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.
Fork Theory
What’s Next Now That My Dragon Age Playthrough Is In The Rearview Mirror?
Please, if you know the answer, tell me. I’m desperate. As of writing this, it has been almost a week since I finished this momentous task, this three hundred forty hour undertaking, and nothing compares to the soaring highs and wonderful emotional lows (that were also soaring highs, let’s be real, because I love a tear-jerker) of Veilguard. I’ve tried playing other video games, things I set aside to brute-force my way through Inquisition, and none of them seem fun. I’ve tried to read, but my mind can’t focus on something that doesn’t feel as real as Veilguard did. I tried taking a night off, to do something other than play a Dragon Age game, and yet I found myself unable to focus on anything but thoughts of how nice it would be to start a new file. Nothing compares to the depth of character and delight I felt while blissfully escaping into this latest Dragon Age game, so how can I tear myself away from the fresh character I made on my second night after beating the first one? How can I deny myself what my entire being desires so deeply and clearly?
Continue readingOne Busy Weekend Has Made A Huge Difference
Last week ended with me feeling incredibly overwhelmed and struggling to deal with what had mostly been a week full of good things [and I am once again reminded of the downsides that come with writing these things a week ahead of when they post since the week before this got posted went VERY DIFFERENTLY than the week before I wrote this]. A four-day work week, a week totaling only forty hours of work instead of my usual fifty, getting to leave work while it was still light out, some major changes at the company I work for, and even a new work computer and related peripherals. The whole week had a lot going for it, even if the exchange I’d negotiated with myself was that I could take it easy for a week in exchange for doing my taxes and taking care of the final receipt submissions for my 2023 Flexible Spending Account, and I got to end the whole thing by spending my weekend buried in video games with my friends, prep work for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and then a successful (and incredibly delightful) first session of that Dungeon and Dragons campaign. Unfortunately for me, this did not fix my burnout. It did lessen my mental load by a huge amount [to be honest, I probably would have had a mental breakdown if I hadn’t had this weekend before everything went to shit], since I was able to take care of a bunch of tasks that where weighing on me (like activating my new FSA card, dealing with some junk mail, sorting through the records I needed to keep to close out my pile of 2023 documents, and ordering some replacement items for stuff that had worn out and I’d been meaning to replace for almost a year), but it was definitely not restful.
Continue readingMotivation And The Little Things That Irk You
In my last apartment, I spent a year and a half being woken up way too early during the warmer months by sunlight streaming into my apartment through the blinds on my eastward facing windows. I thought to myself on numerous occasions that I really needed to do something about this fact so I could sleep in late enough to get some proper rest (especially after my insomnia resurgence in January of 2021) and just never did anything about it. I had already put up all the curtains I owned in my bedroom and I couldn’t close the door because I needed the AC from the unit in my living room to reach my bedroom in order to sleep at all, so I didn’t have a ready-made solution I could implement. Eventually, after I was starting to come apart at the seams, I finally did something about it. It took all of an hour, including the forty-five minute trip to and from my local Target to buy curtains and a curtain rod, to solve the problem. I got to sleep in the next morning and went from struggling with how much light was streaking into my apartment to being able to control my environment again in a way that allowed me to priortize my comfort and well-being. Following this event, where I realized I’d been cursing a problem I could easily solve with a little effort, I swore to never let myself be that miserable about something so easy to solve for that long ever again.
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