Well, I got one decent night of sleep. Went to bed at my usual weekend time, fell asleep right away, and slept for a solid eight before I got up on my own and started my day. One night isn’t a lot, but it’s better than nothing and it hopefully signals the approaching end of this period of insomnia. I didn’t sleep as much the following night, but then I was up late editing videos for the absolutely smashing opening to this year’s Cross Realm Wrestling (the Final Fantasy 14 roleplaying wrestling league I’m recording and editing events for) season. That was a choice, as was waking up after not enough time so I could spend time with my siblings, so I’ve only got myself to blame for that one. Last night’s relatively sleeplessness, though, was back to good ol’ insomnia. I sometimes wonder if I have trouble falling asleep at night because I spend so much of my day struggling to stay awake, but that thought is really depressing so I try not to spend too much time on it. I mean, it’d make sense, you know? I’m constantly struggling to stay awake and putting a lot of effort into not falling asleep during the day, so maybe I’m just training myself to not fall asleep easily. Which fits last night’s sleeplessness really well. Lot of dozing off and then twitching awake, lots of shifting my legs to try to find a comfortable position without any pain for me to focus on. And a lot of desperate thinking of topics I can’t remember as my brain just fires off thought after thought so my brain can’t truly wind down. If that’s not at least a part of my sleep issues, I’d be genuinely quite surprised.
Continue readingInsomnia
A Life’s Worth Of Problems To Solve
Last week’s anger is still around. It’s currently locked in battle with my exhaustion in a way that is amplifying all my other emotions in ways I do not particularly appreciate, but then very little that’s positive has happened. I mean, I had a nice weekend, that was good, but I haven’t been able to make much headway on any job applications, nor have any of my floating problems resolved themselves. They’re not even closer to being resolved than they were before. Hell, I feel like I’ve made negative progress on some of them. I’ve tried talking through what’s going on with some people and that hasn’t actually helped at all. Normally that helps a lot–normally thinking out loud like that helps me push towards a better understanding of what’s going on with me but I feel like that hasn’t worked lately. To cap it all off, I feel like this is all pointless because I’ve got practical problems I need to solve now and all this theoretical stuff, while incredibly important to my sense of self, doesn’t matter as much. I just got my lease renewal which stands to raise my rent by over one hundred dollars, there’s some big changes happening at my employer that necessitate reconsidering stuff I thought I’d already settled about my future, and everything I thought I’d settled about how and why I spend my energy is suddenly in question again as a couple interactions that should be inconsequential have bent me out of sorts.
Continue readingThe Sleepless Spiraling Continues Into Its Second Week
Unfortunately, in the intervening week since I last wrote about my sleep problems, they have not improved. Sure, I managed to get a couple 8-hour nights over the weekend, but only by sleeping until 1pm and then 11am on Saturday and Sunday respectively. Still struggling with being unable to fall asleep and starting to get in a bad habit of giving up immediately when I don’t start to doze off after climbing into bed. It’s a frustrating self-perpetuating cycle: I can’t sleep so I get frustrated which makes it even more difficult to fall asleep which then makes me frustrated about being too frustrated to fall aslep. On top of all the anxiety and stress and stuff, of course. Just a real mess of a situation that I can’t seem to extricate myself from despite how tired and out-of-it I’m getting. I have a therapy appointment tomorrow, which I’m hoping that will help get my feet underneath me again, so to speak. I am going to need to do some work to make sure I’m ready for that therapy appointment, to get my thoughts in order and make sure I don’t miss anything in my exhausted haze or whatever I’ll be in tomorrow, but I will hopefully be able to manage it. After all, it’s not like I can stop thinking about how my life is an endless cycle of doing things because I am passionate about the cause, care enough to see that the work gets done, or feel obligated by either my sense of what is right or the feeling of needing to earn my place somewhere. Heaven forbid I stop thinking about that for even a moment.
Continue readingInsomnia And Caring Too Deeply And Existential Identity Crises, Oh My!
