Content Warning for a long, metaphor-rich discussion of my experience of depression.
Continue readingexhaustion
Planning My Rest Around My Exhaustion
I finished unpacking over the weekend. I still have some cleaning to do, and there’s plenty more stuff that will get done in time such as hanging lights, putting up art, figuring out if I need more rugs, and deciding what to do with my balcony. All of that is work that will take weeks and isn’t really a part of unpacking. It sort of is, in the case of the art and lights, since I packed those up for my move, but none of them are things that I feel inclined to do immediately the way I felt the need to empty boxes and get things situated. In short, I’m done with my immediate grind and while there is work to be done on the horizon, none of it needs to be done today or tomorrow or even this week. Now, finally, after an exhausting four weeks, everything is done and I can finally rest. And I’m finally out of obligations for the year, so hopefully I can actually get some this time.
Continue readingNo New Chapter of Infrared Isolation This Week
Between my total exhaustion and my editor being sick, there will be no new chapter of Infrared Isolation this week. Despite my exhaustion, I’ve kept writing, so there WILL be a new chapter next week. I just need to give my editor time to rest up before she reviews it and myself more time to rest up before I try to crunch out another one. Rest is important.
Unpacking My Thoughts On Unpacking
The slow, arduous process of unpacking is taking me so much longer than I thought it would. It probably doesn’t help matters that I’ve been largely confined to working between the time I’m finished with work (sometime at or after 6pm) and before “quiet hours” start in my apartment at 9pm. Sure, I could keep working after that, but I refuse to be the noisy upstairs nieghbor that I tried to escape. I will not be bumping and thumping around my apartment until all hours of the night. Sure, I can sometimes find something quiet to do, like last night’s folding laundry and unpacking clothes, but I also have to contend with the continued exhaustion from my packing and moving. It’s not like my rest is any good when I finally collapse onto my bed for the night since the mental residue of my life being disturbed prevents me from falling asleep easily. Plus, the most relaxing thing I’ve done all week was go to a friends’ for 2 hours to attempt to play D&D where we wound up just shooting the shit for the whole two hours. After which, I went home and continued to unpack.
Continue readingTrying To Take It All In Stride
Have you ever had one of those moments where, after telling yourself or someone else that something is fine, finally take a real look at it and realize it isn’t even sort of fine? There’s a wide range of situations that can involve this sort of feeling or experience. It could be something like thinking to myself that my headphones are fine, but then going to put them away and realizing that they’re almost unusable because one of the pieces of tape holding them together came loose and it suddenly struck me that the reason I fold them so oddly these days is because I’m trying to avoid putting any tension on any one of the many pieces of tape. Or it could be a situation like me telling someone that something I’m dealing with is fine and not a problem to the extent of it becoming a small argument only for me to go home, sit down for a bit, and realize that I’m actually completely exhausted and burned out by that thing I said wasn’t a big deal (it has been a few years since this happened, but I’ll never forget the sequence of events). There are a lot of times these little revelations can strike you out of nowhere, especially if you’re as invested in trying to get through your day as I am during times of prolonged high stress like pretty much all of 2023 has been so far.
Continue readingNo New Infrared Isolation Post Today
Between traveling, packing, moving, and unpacking, I have not had the time in weeks to even touch the latest chapter of Infrared Isolation, so it will be at least another week before I can resume writing and editing. Only reason blog posts have continued is that I need some daily writing to stay sane. Plus, it’s all lower effort stuff. Which isn’t to say it’s not good writing or anything, just that five 600-900 word blog posts about various topics are a lot easier to write than a 3000-6000 word chapter in an on-going story.
Burnout Extinguished My Enthusiasm
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out in two days and I’m too tired to be excited about it. Sure, I know I’ll have a blast playing it, but I’m too worn down to feel anything but base acknowledgment of what this impending moment means. I’ve been waiting for this game for six years, ever since I beat Breath of the Wild for the first time and knew there had to be more based on the DLC announcements and the rumors swirling around it. After all, if they had so many great ideas for what else they could do with the game via DLC, then it stood to reason that they’d make another one. Now, six years after that thought entered my head, I only feel more tired when I think about it.
Continue readingTotal Burnout Is Dragging Me Down
One week from today, I’ll be getting myself to my local Best Buy so I can pick up my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before returning home to lose myself in a brand new game. I’m very excited for this game, enough so that I’ve had to convince myself not to buy a digital copy of the game as well, so that I can start playing the game the instant it becomes downloadable. It’s difficult to wait, even though there’s literally nothing I can do to make it happen sooner. All I can do is try to be patient as I try to distract myself from the slowly ticking clock. The flip side of this is that time will continue to pass no matter what, so it’s not like I have to do anything in particular to make progress. I just need to work on passing time gracefully.
Continue readingFinding The Silver In All of Last Month’s Grey
The past few weeks have been a study in living with anxiety for me. After my coping mechanisms were overwhelmed during an incredibly stressful week, the nearness of my recent trip prevented me from taking the time I needed to recover. As I’m learning, though, it prevented me from taking the time I thought I needed to recover. This isn’t to say that I somehow did better because I was so busy, or even that I managed just fine. I think time to properly rest would have benefited me, of course, since I felt a deep, aching weariness by the time I had to drive across half the country for a flight and that drive, the flight, and settling in to my trip just added their own spins to my exhaustion. But I managed just fine and I don’t think it was even as self-destructive as I thought it might be. As it turns out, since I was so focused on doing something new and had to take care of or at least confront a bunch of personal issues I’d been putting off, I’m probably better off for being put in this position.
Continue readingGetting Too Detached From The Clock
There is only one room in my home in which a clock is visible. In fact, you have to actually enter the room to see the time. You can’t see it unless you’ve gone out of your way to peer into the room or pause as you’re walking past it to look at the only clock visible from the hallway. This room is the kitchen and it has three clocks because my oven, my microwave, and my coffeemaker are all fundamentally attached to time in a way that I no longer am. It is a privilege, to be sure, to largely not need to run my life by the steady ticking of the second hand or the silent but swift change of a digital clock, and I appreciate the many factors of my life that make it possible. My largely malleable sleep schedule (I need a few days to change now, sure, but I can get used to any repeated pattern), my lack of a specific schedule at work (my boss only cares that I do my work, not when, so long as I keep it reasonable and don’t miss meetings), and a pretty accurate sense of the passage of time (I can usually tell how much time has passed within a few minutes over one or two hours and within ten to fifteen if it has been more than two hours). As a result, I’ve gone from marking the passage of my day via the steady counting of hours and instead mark it by events.
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