exhaustion

I Think I’m Going to Step Out for a Bit

Chris Leave a comment

I’ve spent a lot of my weekend relaxing. As it is a three-day weekend in the US, I’ve been a lot less active that I might otherwise have been and much less directed. I spent Saturday with my girlfriend and her friend until I finally stopped putting off my evening plans, Magic the Gathering with my Saturday D&D group, and then got home in time to basically crash from all of the sun and fun. Mini-golf under the midday sun, three-ish miles of walking in the heat, and then a quick trip to the store so I could get a swimsuit. I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to jump in the pool after spending the previous four hours sweating in the heat. I got a bit of sun-burn despite putting some sunscreen on my face, so that was rather annoying, but doesn’t seem to be too bad.

Then I’ve spent most of my day today puttering about until I remembered I hadn’t updated my blog yet, for today. Played some old favorite games, some REALLY old favorites, and even a few games my friends recommended. Read a bunch, dozed about, and generally just avoided direct sunlight. It has been nice to relax and just lazily drift through the day. I can’t remember the last time I spent a day just doing whatever without getting “bored” and endlessly cycling between things after a couple minutes of considering them because I feel like I’m wasting my time.

While I was laying in bed, waiting to see if I could fall back asleep again and shifting to move my sun-burned bits away from contact with anything but the air, I tried to meditate, but my mind just kept running around in circles. I’ve tried twice more today, but I haven’t been able to get my mind to wind down enough to empty it out. There’s a lot going on in my life and it’s difficult to put all of that aside for even an hour or two. My girlfriend is house shopping; I’m entering my busy month and will be not getting much quiet time, let alone quiet time with my girlfriend; so many different things to reflect on; preparations for my hiking trip and grill-out tomorrow; and my general anxieties that I’m trying to avoid focusing on.

Mostly, I would love a quiet weekend with my girlfriend, hanging out without any particular plans, working on our individual creative projects, watching cartoons or movies, and playing video games. That sort of stuff is like plugging my soul into a recharging station. I’ve got other ways of doing it and recharging myself, but I would really enjoy that one right now. Between the sunburn, smashing one of my toes at the grocery store, and this annoying feeling of exhaustion that keeps pulling at me, I could really go for a quiet day and some peaceful companionship. I’ll probably be fine tomorrow, once I’ve got another good night’s sleep, but today I think I’m going to stop reflecting and just go back to playing games. I’d like to be outside my head for a bit since trying to work inside it has only worsened my mood.

I’d like a Prescription of Sleep to Address my Tiredness Problem, Please.

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The last couple days, I have reached mid-afternoon and felt totally exhausted. I finish up whatever I’m doing (Pokemon Go Community Day events yesterday and moving the bed set I bought from a friend today) and, as soon as I take a moment to relax, I’m suddenly so tired I want to collapse.

Because of my insomnia and tendency to avoid sleep in order to maximize the amount of time I have to do things with my day, I tend to crash when I go to bed instead of just fall asleep. While I could easily blame this for my sudden exhaustion after doing something moderately active (lots of walking and moving a bunch of crap), I’ve lived in this state of perpetual crash-readiness for over a decade now. You can’t lie awake staring at the ceiling for hours because you can’t turn your brain off long enough to fall asleep if you’re so tired your brain shuts off as soon as you’re in bed. You can’t waste your night feeling anxious if you’re too tired to feel anything but sleepy.

Yes. I am quite aware this isn’t healthy and I’m taking things to an extreme to make a point. I live like this all the time, even when I’m being very physically active, so why am I suddenly exhausted when my day is barely even half over?

As I lay on the couch, trying to not fall asleep so I didn’t let my dinner burn in the oven, it struck me. I’m so tired because I’ve been spending so much mental energy on myself lately. Normally, my mental energy is what I’ve got in excess and what I use to help mitigate a shortage in either my physical or emotional energies. It is my will power and I’ve been spending it a lot as I try to make myself focus on something I’ve been deliberately ignoring for a couple of years or longer. Which means my relatively low levels of physical energy due to sore muscles from my weekly fighting practices and my very low levels of emotional energy because I’ve been digging through some tough shit don’t get replenished. This can cause weird moments like how I felt when I got back to my car after dropping off the U-Haul van I rented to move the mattress, box spring, and bed frame. I wanted to just collapse on the seat with the door open, cry my eyes out (not for any particular reason, I just felt like crying), and then drive home without calling my girlfriend to see if she wanted to do anything like we originally planned or just rain check it because she was tired from the engagement party she went to the night before. I just burned through all of the energy I had and was left with only the last dregs of my willpower.

