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 readingMental Health
A Week Of Not Rest But Recovery
Last week, to visit friends and family (chosen family) for the US Thanksgiving holiday, I drove just a shade under two thousand miles. It was broken up into two drives of five hundred miles each and one drive of a thousand miles–which came a day earlier than planned. I committed numerous caffeine crimes, ate a lot of junky travel food (and a whole lot of pretzels), gave myself sinus problems due to the elevation changes, and still started my first week back at work before the holidays feeling way more prepared for the long weeks ahead than I’ve felt in a long time. Even that week off for my birthday didn’t have this kind of effect on me and I got WAY more sleep during that week than I did while traveling. Hell, I might have gotten more sleep in half of that week than I did during the entire week of traveling and visiting people that just ended. And yet I feel so much better. Part of that has to do with getting to spend time with two people I don’t get to see and be around nearly enough, and part of it was that, despite the snowy struggles of part of my sixteen-hour drive home last Friday (two Fridays ago as this gets posted), it’s so much more relaxing to do that than to do my job. Which feels like quite a statement. Driving two thousand miles over the course of six days was less taxing than even a quiet week at my job. It stands to reason, though. That took only about thirty-five hours, which is fifteen hours less than a normal work week takes, and I only had to worry about myself and accomplishing my goals rather than a whole bunch of delicate personalities and people who only think you’re working if they see you outside your office (despite all of them having jobs that happen almost exclusively in their office).
Continue readingFinding A New Flavor Of Overstimulation
I wound up taking today off work (the day I wrote this, which is about two weeks before it got posted) because I was just so burned out and exhausted that my body physically refused to operate correctly. Which is a bad state to be in, considering that I have plans to drive about five hundred miles in two days, another five hundred two days after that, and then a thousand in a single day four days after that. I don’t need to be in tip-top physical shape going into all of that, but it would certainly help make the total thirty-two-or-more hours of driving more bearable if I didn’t feel like crap. So I stayed in, played some video games (to wrap up some Final Fantasy 14 stuff before my week away from the game), and had a mostly relaxing day. Unfortunately, it was not entirely relaxing. I found out about an event my favorite wrestling group was doing a literal hour before it was supposed to start and scrambled to reorganize my evening so I could attend the event. It was a lot of fun, but I was not prepared to record and I was not mentally prepared for the shear amount of stuff that was going to be happening. Wrestling events can be a little overwhelming because there’s two chats to watch (the Wrestling chat and the crowd chat), the action to follow, the event’s music to listen to (used to help set the emotional tone for scenes), and usually my recording to monitor (and related camera work). While I wasn’t recording this time, there was a lot more mixing of chats than usual, a lot more attendees, just as much music, and I wound up in a discord voice chat with some people I’ve been getting to know, all of which left my fried and overstimulated after the first two-hour event.
Continue readingI’ve Even Stopped Wishing I Could Put An Optimistic Spin On These Posts
It has been a rough… Well, couple of months in particular. Years. Decade. Etc. But the last couple months in particular have been very draining and extra exhausting. Having all of this stuff with my family hanging over me isn’t helpful at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The world looks increasingly awful as fascism continues to rise. Sure, we had a really good set of election results this past week, but we’ve got a long ways to go before anything starts to really change and the actions of various senatorial elected officials have made it pretty clear that this doesn’t change anything in their eyes despite how clear of a call to resist this should have been [I wrote this before they gave up, too, but more on that next week]. I don’t know how it could be any more clear than it is that the people of the US want our elected officials to resist every single one of Trumps moves, heinous or mundane. Throw is increasing work loads, a messed up sleep schedule, and it’s no wonder that I can’t seem to shake the dogged exhaustion I’m feeling. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that? It’s all I can do to even think about sending a letter back to my aunt, the one who responded in what I’d call a positive manner, let alone write it and manage all of the other stressors that are taking up space in my mind with no relief on the horizon. All I want to do is lay down and surrender to unconsciousness until something has happened to resolve at least one of these things because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to actually do anything about any of them.
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 readingAn Out-Of-Mind Experience
Today, the day I’m writing this (a week before it gets posted), is the first day any of my relatives could have reasonably received the letters I sent out earlier this week. It might take longer than usual, given the government shutdown and everything, but today’s the day were my anxiety goes from “steadily bubbling” to “boiling over” as I begin to flinch every time my phone buzzes or it’s little “you’ve got a notification!” light turns on. I do not want to hear from any of them. I’m not interested in what any of them have to say immediately upon reading my letter and explicitly mentioned not sending me texts or calling me in the letter itself, so I should not be hearing from any of them. I will, almost certainly, be hearing from at least one of them at some point this weekend, though. Not sure what it’ll be about, considering the various relatives getting a letter and their wide range of knee-jerk responses to stuff, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually. After all, it’s not purely unhealthy communication if there’s not also communication when you’ve explicitly said you want none. I expect that the general content of whatever message I get will include some form of apology, some number of excuses or “explanations” for past behavior, and then either a statement that they’ll do what I asked in my letter (despite already contacting me) or some statement about the importance of family connections with a deflecting acknowledgement that our family communicates poorly. Bonus points if it includes both.
