As a result of this past weekend’s tumult, I’ve noticed a habit in my life more starkly than ever before. I have, of course, been aware for years that I tend to deal with feeling poorly about myself or a loss of control in my life with some form of hard work. Either new projects to work on, an attempt to reassert control by just throwing myself at whatever is making me feel like I lack control, or just keeping myself working on a problem until it is solved rather than letting myself rest. This is not a new thing. What does seem new, at least to my eyes, is how pretty much everything I do comes down to this habit and how unhealthy that has gotten recently. I’ve always struggled with letting myself rest and with not taking on more work than I can handle, but I’d begun to work on doing less and punishing myself less for not doing everything I’d wanted to do in a day over the past two years, so I’d thought that I was making solid progress. Unfortunately, while I was making advancements in a few specific areas or with regards to a few specific cases (such as this blog and my personal projects), I’ve been losing ground elsewhere. The most easy examples are things I’ve written about recently. How stressed I made myself by doing what was, in retrospect, way too much work before I went on vacation. How I dropped all of my plans for two whole days to build my computer. Hell, I even spent my last week of my break pushing myself to get work done rather than letting myself actually continue to rest. Sure, all of this stuff is only as clearly over-the-top as it appears to be because I have the benefit of hindsight, but some time thinking and a therapy appointment have made it very clear that there were spots in all of those events where I should have stopped, all of which I recognized and then chose to ignore in the moment. Not only would I have been better off not doing as much work, but that nothing bad would have come of stopping to breathe or rest.
Continue readingHabits
Songs To Correct The Course Of My Mental Health To
Content Warnings for general discussions of mental health with a focus on mental breakdowns, trauma, depression and surviving abuse.
Continue readingSleep Cycles And Bad Habits
I read a review by Linda Codega (the reporter who broke the Dungeons and Dragons/Wizards of the Coast OGL news back in January) the other day. They were covering Pokémon Sleep, the latest app in Nintendo’s continued pursuit of becoming a lifestyle company. The game is fairly simple, in that it monitors your sleep habits (by being open on your phone, which you’ve left facedown on top of your bed) and scores you based on how much you moved around in your sleep, how long you slept, and who knows what other data. Based on your score, you get the chance to power up your Pokémon, capture new Pokémon (via taking pictures), and advance in the game. It’s fairly simple and straight-forward and, to me at least, does not seem terribly appealing. I sleep pretty poorly, though, so maybe I’m just not interested in a game I won’t be good at. That said, what has me thinking about this fairly bland game days later is what Codega muses on in the latter portion of their article. If this app is the last thing we think about before we go to bed and the first thing we think about when we wake up, what does that do to us as Humans? What are going to be the long-term consequences of the continued gamification of life, as we turn sleep from something meant to prepare us for another day into another form of entertainment? They end the review without coming to a conclusion, saying they would need more than one night of using the yet-unreleased app to really dive into the cultural implications, but I realized that this is something I’ve already done to myself and have been doing for years now.
Continue readingI’ve Been Too Tired For Anything But Books
As I’ve slowly gotten parts of my new apartment in order and done what I can to create space for myself to relax, I’ve found myself turning back to books more and more. My video games and TV shows are fun, of course, but they have a layer of separation between myself and them. Video games require a certain degree of skill or mechanical separation. You must know how to play the game and think about how to play the game for everything but the most immersive experiences, and even those are frequently broken by reminders that there is a mechanical separation between you and your experience. TV shows and movies lack this interactive layer, but most modern movies require subtitles (at least for me, since I often can’t understand the actors over the sound effects) and there’s always this nagging thought in the back of my mind that this experience has a volume that could intrude on the lives of other. Mostly because of how often other people’s movie experiences have intruded on my life. There is nothing between me and a book.