I did not of those things. I turned my car on, took a few calming breaths, spoke with my girlfriend, and then drove myself to get some things for dinner. Now, having eaten my dinner and had a bit of caffeine to help me hobble through the rest of the day, I’m updating this blog because I’m not letting anything stop me from updating it daily. Even now, as I write, I want to just lean back in my chair and cry. Or put my sheets back on my bed as I exhaustion-cry before closing the blinds and collapsing onto my bed to sleep until time has no meaning and idea of “Chris” has melded with my new mattress and the universe returns to being the illusion new age gurus would have us think it is.

This leads me to believe that my willpower is limitless or at least a poor concretion of a difficult abstract idea. I’m doing none of those things. I’m doing what I think is an important part of my day-to-day life, keeping up with the goals I set for myself, and taking the requisite actions to ensure that my health (physical and mental) doesn’t deteriorate beyond repair.

I used to really love the “spoons” metaphor as an example of what it means to live with a chronic illness (mental illnesses are included in this) but I’ve kind of found that it doesn’t exactly work for me. If I feel something needs to get done and I have no way of making it easier on myself by adjusting the goalposts, I will just get it done. It’s hard to say I’m restrained to a certain number of spoons if I just give myself more for free when I feel the situation calls for it.

Now, I wonder if I am hurting myself by pushing myself past the point where all I want to do is collapse, or do I just feel like I want to collapse because my depression and mental illnesses tell me that I’ve done so much already and deserve to rest? Do I naturally have this energy and don’t feel like I do because my depression hides it behind a steady litany of how unable I am? I’ve heard of a lot of people who have similar anxiety, OCD, and depression problems who have said they felt like they regained a ton of energy once they were on a medication that helped treat their mental health without over-burdening them with horrible side-effects. Part of me wants to try out the medication route again just to see if I can get a similar boost. Even if I have the same amount of energy overall, no longer needing to fight myself and this weird feeling of consumptive exhaustion in order to use it would be amazing.

I don’t know. I’ll talk about it with my healthcare providers and we’ll see what comes of it. In the mean time, I’m going to reflect on my habit of exhausting myself, why I feel so tired this weekend, and how I can seem to spend so much energy on untangling my mind without realizing it. I hope you had a great day and found something in this rambling reflection piece that got you thinking. I know I did.

 

Saturday Morning Musing

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As I’ve often said on my blog, I prefer to keep busy as my main method of dealing with my depression and various mental health issues. The thing is, I like to stay a certain kind of busy. I like a fair amount of social activity, but I prefer most of my busy is working on things or playing video games. Too much social activity and I wind up feeling stressed and exhausted because I don’t have the time to do the things I want to do. It can stress me out, which starts the vicious cycle of losing sleep and getting further stressed.

This past week has been a week where I’ve had a hard time balancing my social time and personal time. After a stressful Monday and Tuesday that not only threw my routines out of whack but knotted up my emotions, I’ve been struggling to balance out since then. On Monday, I heard from someone who I had removed from my life for my personal well-being. She wanted to apologize and I was willing to listen. It was just difficult because the way it played out and how I felt about it fell into line with some other, thornier issues I’ve been dealing with and all of that emotion hit me every time I talked to her. The other thing was that my roommate had some health issues and it took almost 12 hours for my other roommate and I to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t too bad–he’ll be fine–but it was super stressful and anxiety-inducing to be able to do nothing but worry and wait for him to respond to one of our messages.

Throw in my new Monday night D&D group wanting to meet again, the extension my usual weekday date night to cover two nights, my foam-fighting practice on Thursdays, today being my 6-month anniversary with my girlfriend, and it has felt like I’ve got no time to write or rest or be quiet by myself. I’m writing this blog post after the extra D&D session Friday night as I try to avoid falling asleep on my keyboard because I used up my entire buffer during my week of vacation and haven’t been able to build it back up again. All I’ve got in the way of a buffer is tomorrow’s post so I can get enough rest between the anniversary date and tomorrow’s Pokemon Go community day.

The worst part, at least what often feels like the worst part, is that I chose to do all of these things. I could have canceled on D&D. My girlfriend would have understood if I had asked for Wednesday night to myself. I didn’t need to fight at Foam Fighting practice, I totally could have just sat and talked with the non-combatants. I wouldn’t cancel today’s date for anything but a major emergency, but I definitely don’t need to do the Pokemon Go event tomorrow.  I could have been writing and resting instead of doing stuff, but I keep choosing stuff despite telling myself that I was going to make my writing my first priority this year.

