There used to be a through-line to my blog posts. Probably not something anyone but me would notice or know, but I could follow each post from one to the next as a solid chain of thought that ended with whatever blog post was my last-written. A chain sometimes mixed up or interrupted by more urgent-feeling posts or that broke up stuff I was obsessing over in order to give myself more time to think it through or an opportunity to let it breathe. Now… For a while now, there hasn’t been. I don’t know exactly when it changed, maybe in March or February, that through-line is gone. Each post feels like a disjointed pile of thoughts scraped together to form some kind of internal coherence with no real connection to the other posts. At least not for me. There’s thematic connections, topic connections, and so on, but those are the sorts of notes and labels you apply after the fact. The thought at the center of each is disjointed and disconnected in a way I have labored to hide. Maybe that’s part of why I’m having such a difficult time writing lately…
Continue readingexhaustion
Reflections On A Quiet, Busy Week
I’ve been busy. Normally, I’d dig deep and find the time or energy to write a blog post no matter how busy work was, but my days and nights have had a lot going on. Monday, after I wrote the one blog post I published earlier this week, I had my weekly hangout with my friend. Tuesday was my night away from my PC (though I still wound up spending some time there to take care of a few things) to watch more of The Sopranos so I could listen to the next Media Club Plus episode. Then Wednesday night I worked right up until I had to leave so I could scarf down some kind of dinner and then go do wing farming with my group. After that, I realized I was behind schedule on producing some stuff for my free company, so I spent a bunch of time on that and crafting collectibles to turn in. Tonight, I haven’t got anything planned, but it is my third super busy work day in a row and I’ll admit I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to energy. I just… Haven’t had the time or energy to write. So I didn’t.
Continue readingPutting Down Some Plates Before They Break
Funny to follow up a post about keeping plates spinning with a post that I’m temporarily stopping some plates from spinning due to burnout and a need to rest. I’ve spent few weeks staggering through life, just barely keeping myself going and often only by taking days off. So, this week, rather than pushing myself to the brink of exhausted collapse, I’m exhaustedly collapsing at the start and just letting myself off the hook on just about everything I can. Might as well take a whole week off if I’m not going to be doing any overtime. Might as well rest. Might as well create the time and space to work through everything weighing me down and making my life more difficult and stressful than I can easily manage if I actually put aside time for it. So I’m doing that. No new blog posts until July 6th. Taking two whole weeks off and this time without the emotional weight and loneliness of the winter holidays to weigh me down. Just… rest. Actual rest and casual activity and clearing every single fork that’s been slowly adding to my daily burdens. Actual real rest. I hope.
Reminders Of Past Decisions In The Workplace
Once again, the calendar has rolled around to the midway point in the year and I have gotten information about how my next year of financial life is going to shift. That’s right, it’s raise time. I got a decent raise this year. Objectively not stellar, considering my experience and the work I do and so on, but my employer is not known for paying well and I got pretty much the maximum possible raise I could get without getting promoted as well, which is rather uncommon for someone in the upper half of the pay bracket for my current position. My boss seemed pretty surprised by the numbers, but he might have been goofing around. I literally have no idea if any of the things he said were jokes or genuine. I actively interpreted them as jokes in the moment, because my boss is the kind of guy who will let anything slide as long as he’s got you laughing, but I genuinely can’t tell if they were if maybe he’s a lot less involved in how people get raises than I’ve been lead to believe these past nine years.
Continue readingWork Continues Despite The Horrors
Work’s been hectic lately. While all of the bad stuff in my Final Fantasy 14 guild was happening, my day job was keeping me incredibly busy with bullshit. I got notified within fourty-eight hours of being given new test equipment that it needed to have a essentially eighty hours worth of testing done by the following wednesday. That wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if I hadn’t been getting ready to leave for the day on Friday afternoon. But I stayed, I did some testing, and I put all of my considerable experience and knowledge into figuring out how to cut down on the time between tests. I was able to get it from an hour to half an hour, but even that wasn’t perfect. There was still a hard cap on how much of that I could do in any given day and that was only because it was permissable for the stress of that testing to slightly change the behavior of the thing being tested since I’d be able to start the following morning by checking if the change in behavior was due to wear or due to the heat of the testing equipment.
Continue readingSo Much For Resting
As it turns out, it is not that easy to take a week off. Any other week would have been easier, since this last week involved the in-game bonding ceremony between my dearest friends’ Final Fantasy 14 characters (now they are married in real-life and in this video game) and I was as involved in that as I had the energy to be. Plus there was another wrestling event to record and edit, all the busyness of a “normal” workweek, the sudden extra busyness of this past week, and then the complete screeching halt of all of the work stuff for at least a day due to me twisting my ankle. And while twisting my ankle sucked, it did actually force me to rest in a way I couldn’t make myself until I actually had an unavoidable reason for it. But there’s still more celebrations tomorrow (as of the day I wrote this), the imminent return of my delayed obligations and plans, and now the exhaustion of painfully hobbling around my two-story apartment to contend with, so I’m not out of the woods yet. To be honest, given everything I’d done this week, I’m not sure I actually took a break the way I meant to and maybe just… Stopped doing as much. Which definitely counts for something, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not exactly what I was looking for with this decision to step away from things for a bit.