Continue readingOne Last Letter To Bring An End To Years Of Waiting
One of the most difficult things I’ve ever done was choose to cut off my biological family. Though I’m still in contact with two siblings and briefly reconnected with a single cousin (who stopped responding and fell silent at some point last year–or maybe the year prior, I really don’t remember), I haven’t exchanged more than pleasantries with any one else in years (barring one moment of connection with an uncle I thought would be cooler about everything than he eventually was and my multiple attempts to extend a hand to my parents in the hope that they’d be able to grow enough for me to build some kind of relationship with them). Only a few still try to keep in contact and while I absolutely could do more to stay in contact with my wider family, that’s not really something I want. I cut them all off, not just my parents. I would tell pretty much anyone that my primary reason for doing so was because I didn’t want to come between my parents and their siblings, or drive any kind of wedge into the family at large, but those are things I’m currently discussing with my therapist as a result of how reflexively I say them and how they all center the well-being of my parents and family rather than admit the truth, which is that I can’t just ignore the fact that they all bore witness to the abuses of my childhood in some capacity and chose to do nothing. Regardless of the reason behind it, I still made the choice to potentially never speak to any of them ever again. I didn’t do it as directly as I did with my parents and I didn’t go as nuclear as I did with my brother, but none of them know where I live and I haven’t responded to any of their attempts to draw information out of me despite knowing exactly what all that would mean. I did, after all, set a rule in place for what it would take to reestablish contact with any of them, like I did with my parents and pretty much anyone I’ve ever cut contact with. And like my parents and most of the other people I’ve cut contact with, I knew from the outset that it was incredibly unlikely that my rule would ever be satisfied.
Continue readingWeird Anxiety Spikes Are Still Less Trouble Than My Depression Was
Two months into my current dose of antidepressants and I’m pleased to say that my old misery/constant depression has stayed consistently gone. I’ve had my ups and downs during this period, my sleepless weeks that make the whole world seem darker, but it has been a weight off my shoulders to not have to fight myself every step of the way. Well, mostly. I’m still fighting myself occasionally, in ways that I was only sort of prepared for, and that by only one weirdly intense interaction with someone and the constant refrain of people complaining about weird increases in anxiety. Turns out, one of the side effects I’m experiencing is irregular but intense anxiety spikes. My brain will pick one specific thing and get incredibly bent out of shape about it no matter what that that thing is or what I tell myself. The first one was about a weird experience I had in a discord server and how I should have responded, where I worked myself up like I haven’t in a decade despite my best efforts to calm down and work through it myself. The second one was about my birthday, though I didn’t recognize it for a strange anxiety spike given how negatively I normally feel about contemplating my birthday. Currently, I’m struggling to contain the anxiety I feel about knowing that the world population status on Final Fantasy 14 has changed as part of today’s update (the day I wrote this) and the intense feeling that I need to take this time to make alternate characters because there’s no telling when the world will close again or how long it will be until it opens up again in the future. I’ve had a couple other spikes here or there, but they were all easier to work through: things that took a few calming breathes or waiting a few minutes for my mind to calm down rather than the day or days that these other ones are taking.
Continue readingToday Is A Day For Rest
Needing to take a day to rest so soon after taking an entire week off has me thinking about my long-term plans. I typically try to space out my rest days and PTO usage a bit more, so I don’t burn through it too quickly. Plus, you get way more bang for your buck during weeks with holidays and it gives me a good reason not to work insanely long days in order to make up for not getting overtime on the day that I’m off work already (which is all part of the particulars for how my employer handles overtime and overtime eligibility). Spacing them out has been my way of maximizing my rest over the past couple years, by doing sprints instead of long marathons, but that has not stopped my burnout from slowly getting worse and worse. Taking a longer rest really hasn’t been an option at any point, though I’ve gotten close to it being an option a few times before something happened to return my financial situation to the edge of precarity. For these last few years of rising rent and cost of living, I have to carefully manage my time and energy so I can maximize the number of weeks in a year that I’m working as much as I can handle. I need the money, after all, and overtime is much more time-efficient than getting a second job. Ten hours of overtime each week gets me three quarters of a week’s pay per paycheck and none of the side jobs I can find would come even close to matching that level of income for the same amount of time. No matter what I do, no matter what numbers I crunch or how I try to rebalance my budget, there just isn’t more I can extract from myself without descending into misery. And yet, despite knowing all that, I’ve already hit a point where I can’t keep pushing myself to work and I haven’t even been back in the office working for three weeks.
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.
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