I don’t regret my decisions. I had a very nice time with my girlfriend, visiting my roommate in the hospital, playing D&D, and getting my butt kicked by fellow nerds, but I’m tired. Despite more than my usual amount of sleep, I am tired. I want to just spend a week or at least a weekend quietly by myself, doing quiet things. I already want another vacation and my last one isn’t even two weeks old yet.

I know this feeling will pass. By the time I wake up tomorrow, I will feel better. Not entirely better, but somewhat better. That’ll be enough to enjoy six months with my girlfriend and to make the most of the Pokemon Go event. I’ll be just as tired again come Sunday night, as I scramble to get my blog posts written for next week. All I need is a little time to rest and I’ll feel better. I just wish social situations and generally being me weren’t so damn exhausting.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

It is always good to believe in yourself. When it comes down to it, nothing but believing in yourself is going to keep you working on something difficult when you continuously encounter setbacks and challenges that make you wonder if you should just give up. No amount of other people believing in you is going to be able to answer the question of “should I keep doing this.”

It does make it a lot easier, though. If someone else believes in you, it makes it a lot easier to believe in yourself. I used to sort of believe in myself. I would always say I did and I possessed enough blind determination to just keep working regardless of whether or not I believed in myself, but it took an endorsement from one of my favorite teachers in college to actually do it.

I wrote in high school because I wanted to escape. I kept writing because other people enjoyed my escapes as much as I did and because some part of me recognized that writing gave me the ability to work through some of the problems I had faced without having to confront them directly. Looking back, it is painfully clear how much each story I worked on was some part of my attempting to reconcile how the world was with how I had been taught (and how I believed) it should be. How my life was versus how I thought it should be.

In college, as I focused on learning about writing and stories and literature, I started to grasp more consciously what I had subconsciously known and my writing improved. I could now do on purpose what I’d only been doing by accident before. I improved my technical writing skills and kept improving my storytelling skills. I read a bunch of experimented with formats and styles. I grew a lot, but I still didn’t believe in myself.

At the end of my junior year of college, I was awarded a scholarship for excellence in writing. The award was validating, of course. It felt great to see that my professors believed in me and that my work at building a community amongst the other writing students was being recognized. Still, what meant more to me was the speech my creative writing professor gave as she introduced the award and hinted at who had won it.

Hearing what she said, the way she said, and how excited she was to see where I might one day wind up was huge. Everything she said then and the things she said afterwards gave me the confidence I needed to really commit to believing in myself. What had once been a sort of general belief that I’d be able to land on my feet (or get back on them) no matter what happened focused into a sincere belief that I’d be able to achieve my writing goals of helping people with my stories.

It changed the course of my next few years and enabled me to keep writing despite how hard my life eventually became. Eventually, though, even that wore down. A single endorsement, even if I still have the speech my professor wrote, will eventually crumble due to the passage of time and all that I had left was my belief in myself. That helped for a while, but it eventually was riddled with doubt.

Eventually, though, that ended. It was a small thing, at least it probably seems like that to a lot of people, but it was huge to me. A birthday card from a friend. A simple message of a few sentences full of heartfelt words and the same strength of belief that my professor had years before. It helped me answer the doubts I felt and gave me the boost I needed to push from doubts to writing again. My belief came back, strong as ever, and I started working on writing projects I hadn’t touched in months and eventually decided updating my blog every day was a good idea.

When I get exhausted or start to wonder if updating this thing every day for a year is actually worth it, I just look at that card again and am reminded that I’m not doing this for views or for fame or for anything external reason. I’m doing this for me. I’m proving a point to myself that I can do this and that nothing is ever going to stop me from being a writer but my own decisions to give up.

I’m about a third of the way through my thirteen month challenge and I’m getting to the point where I can make room to work on non-blog stuff. At this point, nothing can stop me. I’ve felt burned out for three years now, thanks to the job that brought me to my current city, but I don’t need to feel a certain way to write. If I ever recover fully, from the mental and emotional exhaustion that job inflicted on me, I’ll be more productive than I ever imagined I could be. Right now, I’m constantly exhausted, battling depression, and struggling to make it through each week without letting my mental illnesses swamp me, and I’m more productive than I’ve ever been.

I knocked on wood as soon as I finished writing that paragraph because I’m not so naive as to believe things can’t get worse, but I still don’t think they will. There will be bad days and there will be bad weeks, but I think I’ve got it in me to make sure I’m still having good months.

Intertia

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Inertia rules my existence.
It wears the crown and bears the scepter,
Commanding me to march and obey.
I’m no conscientious objector.
I would gladly march like a toy soldier
To keep away depression’s specter.

So long as I am moving forward
I can pretend everything is fine.
If I take a break or push too hard
I will fall into a self-made mine
Where crystallized despair waits for me
Like an old god sitting in its shrine.

