavy labor I was doing at the beginning of this year (though at a slower pace, thankfully), it is nice to know that I am not only more physically capable than I was back then, but that a good night’s rest is more effective than it used to be. From just over a year ago until sometime in the spring, it would take me multiple days of rest to recover from a single day’s exertion and now a single night is enough to recover from feeling physically exhausted. Assuming I get enough sleep, anyway. But also, a year ago, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, three or four at most, without waking up with excruciating back pain! I was so tired and pained all the time that it was everything I could do just to keep getting through my days. I descended into a place of fog, exhaustion, misery, and constant trudging persistence while I slowly recovered from years with a worn-out bed, the physical toll of the medication I was taking, and the added weight of not sleeping enough for three months in a row. In fact, I only ever started to recover when I stopped taking that medication and my body was able to start properly repairing itself instead of… well, whatever was going on there. I tell you, there’s nothing like going from needing three to seven days for your muscles to recover from feeling tired to being able to get back up and do more with them after sitting down for a little bit, much less feeling almost all the way better by the next morning. I mean, today was a doozy and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow, but only enough that it’ll make me do my morning stretches for sure and not leave me in a miserable amount of pain like even half this much effort would have done a year ago.
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