I haven’t actually enjoyed writing these blog posts in a long time. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that in any of my posts reflecting on my current burnout or creative process or whatever. I don’t really enjoy doing these. I don’t dislike writing them and I do still get a sense of satisfaction out of writing them, but I haven’t really felt the joy of writing in a while now. I’ve done it because I’ve felt the need, to help figure out what’s going on in my head, and to provide myself with a sense of satisfaction after a day largely devoid of anything resembling that. But I haven’t felt any of the joy or passion I once I did. I’ll be the first to say that it’s better to rely on discipline than passion or inspiration since discipline will never abandon you like passion and inspiration might, but I think it’s worth considering that enough discipline will also enable you to actively harm yourself if you force yourself to keep performing past the point where your body is telling you to stop. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I can’t deny that my burnout hasn’t gotten any better in months or years and that I just don’t really enjoy any of my creative pursuits anymore these days.
Continue readingexhaustion
Knowledge Does Not Always Bring Relief
Well, I’m rewriting large chunks of this a couple days after I drafted a meandering series of complaints about how I was feeling since I finally came out of the brain fog enough to realize just how bad it was on Monday (a week before this posted, when I wrote those unfortunate paragraphs) and am feeling mostly clear enough today that I am not as concerned with my ability to string together coherent thoughts. As it turns out, what I wrote about just a few days ago (as this post is being published, anyway) was actually the beginning twinges of withdrawal from my previous antidepressant. Apparently, it can take as long as a week to start and last multiple weeks (or even months) beyond that. Thankfully, since I spent a month reducing my dose before stopping it entirely, I think I’m on the mend and will be fully recovered by the end of the week this post goes up or maybe sometime during the weekend following that [unfortunately unlikely, given the increasingly slow recovery I’m experiencing]. It is difficult to imagine how I could be doing any worse than I was from pretty much Saturday night through Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve got no guarantee that things won’t suddenly get worse again or that things won’t get bad in an entirely new way. I’ve never suffered withdrawl like this before. Caffeine withdrawal, sure, but I’ve spent my entire life avoiding any other substances upon which I might become dependent given that I’ve been consciously treating my depression with caffeine for over a decade now, so this is all a first for me. Even the caffeine withdrawal was carefully managed after the first unfortunate day of accidentally going cold turkey.
Continue readingDoing Little Tasks At My Job (Bad) So I Can Go Home And Do Little Tasks In Final Fantasy (Good)
It has been nearly a month since I last wrote about Final Fantasy 14. I started the subsequent expansion not long after my last post (and might have dipped my toes into it just before that post went up), but progress has been pretty slow. It’s not a lack of interest mind you, but perhaps because of an abundance of it. I’ve been consistently putting off certain bits of progress in the main story until my friends could play through them with me, which has sometimes meant needing to wait a day or two to get through the next plot-blocking dungeon or trial. I also took a bunch of time away to level up a class so I could do all of the combat job quest lines simultaneously, and getting something from twenty-ish to seventy is a significant undertaking. I’ve also had a lot of little money-making tasks to pursue, some crafting to do, attempts to update my character’s various glamours, more wrestling events, and so on. I’ve played PLENTY, I just didn’t get back to the Main Scenario Quests until last week on account of all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Even now that I’ve been back at it, the going has been a bit slow as I’ve had to level up additional jobs every night so I can do their quest lines, which means I’ve been poking at the MSQ in small increments here or there every night once that is all done. I also did some raids, took most of a day off Final Fantasy, and gotten back into working all my usual overtime at my job, so I’ve just not been able to bring my focus to bear in the way I’d like to.
Continue readingThe End Of My Ceaseless Exhaustion Is Hopefully In Sight
After three months of miserable side-effects, unending exhaustion, and sleepiness that dominated my every waking moment, I’ve finally hit the end of my “wait it out” period for the antidepressant my doctor recommended. I had some small improvement from it at the highest dose I took, but I was also so tired on it that I’d be falling asleep every afternoon even when I was sleeping a minimum of seven and a half hours. Which, you know, wasn’t exactly a viable outcome for me. It took me a couple weeks to even recognize that the medication was having a positive effect on me because I was just too tired to feel anything but nigh-overwhelming exhaustion. It was a bit of a lateral move rather than an improvement or worsening of my general well-being, but I can work through feeling incredibly depressed and I cannot work through exhaustion that complete, as I learned throughout the last three months. It never quite got bad enough to actually make me mess up at work, but I also took a lot of vacation time during the peak of the exhaustion and I had plans for that time later this year. So it wasn’t great but I got through it, told my doctor it wasn’t working for me at any dose, and now I’m officially on the “slowly wean off the antipressant” path. As of this blog post going up, I’m one week away from my last dose of it and what will hopefully be the end of my constant sleepiness.
Continue readingGetting Back To Work And Thinking About The Future
I’ve been taking it easy for about a month now. Maybe a little more than. After we found out that the final release meeting of my project got delayed until just this past week (as this gets posted), I decided to take my long put-off week of vacation. I unfortunately did it after a full day of work on a Monday, but I still got a decent week away from work by taking the next Monday off. Since then, I’ve been dealing with the fallout of pushing myself as hard as I did and my current medication-induced exhaustion, all of which means that I’ve been avoiding overtime in my work weeks. Mostly by taking days off every week, forcing myself to avoid even doing the “here’s how much overtime I could get” calculous because I can’t get overtime until I’ve got 40 non-PTO hours allocated to a week and I’m not going to work eight “extra” hours without getting my overtime pay. It’d be better to just not use the vacation time in the first place. Anyway, I’ve taken at least one day off each week, mostly dictated by my messed up sleep schedule, overwhelming exhaustion, or my poor physical health. I expected, initially, that I was only going to take it easy for the first two weeks, the ones involving my planned week-off of work, but something has come up every single week since then that has left me with one or more days where I could not force myself into the office.