I have not slept much the last couple days (as of writing this). It has been difficult for me to wind down these past few days because I am currently caught in an exhausting vortex of my own creation. It isn’t video games or TV shows I’ve starting watching (though my tendency to lose track of time while doing those things certainly hasn’t helped me these last few weeks), but just my good ‘ol insomnia. My mind will not spin down in the evenings and, in fact, seems to kick things into high gear when I’m trying to go to sleep. Most of the time, though, I can attribute a period of restlessness to a spike in anxiety or stress. These days, it’s all anxiety and stress to the degree that I’ve stopped registering it as anything but “normal” everywhere except in how much anxiety and stress I can manage in a day: that just keeps getting smaller as the world around me gets messier and messier. Still, despite this, I am pretty sure I know why I can’t fall asleep easily lately (this has been going on for a while but only recently has it prevented me from sleeping for long periods of time): I am having a small-to-moderate existential crisis. I joke often about having those, or at least have joked about that once or twice over the course of this blog, but my sense of purpose and self has been relatively stable for a while. After last year’s burnout (which is continuing into this year), deciding to stop my D&D campaigns troubling my self-identity as a storyteller, and the way that my thoughts about why I stopped that D&D campaign has grown in my mind to be applicable to so many of the difficult and draining parts of my life, all my mind can do is spin its wheels and get nowhere.
Continue readingAnxiety That’s Lingering Just As Long As This Cough
Yesterday’s post was called “On The Other Side Of Sickness” because it was a bit of wishful thinking about the future. I wrote it on a Monday, as I went into work while still unwell, and hoped that, by the time I was editing it, I’d be better. I am not. I’m also a bit behind in blog posts because work has been so busy and I’ve been so cotton-brained and tired that I’m having difficulty focusing. It is truly awful, to feel myself mentally diminished and be unable to do anything about it at all. And yet I must soldier on because there is work to do, money to earn, plates to spin, balls to juggle, and a small legion of crafters and gatherers and combatants to lead into a new Final Fantasy 14 patch (we’re up to six people, as of the night before I wrote the first draft of this). Lots going on and very little rest to be had despite my illness, which definitely hasn’t helped me get over the last bits of this. I’d be tired and unfocused at this point regardless of having a cold, so it’s no wonder that I still feel as loopy as I do. I wish I could say it was all bad choices, but only staying up late last night was a bad choice and it was a bad choice made knowing that I spent the two previous nights unable to fall asleep. Not because of coughing or congestion or anything like that. No, this was because I was too warm or I couldn’t get comfortable or my mind just wouldn’t wind down or I kept jerking awake as I was falling asleep for some reason. I don’t really know what’s got me in such a fuss right now, but I can definitely tell that it’s my anxiety coming at me like it hasn’t in a long time.
Continue readingSurviving The Day After A Sleepless Night
Going in to work on a Monday with no sleep is a special kind of hell. I wish I could say that this was all my own fault, that I made bad choices over the weekend and wound up not sleeping as a result because then I could accept the blame and do better in the future. Instead, I’m almost falling over while standing at my desk because I exhaustedly closed my eyes for just a moment and dozed off standing up. Not because I was too wrapped up in a game or a book but because my sleep rhythm is a sensitive creature these days and the disruption of the time changing last Sunday was enough that I wasn’t tired enough to sleep when I went to bed and, instead of eventually drifting off or suddenly waking up in the morning, I just stayed awake. Long enough that I gave up and when to go do some video game chores in the hope that it would either be mind-numbing enough to let my mind unclench or engaging enough that I could stop thinking about being unable to sleep long enough to feel tired. Instead of either of those things happening, I did a lot of shopping for supplies in Final Fantasy 14. I made out like a particularly well-appointed bandit, so I have to admit that this is one of the most productive sleepless nights I’ve ever experienced, but the day after it at work? As I try to stay focused and ride the line between immediate over-caffeination, crashing, and getting kept awake from excessive caffeine intake? That sucks. Monumentally.
Continue readingI’m Tired But Not Sad So I’ll Just Ramble About Why That Is
As I slowly move back towards the kind of heavy labor I was doing at the beginning of this year (though at a slower pace, thankfully), it is nice to know that I am not only more physically capable than I was back then, but that a good night’s rest is more effective than it used to be. From just over a year ago until sometime in the spring, it would take me multiple days of rest to recover from a single day’s exertion and now a single night is enough to recover from feeling physically exhausted. Assuming I get enough sleep, anyway. But also, a year ago, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, three or four at most, without waking up with excruciating back pain! I was so tired and pained all the time that it was everything I could do just to keep getting through my days. I descended into a place of fog, exhaustion, misery, and constant trudging persistence while I slowly recovered from years with a worn-out bed, the physical toll of the medication I was taking, and the added weight of not sleeping enough for three months in a row. In fact, I only ever started to recover when I stopped taking that medication and my body was able to start properly repairing itself instead of… well, whatever was going on there. I tell you, there’s nothing like going from needing three to seven days for your muscles to recover from feeling tired to being able to get back up and do more with them after sitting down for a little bit, much less feeling almost all the way better by the next morning. I mean, today was a doozy and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow, but only enough that it’ll make me do my morning stretches for sure and not leave me in a miserable amount of pain like even half this much effort would have done a year ago.