Do enough to be making progress
But not so much I will fall apart.
With fiery determination
And bone-deep weariness in my heart
I know I’ll someday find my balance
Even if I don’t know where to start.

Saturday Morning Musing

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Lately, I have enjoyed joking that my life is finally in order so now I can say that, for sure, I am the mess. There’s some truth to this expression, but it isn’t entirely fair to me. I believe that my mental issues are a part of me and that they are a significant characteristic, but they are not limitations. I am bigger than my mental illnesses. I am more than them, though I am them as well. I may be a mess right now, but I’m a fairly organized mess and I’ve got a plan for becoming a not-mess. I’m in-between bookshelf organization methods. Sure, my books are stacked all over and covering the floor, but I know each stack and where each stack needs to go. I’ve just got to do the work of putting the books away.

I’ve been having a lot of stressful weeks, lately. I’m currently trying to do everything I can to avoid feeling too depressed and wanting nothing more than to just stop doing stuff for a few days or weeks so I can rest. Dating, writing every day, blog posts, working more, and more! Then there’s been a lot of individually stressful things like a few super busy weeks at work, tax-filing, and realizing I need a strict budget. This leaves me spending my Sunday in bed, watching my Steven Universe DVDs while listening to the Steven Universe soundtrack and playing Pokemon, only leaving bed for D&D at 5 pm and a few times before that for food and the bathroom.

I don’t even know if I can say I actually enjoy days like those. I have them every so often and I know I need them, but I don’t really enjoy retreating from the world to that degree. I talk to almost no one, get nothing productive done, and make a mess in my room because I can’t even be bothered to go downstairs to put my dishes in the sink. Don’t forget the time I spend agonizing over stupid little things that shouldn’t be stressing me out as much as they are while I ignore the actually legitimate issues I should be fretting about. Sometimes I eventually work through it all and can think about the real issues, but not always.

Depression is a bitch. As John Green once said in a video (I can’t find the video so I can’t attribute it to its primary source), “Depression is melancholy, without its charm.” There’s nothing fun about this. Anxiety also sucks. Nothing ruins a day quite like feeling like you forgot to turn off the oven about literally everything. I woke up at 6:30 because I apparently don’t like to sleep and then spent the next seven hours stressed out. That was last weekend and it was the longest day I’ve had in a couple of years.

I really want to find a way to calm down and let go of my tension, but my tension is a result of constantly working on things that are good for me and that I enjoy. I want to do everything I’m doing and more, so I’ve only got myself to blame for the position I’m in. If I want the successes I’ve set as my goals for 2018, then I have to pay the price. It’d be really cool if I could just get out of my own way and no longer waste so much energy on dumb shit like freaking out about whether or not I’m going to see an increase in the daily average views for this blog or if I’ve actually got enough clean underwear for the next week (which doesn’t matter because I’ve got a washer and dryer, so I can just do laundry whenever I want).

I’m used to being able to turn my anxiety and OCD toward useful ends. Even my depression had its uses. Now, all of my worries and OCD traits feel frivolous or irksome. It is hard to enjoy the feeling of being in control engendered by the act of cleaning your space when you can’t actually get down to cleaning because your cleaning supplies need to be cleaned first

I’d like to just shrug and say I’ll figure it out in the end, but it feels difficult to maintain that level of confidence and belief in the strength of the future when I feel like I no longer have any part of my mental health problems figured out. That’s the stress and exhaustion talking, but they sure talk pretty loudly these days. They’re becoming dominant aspects of my mental landscape every week. Hopefully another quiet weekend or two, following on the tail of a quieter work week, will help me get back on my feet and feeling like I can figure it all out in due time. That’s always a nice feeling.

Moments of Quiet

Chris 2 Comments

It is these moments of quiet,
As my brain creeps toward sleep,
That keep me up at night.

The time before is calm and soft:
Full of lingering traces of all
I have accomplished that day
And everything I desire to do
When I wake on a brand new day.

The time after is strange and quick:
Full of half dreams lost to me
As soon as their story has ended
And small movements that feel fast
As my body begins to slumber.

During, though, there is only silence.
I am left with the darkness of my room
Mirroring a darkness inside of me
I can only manage to drive away
With things that would keep me from sleeping.

During these moments of quiet,
I am the captive audience of my fears
And every single thing that went wrong
During any day I can remember
Plus a few more I had once forgotten.

It is no wonder I do not sleep well
When I cannot bypass these moments
Without crashing from awake to asleep.

Sinking

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Whispered words
p           like will-o-wisps
Light my foggy mind
p           with little lights
That draw me in
p           toward unsafe lands
As I stir and stare
p           through too-long nights.