Continue readingReturning to Animal Crossing New Horizons
As I’ve struggled with falling asleep at night, I’ve returned to one of the games I used to soothe my anxiety during the peak of the pandemic: Animal Crossing. I bought a digital version of the game at some point last year, to ease the disruption I felt during the cold winter evenings when I was forced to leave my cocoon of blankets in order to change the cartridge in my Switch, and then wound up not playing it much more than I had previously. It turns out that even removing the one incredibly minor inconvenience preventing me from playing the game wasn’t enough to get me back into it in a dependable manner. This time, though, I swore it would be different. This time, I needed the calm music and friendly NPCs to soothe my spiraling mind.
Continue readingHoliday Food And Vanishing Leftovers
As I work through my leftovers from the holiday feast I prepared for myself this past winter holiday period, I find myself reflecting on my cooking habits once again. After all, I’m aware I have a tendency to eat the same stuff over and over again because the recipes are familiar and require very little mental effort. Something like baking a turkey breast might also be fairly easy, but it’s not something I’ve successfully done very many times (I’ve eaten dried-out turkey all but two of the times I’ve made it myself) so it takes a bit more mental effort than even putting together a stew does. That has lots of steps, requires pretty active monitoring throughout the process, and requires a non-insignificant amount of chopping, but it’s still easier to make myself do that than it is to bake a turkey breast.
Continue readingThis Is My 900th Post
While I’d love to claim that this is a complete coincidence, I’ll admit that I did thumb the scales a teensy bit to line up the first post of 2023 with my 900th over all blog post. A teensy bit. My time off was legitimate and I definitely didn’t have anything ready for last Saturday as far as Infrared Isolation goes, but I did decide to still do a post on the 31st and not take an entire week off when I realized I wasn’t going to have Chapter 13 ready just so I could line this up. It was a small amount of effort and is, ultimately, a fairly small thing. I’ve been running this blog since 2017, after all, and while most of those years show huge periods of inactivity from me, 2018 and 2022 saw almost daily posts, and that’s most of 900 posts right there. The rest mostly come from posting in the last third of 2021 and the last two months of 2017, when I got on the daily blogging train for the fist time.
Continue readingLittle Rituals
I love little rituals. Small things you do that aren’t a huge or impactful part of your day, that come and go with enough frequency that it feels weird to call them “rituals” sometimes. They’re the first things to go when you’re stressed or running out of time in a day and the first thing to come back when you get through the worst of it and can return to whatever you consider normalcy. For instance, during the time of the year when it’s usually dark before I leave work, I always stop whatever I’m doing right before sunset, make myself a nice cup of tea, and spend some time looking out at the world as darkness closes in. I never drink the tea while I’m doing this because it is far too hot during this brief ten-minute window, but I enjoy the warmth it provides nevertheless. As I return to my desk for however much time remains before I’m finished for the day, I slowly sip the tea and think about the sun setting in the distance, behind trees or clouds or the nearby hills. It always helps me feel less frustrated when I leave work after nightfall and it gives me something to look forward to that makes me feel like I’m still a part of each passing day even when my office is located in a space without any windows.
Continue readingEven Small, Every-Day Accomplishments Are Still Accomplishments
It can be difficult to maintain context in your life. At the very least, it is difficult for me. I haven’t figured out how to really compare notes with people in my life about the way we remind ourselves of the context of our lives and our daily deeds, so I’m not sure if this is a problem I face because of my childhood, or if it’s something everyone struggles with. As a child, I got very skilled at normalizing the things happening in my life. It was a key survival skill, going hand-in-hand with hiding the way I felt and learning to live with people who did not treat me well. While I’ve made a lot of personal progress on the latter two things (which will still be the work of a lifetime, rather than a labor I can reach the definitive end of), I still struggle with maybe too-readily normalizing whatever is happening in my life.
Continue readingChallenging Assumptions
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the habits and knowledge in your life that you don’t realize are arbitrary. All the things you “know” or do because that’s just what you were told or the example you had to follow and then never really thought about again. For example, you can just eat the whole dang apple. It doesn’t really have a core and the seeds can’t hurt you unless you eat a huge number of them, so you are wasting a whole bunch of apple if you eat around the center, fibrous bit and throw that away.
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