Continue readingGetting Back In The Saddle After A Decent Rest
I took a whole week off. It was only supposed to be a long weekend, but it turned into a whole week off of work. And writing. And most personal responsibilities. I didn’t even go grocery shopping and cobbled meals together out of stuff I had around my apartment, including a meal that was two bagels and the last of my jam. I did absolutely nothing that didn’t need doing and, honestly, it was kind of nice. Between actually getting some REAL rest, with proper seven-to-eight-hour nights and having an antidepressant that is (now unequivocally) working properly, that sure solved a lot of my active problems. Not all of them, mind you. It turns out that, by my approximation, eighty percent of my stress and exhaustion was actually burnout, not depression, so a single week of rest isn’t going to fix that by a long shot. It did still help a lot, though. Between having my first genuinely good birthday in at least a decade, maybe my entire life (can’t have a bad birthday if you don’t really celebrate it), taking time to sleep, allowing myself to just do whatever I wanted (which was only MOSTLY Final Fantasy 14), and reaching a point in my rest where I felt comfortable just sitting on my balcony and reading, I think I’ve gotten the most rest I’ve had in about two years. Turns out it’s difficult to rest if you have to spend a bunch of energy every day fighting your own mind in order to not be lethargic and miserable constantly and that removing that extra bit of effort can really help kickstart your other resting efforts.
Continue readingDreaming Through It
For the past few years, I’ve been dealing with an increasing number of dreams. For a lot of my life, I didn’t really dream much aside from a few repeats. I had one when I was younger about being swallowed by a blanket that showed up every time I got sick (our family called this specific blanket “the sick blanket” since, as little kids, we got bundled cosily into it when we weren’t feeling well), a weird warped-perspective dream about being a tiny dot that couldn’t move around my parents house every time I got sick after I was ten or eleven, and some weird tons-of-armies-fighting-a-giant-war dreams that were basically my imaginary play games given life and ridiculous scale by my sleeping mind. I’m sure I had other dreams from time to time, but I really didn’t have many and it was only in high school that I realized that most people dream much more frequently. These days, though I still don’t dream often, I now have about as many dreams a month as I used to have in a year. Generally speaking, they’re a much wider variety these days, having replaced the old “got stuck in high school as an adult somehow” anxiety dreams of my college years and early twenties with a much greater breadth of mental fiction. Unfortunately, this uptick in dreams coincides with me starting to finally process the trauma of my childhood and so most of my dreams since then have a dual attachment to my present and something I’m working through or have mostly worked through from my past. It’s kind of exhausting, to be frank, but I try to stay focused on it being a good sign that my mind is actively healing from the stuff I went through as a child.
Continue readingFalling Asleep, Waking Up, Or Staying Up
For a few years now, I’ve had the end of Friends At The Table’s fourth season (Twilight Mirage) bouncing around in my head. Not the way the story played out, though I’ve thought of that plenty, but the very end of it. As the season wraps up and the last bits of the game they played slowly fade out, the final theme starts to play over what turns out to be one of the characters from the season interviewing his allies. He cycles through a bunch of questions and the person answering them usually changes from one question to the next with very little repetition, with one notable exception. This final question lends itself to the name of the song that’s playing as the season winds down and the various characters answer questions posed by the interviewer, and is what has stuck in my mind for so very long. The interviewer asks the crew if they prefer falling asleep or waking up. Everyone answers with their own thoughts on the matter, providing information about not just their answer but also their view about the world and the part they have to play in it, because they’re not just answering the question but speaking about why they prefer their given option. The way this question and series of answers are framed makes it clear that one answer isn’t “correct” or that one mode of thinking isn’t preferable to another. Instead, it leaves you, the listener, to consider their words and reflect on how these interviews, which ostensibly occurred at the halfway point of the season rather than the end of it, might change or alter how you feel about these characters and the events you’ve been listening to for some thirty-ish episodes. It’s really well done and has stuck with me as much as anything Friends at the Table has done (and that’s genuinely a lot).
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