Continue readingSpring Weather, Sleep Schedules, And Catching Sick
It is officially spring. At least it is when I’m writing this. Who knows when you’re reading this (but chances are good that it is also spring, given how infrequently old posts of mine resurface). It is the first of Spring today and the weather has stopped its mad fluctuations for at least a little bit. Next week holds the promise of some wild swings between freezing weather and the seventies, so who know what kind of day you’ll be reading this on, but the days before it will be proper, early-Spring days and most of the days after it will be proper early-spring days, so I’m looking forward to having at least a little stability in the weather for a while. After all, things have been jumping up and down (in both temperature and air pressure), that I’ve been decidedly under the weather for a while now. It’s usually not that bad, unless it’s jumping forty degrees in a single day, but I’ve been in a rough place for a while now, due to burnout and exhaustion, so even a little bit takes a toll on me. Still, thanks to feeling buoyed by sunlight, how late sunset is these days, and generally uplifted by the warm weather, I managed to push through it. Then I got a stomach bug, got laid out for two days dealing with that, and then everything came crashing down on me, keeping me laid out for another three days. It was rough, but I’m coming out the other side of it feeling better than I have in a while.
Continue readingStaggering Exhaustedly Into Another Week
Adjusting to my new medication has been rough. Not as rough as the last one was, sure, but given how long it has been since I’ve felt like I was near one hundred percent (and the fact that I started this medication as soon as I felt I could when coming off the last one), it feels maybe worse than it otherwise would. There’s a lot of emotional weight behind the thought “I don’t know how long it has actually been since I felt more than alright” and it occasionally winds up one hell of a sucker punch to throw my way when I’m feeling down. It doesn’t help that the benefits I’m supposed to be seeing from this medication haven’t really materialized yet and I don’t know if they ever will. It’s entirely possible that this one just doesn’t work for me and that I’ll have spent two months waiting for something that just won’t materialize. Or that has somehow materialized without me knowing it? It’s difficult to say, sometimes, given how much the tiredness from this medication is just sort of casting a pall over my life. That’s the problem with such overwhelming tiredness: it’s difficult to keep track of anything at all, much less how you’re feeling, when your predominant physical and emotional state is “ready to fall asleep the instant I relax” all day, every day.
Continue reading1500 Is A Lot Of Blog Posts To Have Written
This is my 1500th blog post. I wrote it yesterday because I’ve been struggling to keep up my buffer and, in my haste to at least get a post taking up Draft space on my blog so I’d have something to work on between coming up with the idea a week ago and it getting published (which has resulted in me not doing any work on it until the day before), I forgot to put together something for the big one five double-zero! Aside from being a large number of things to have written, there isn’t much significance to the number aside from this being a specific personal goal I set. You see, 1500 blog posts guarantees that I’ve written at least a thousand blog posts since I started this whole thing back up a few years ago. That’s a pretty significant number, considering that I haven’t missed a day (aside from planned breaks) in that whole time. I’ve posted some of these later than I’d have liked (mostly because I forgot to fix the scheduled post time but once because I just didn’t have anything written until partway through the day), but I haven’t missed a day that wasn’t planned ahead of time. I’ve had to reduce my scope by no longer sharing things on Saturdays, I’ve circled the drain of topics and journaled my misery for a while, but I’ve never missed a day.
Continue readingSick Of (And From) This Weather
As often happens, when the temperatures rise and fall pretty rapidly from one day to another, I’ve gotten sick. It definitely doesn’t help that I’m super burned out and exhausted from the pains of last year combined with the project I’ve been doing for so long at work that I’ve forgotten what it is like to not be constantly thinking about it. All it takes these days is a tiny disruption and I am down for the count, especially now as I’m trying a new medication and tiredness/low-energy seems to be one of the common side-effects that I’m trying to cope with. Which means I’m working from home today (the day I’m writing this) and doing my level best to actually rest a bit. I’m really not sure how much more of this I can take, if I’m being quite honest. I know I’m physically reaching a breaking point, but I’ve got maybe another week or two before the project is fully done and I can just take an entire week off from work to sleep, rest, do nothing, and try to start undoing the damage all this constant stress and burnout has done…
Continue readingMaudlin Meanderings On The Imminent Time Change
It’s almost that time of year again, unfortunately. Spring forward, Fall backward. Daylight Saving Time. The good ol’ “confuse your body by altering the time associated with sunrise and sunset” event of now late-Winter. I mean, I’m excited to be able to drive home before it’s fully dark in maybe another week or two, but I’m not looking forward to feeling more tired than usual (if that’s even possible). Nor am I looking forward to how weird driving at sunrise and sunset are going to be for at least a week while everyone else adjusts to the change in the time-to-sunlight ratio in a way that somehow makes them a worse driver. It’s going to be a wild week and I’m going to be going into it with even less sleep than usual, which is a little rough these days considering how absolutely exhausted I am from a combination of burnout and trying a new medication that has me feeling pretty sleepy most days. All that said, I stand to benefit from it a little bit, too. My sleep schedule is usually at its worst during the winter months because I function better during DST than off it since I tend not to sleep through as much of the morning sunlight as I might otherwise. I love a later sunset, after all, and I’m really hoping that I can use this as the impetus to finally fix my sleep schedule. And, you know, for all my clocks to finally be right again (I stopped changing them years ago and now just let them be wrong for three solid months).
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