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 readingexhaustion
Surviving 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.
Continue readingI’m Gonna Make It Through This Month If It Kills Me
In the last five days, multiple news anchors have called for the death of homeless people and they all still have their jobs. Other people have stated, with no spin or hyperbole, the beliefs of a man who was killed in the middle of making excuses for mass shootings being an acceptable loss for the right to have guns and gotten themselves fired, doxed, or stuck on administrative leave as a result. People have come out of the woodwork to praise a man who spoke only hate merely because he was killed. An entire factory of temporary workers were abducted by ICE and had their human rights violated while imprisoned, which isn’t even the worst thing that happened that week. The president of the United States of America has called on the various executive powers of the government to start investigating anyone who has spoken ill of him publicly (culminating in Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air for incredibly innocuous comments, but that seems to have broken through to the general public in a way nothing else has so far, which feels both horrendous and mildly relieving–horrendous because so much worse has happened already and mildly relieving because finally, something broke through to the public). A man going about his day-to-day life was killed by ICE agents who lied about what happened and will likely face no real consequences because there’s no way to know for sure who did what because they’re going around with their faces hidden and all identifying information removed from what can’t even be called their uniforms. All of this, and so much more I can’t bear to write about (or don’t dare to write about) has happened in the first half of the month (September, 2025).
Continue readingThe Price Of Burnout
After months (and perhaps even years, depending on how you want to measure it), I’m taking my first break where my depression hasn’t been a factor. Which means that, as I’m assessing myself and my well-being, my burnout is the remaining explanation for how awful I feel. Surprisingly, my depression was only about twenty percent of how bad I’ve been feeling for a long time and while it, and so many other factors, contributed to my burnout, removing my depression as a factor doesn’t decrease my burnout. It just shows me how bad things have gotten. Which is why I’m going to be taking a break from proper blog posts today and tomorrow. I’ve finally hit the point in this suddenly-a-full-week of vacation where I’m able to spend time and energy thinking about stuff, but I’m trying to avoid pushing myself too hard, so I will probably write posts, I’m just going to save them for maintaining my buffer after two days of posts and absolutely no writing as I felt myself by-and-large removed from reality by the personal collapse I’ve experienced as a result losing the tension and focus that has been keeping me going for the last eight months. So don’t look for a post tomorrow, but you can expect to see them again on Monday and I expect I’ll have plenty to say about all this which I’m sure you’ll be able to read next week at the latest.
This Hyperfixation On My Own Energy Levels Will Hopefully End Soon
Way back in 2015, I went on a pretty hardcore diet. I was trying to pick up running (long story) and having issues because of how hard it was on my legs (from knees on down), so I thought I’d try to lose some weight and see if running worked better. I took a severe, rather limiting approach that drove a significant lifestyle change I was hoping to maintain (that lasted until I went to a convention, slacked off on the severity of my limitations, and never picked it back up again), and it was all I could think about for a solid month. I had cut down my calorie intake to an incredibly low number and was fighting through the feelings of hunger that plagued me as my appetite slowly shrunk and my body adapted to burning stored fat rather than recently consumed food, so it was kind of at the forefront of my mind whenever I wasn’t focused on something else. It was all I talked about with my friends, in my group chats, and around my D&D group, so much so that I eventually realized it and (unsuccessfully) tried to stop talking about it. This past week of recovering my executive function has been kind of like that. Getting something back that I’ve been missing for so long–years and years–has consumed my mind and attention to the point that I’ve written about it every single day this week. I’m sure I could try to jog my mind away from this topic, but I’m not sure I want to yet since, well, this is a part of my lived experience and very important to me.
Continue readingI’m Recovering My Executive Function And All I Got So Far Was Less Final Fantasy 14 Time
In perhaps the least-expected twist of what increasingly seems like an effective antidepressant, while I am actually regaining my ability to do things at what feels like a nigh-miraculous rate, I’m actually doing a lot less Final Fantasy 14 stuff than I expected to do. I mean, I’ve spent so much time on the game lately that a lot of my considerations for what I might do more if I had the energy was stuff like “get back to my daily level-grinding work” or “finally work through a bunch of the job quests for fishing that I’ve been ignoring because fishing isn’t fun” or “return to my old days of constant resource collection.” Instead, my apartment is (mostly) clean, my dishes are done, my laundry is folded, work is less productive than ever, I’m more tired than before, and I’m sleeping less than I should. Turns out that stuff piling up on your mental to-do list starts to reassert itself pretty heavily when you finally stop reflexively flinching away from the thought of doing any kind of extra work because even considering the act of thinking about it made you so tired you wanted to lay down on the floor and not move for a week. So now I fill my “spare” evening time with cleaning tasks around my apartment, spend more time preparing myself decent food, and then realize I had a list of Final Fantasy 14 chores I wanted to get done such that now I’m staying up even later to do those as well. I’ve spent so much time over the past few years (and probably even longer) so incredibly tired in body, soul, and mind that now I’m starting to mistake the mental drive to do things returning for the physical ability to do things. Wanting to do stuff is unfortunately not the same as not being tired, much less actually having the energy to do stuff. Which is a mistake I’ve made three nights in a row.
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