Continue readingTaking A Break From Almost Everything
I hit a point last night where I just…. couldn’t anymore. Between my two workshops, my raid group farming for wings, the roleplaying wrestling league, and my two dearest friends have their characters get married in-game, I just… don’t have any more. So I spent two hours staring at my computer as I tried to figure out something fun to do last night after logging out, gave up and asked for recommendations, and didn’t get much from that, so I just hung up and… stared into space for a while. I’m so burned out, but even that doesn’t explain the depths I sank to last night (as I’m writing this, but at least a week ago as you’re reading it). Something just caused my depression to spike immensely, to the point of withdrawing from people, and I couldn’t push through it to do anything because even the stuff I normally do to stay occupied during those times felt just as pointless and boring as everything else I considered. So I moved to my couch and started into space for half an hour, intermittently crying as I tried to figure out why I felt so bad and why stuff that I generally liked doing suddenly felt so odious and awful. Because that was the thing. Minutes before this happened, one of my other friends asked how my day was and I told her “good,” but then I’m suddenly crashing and feeling like even doing the small tasks of normal preoccupation in Final Fantasy 14 were going to rip my soul out of my body if I forced myself to do them.
Continue readingBurnout And Fridays Off
I’ve been taking Fridays off of work lately. I probably shouldn’t, what with rising costs, but I’ve been so burned out that I needed to. Three weeks in a row, I was so worn out by Friday morning that I couldn’t make myself get out of bed on time or I slept through my alarms or felt so awful that I went back to sleep until I stopped feeling bad. It’s not great, to be quite honest. I really do need the money from my weekly overtime if I’m going to survive the upcoming financial crisis (in whatever form it takes) and while I haven’t spent vacation time to take my days off so far, I really need to find a more sustainable way to get through my weeks without entirely burning out by the end of Thursday. Work is demanding, sure, but I’ve also been taking a lot of burdens on myself that I don’t really need to, so maybe I need to dial it back there, or maybe I need to make sure my free time is spent better, in a way that is more rejuvenating or enriching. I really hope it’s the latter because I don’t want to do less stuff and I feel kind of like I’m on the hook for all of it anyway, considering it’s all commitments I’ve made. I could take breaks if I need to, I’m sure no one would begrudge me a week off, but I worry about the precedent that would set for myself. And that taking the time off wouldn’t actually fix things, only let me recover from them, since that means I’d be right back in the shit again the instant I went back to doing things. Work certainly isn’t going to slow down. It’s going to speed up, if anything…
Continue readingMy Severe Depression Rears Its Head Once Again
I’ve been more depressed than usual for a while now. I don’t know if my antidepressants stopped working or if, maybe, I would be worse off without them. It fades sometimes, for hours or an afternoon or an evening, which makes me think they’re still working, but it always comes back. Maybe my meds are less effective than they used to be. Maybe I’m more depressed than I used to be. The latter stands to reason, given the way the world is going, but the former is an unanswerable question so it is where my mind dwells. I do not know how I’d even begin to figure that out. I doubt that there’s a blood test of some kind my doctor could perform that would tell me and while I expect there is some way of figuring it out via brain chemicals, the actual process of testing my brain chemicals seems like it’s not the sort of thing you do to figure out if your antidepressant’s effect is weakening. And it’s not like I can ask my therapist if I seem more depressed than usual. Of course I seem more depressed than usual! Have you looked outside? Have you follow any amount of news? Why WOULDN’T I feel depressed with all that going on? I can’t even say it’s probably both because either one could have this effect on me by itself! So all I can do is wonder while I interrogate my feelings and continue getting the same “I’m too tired to feel anything” response no matter what.
Continue readingReturning To Wanderstop
A while back, I decided I was going to write on essay of some kind per week. A longer post, more contemplative or reflective than my usual pieces, with the goal of getting back to the style of critical analysis that I used to enjoy when I was still a student (and still enjoy to this day, even if I site fewer sources and never produce a proper MLA bibliography). I even did it a couple times until I started writing this post and then… Well, I ran aground on the problem at the heart of this and have been too burned out and beaten-down by life to push myself to contemplate it further. Because I started playing Wanderstop again. I got further and then, after a couple hours of play, ran into a hurdle I could not get over at the time. I still can’t get over it. And so I haven’t returned to the game despite how much I love its concept, art style, writing, and whole entire deal. No other game has forced me to confront my own habits and burnout and compartmentalized problems like this game has and it has proven more than I can handle while in the midst of… well, being stuck in a mire of problems I have no means of rapidly escaping. I cannot hide from it forever, though, and while I’m not sure my heart can handle diving back into it yet, I think I’m finally ready to return to whatever this winds up being.
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