Might-have-beens and
p           I-should-have-dones
Swamp my listless heart
p           with fetid doubts
As I feel and grope
p           my way through
My heavy soul’s
p           deep and bitter bouts.

One breath
p           as I break the surface
And then I slip,
p           soundlessly sinking
Without a fight
p           into the deeps,
Tired eyes
p           all blank and unblinking.

Late-Night Writing

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When midnight approaches
And exhaustion encroaches
I make a silent wish:
Just one more late-night hour
To write and feel the power
I have when I create.

A mind full of thick fog
Permeates my daily slog
When I choose to stay up.
Better fog than the loss
I feel as I turn and toss
When I instead choose sleep.

Second shift and spare time
Is never enough to climb
The mountain before me.
I just want to explore
Writing in a time before
I’m bidding friends good night

So for now I contend
With foggy days that descend
From my late-night writing,
All while hoping someday
I will be able to say
I spend my days writing.

A Place of Peace and Quiet

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Depression sucks. You get all geared up to post three times a week, work on writing every day (at least a little bit), and maybe sleep a little more if you can do all that before midnight before getting slapped back down into the emotional pits by the heavy hand of ever-present depression.

My depression always takes the form of exhaustion. Sure, there’s a certain degree of listlessness and negativity that goes with it, but the constant, ever-present face of my depression is a sense of exhaustion always hovering at the edge of my mind.

Any kind of exhaustion or tiredness I experience can trigger it to come tumbling down on top of me. A frustrating problem at work that is intellectually taxing; a long day of dealing with people and the requisite emotional output; a long hike or hitting the gym hard. All of these things can trigger it or compound it, leaving me unable to break free of it.

This exhaustion is always there, always beckoning me toward lethargy and, eventually, a complete lack of motion. It takes energy to throw that feeling off, to push out of the haze it pulls me towards. The whole thing can be frustrating because pushing it off often results in it coming back worse once I’m no longer actively pushing it away.

When it starts to take over, I sometimes have to give into it and let it slow me down, let myself drift toward the precarious edge hinted at in coy phrases like “a complete lack of motion” or “the deepest rest.” Its terrifying. Which is also exhausting.

You can probably see the issue there.

I spend a lot of time managing myself and administering self-care in order to avoid the feedback loop I just described. Thankfully, this sort of management and caution plays right into most of my obsessions and compulsions from my OCD, so it can often be counter-intuitively relaxing. The most relaxing thing I did in the past month was take an entire day, on which I was off of work for a holiday my employer observes, to rearrange my bookshelves, setup my video game console recording gear, and to reorder my entire bedroom to better reflect the direction I see my life and my mind going.

There is a lot of psychology and philosophy out there that suggests the environment one finds most relaxing is one that best reflects oneself. Most people who know me would say that’d be somewhere in nature, far away from the city, where a sense of peace and steadfast endurance exists. Mountains or great forests.

To me, though, the place that best reflects me is my abode.

I live on the edge of cities, caught between the quiet I need and the chaos I love to watch. I’m surrounded by a frenetic energy I don’t understand and a populace I struggle to connect to. Within that bubble of disorder and unknowable insanity, I have a place I live that is–aside from the portions effected by my current roommate–strictly ordered, neat, and calm. I decorate in more muted colors, favor ambient music and light that lends itself toward creating a calm environment, and tend to prefer the quiet of my own company over the obtrusive noise of other people.

My mind is like that. Longer ago than I can even remember, I create a small place of order, quiet, and calm in my mind, tucked away inside the chaos created by how I grew up and the chemical imbalances biology has bestowed upon me. A small room of peace amidst the constantly growing chaos of my mind. There is no place more relaxing to me than my room or home. When I meditate, I always seek out that place of peace within myself.

I do need to get away sometimes. There is a huge value to be found in the quiet tranquility of a cabin far away from any city or civilization. There is a huge value to be found in the experience of a new city and the new chaos that is both challenging and rewarding. Sometimes the strength you need is found by going outside yourself and sometimes its found by going deep inside yourself.

When I really need to relax, to let the exhaustion finally slide away on its own, I spend my time in the peace and quiet of my home. I sit and read for hours at a time. I reorder my space and let it represent the less tangible reordering of my mind. I cut off all communication to the outside world aside from one or two lines to particular individuals and just let myself sort of expand to fill the space. Stop trying to cram everything into that tiny little space in my head and let the order I’ve created do the work for a while.

I’m pretty sure its coping mechanism, but I’m not terribly concerned so long as it helps me push back against the ever creeping exhaustion. Pretty much everything in life is a coping mechanism to one degree or another.