I don’t think I’ve ever had a week that has tested my coping mechanisms as much as this past one has. 2023 has been a rough year, but this past week has been a special brand of hell. Not only have I had to deal with a few incredibly stressful events such as cancelling a flight and booking a new one, confronting my body image and gender identity issues as I get fit for a suit and buy new clothing, and trying to ramp up my performance at work even more as projects get shuffled around and my timeline gets drastically reduced, but I’ve also been trying to juggle preparations for this trip I’m going on. I have dropped every single ball multiple times this week (or had it knocked out of my hands by circumstance) and, despite wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole for twenty-four hours so I can rest and recover before cleaning up and trying again, I have had to carry on immediately. I honestly don’t think I’ve had a week where I’ve had to just suck it up and keep going when I’m this stressed and miserable since I moved out of my parents’ house.
Continue readingMental Health
Being Anxious Saved Me From A Worse Disaster For Once
I’ve been busy with getting ready for a trip. I’ve known about the trip for a while, but with everything else going on this past year, I couldn’t afford to spend time and energy on trip preparations until this month. Now, as the final weeks count down, I’ve had to systematically prepare myself in a situation where I don’t really have that much room for delays or procrastination. Unless I wanted to give myself a truly awful final week before the trip, I needed to methodically work through everything in a timely manner. Thankfully, I’m good at getting organized, so it was incredibly easy to come up with a broad to-do list and then sort tasks into a day-by-day order that would still leave me with time to rest so I wasn’t burning myself out before the trip. Unfortunately, everything blew up pretty much immediately when I lost an entire day to discovering that my flights had changed and the agency I booked with not only hadn’t notified me, but didn’t even seem to be aware that anything had changed when I started digging into it.
Continue readingTrying To Actively Fix My Burnout
I’ve been battling burnout for years now. I was driven away from my last job because of the demands placed on me and how all my work was punished because it didn’t fall neatly into the metrics my new manager used to rate my performance (despite how my old manager had approved of and supported my work). My new job was better for a while, but years of dealing with one of the most difficult people I’ve ever met and a great deal of institutional indifference to new ideas, modernization, and change in general have slowly ground me down. Since it is a slower process, I’ve been able to work to counter it, but there’s only so much to do when you’re also in the middle of a pandemic and the economic system you live in is doing it’s best to extract every single penny it can get from you and people like you. There’s no time to rest, little space to get a breather, and almost no ability to create either one of those since the only thing that will let me potentially escape in the future is working as much as my health will allow me to. It is not a great situation to be in, honestly.
Continue readingSense Memories, Grief, and Growth
The last time I was updating my blog as rigorously as I am updating it now, I wound up stopping because I had too much stuff going on. Between work, my grandfather’s final months, trying to support my family during that time, sorting through my feelings about my family, and being forced to confront the loss of the one person who seemed to just be happy to see me any time my family gathered, I just didn’t have the time or energy to keep up posting. Plus, a lot of the time I spent on things like consuming media or resting vanished as I wound up driving back and forth from my home to my parents’ home. It was a trip that took about three to four hours to travel just one way, depending on the time of day and traffic, and I was doing that at least once a week, sometimes twice as I haphazardly worked from my parents’ guest bedroom when I could and had to return home when work demanded my physical presence. The only thing that made this segment of late 2018 (from November onward) and early 2019 possible was that I’d just gotten into podcasts.
Continue readingAnxiety Is A Terrible Roommate
Some days, having anxiety is a lot like that moment in a movie where a dog starts barking about something and it is clear to the people around the dog that something is very wrong. The dog’s behavior makes in irrefuatably clear that there is a problem that needs to be corrected, but when that problem isn’t incredibly aparent, most people are at a loss for what they can do to handle whatever has caught the dog’s attention. There’s been jokes made for decades now about how people respond to a dog clearly attempting to communicate something when they don’t know what that is, everything from answering as if they know but without committing to an interpretation (“Yes, yes, I know”) to falling on popular media references from decades past (“What’s that, boy? Timmy fell down a well?”).
Continue readingThe End of The World And Coping With My Mental Health
Content Warning for mentions of suicidal ideation.
Continue readingDark Days And Long, Sleepless Nights
As I was going through some notes, I realized it has been two and a half months since this one night where I was so stressed out that I wound up staying up all night. I wasn’t exactly well-rested going into that evening, but I thought I’d be able to handle it without too much of a problem given how frequently I used to be able to go without sleep. While I did, eventually, get through the day, it was not the simple but tiring experience I remembered. Much to my chagrin, given how much I relied on this ability to carry me through my bouts of insomnia, I have slowly but surely reached the age where I can’t function without any sleep. It is an unfortunate fact of getting older, but more unfortunate is that this loss hasn’t come with a corresponding increase in my body’s day-to-day demands for sleep. I still struggle to fall asleep just as much as I used to and the impacts of losing sleep seem to hit me harder. At least until it comes time to fall asleep, again. At that point, it pretty much counts for nothing.
Continue readingIt Was the Best of Times AND the Worst of Times
Despite all of my preparations, last week was both a great week and a terrible week. I had a schedule, a to-do list, plenty of projects to work on, books all lined up for reading, some new games to play, and a new exercise regimen that would allow me to get a close to full workout in at home. Yet I made it through only two days before I started to fall apart.
Broken Words 