Growing up, in the simplified lessons of conservative Catholicism and childhood emotional grow, I was taught that love and hate are opposites. That they’re so opposed they cannot exist together such that, should you feel love for something, you are incapable of actually hating it, or if you burn with hatred for something, you are incapable of loving it. This was taught to me again and again as I dealt with my abusive elder brother and neglectful parents, alongside the lesson that of course I loved my family since anything less would be some kind of sin or moral failing on my part (these are equivalent in the version of Catholicism I was taught as a child), and since I had little access to people outside of my family thanks to being homeschooled, I didn’t learn any different until high school when I finally got out from under my parents’ teaching and learned from people who had different ideas and understandings of the world around us. There, as I began to develop emotionally and learn things about myself and others, I learned that the opposite of love wasn’t hate but a lack of care or concern. In fact, love and hate were two sides of the same coin, emotions so intense that they couldn’t help but overlap in ways big and small that could not only lead to some incredible opportunities for change and grace (since this was still a Catholic high school and everything was taught as close to a religious framing as possible) but also to some of the most toxic and horrible relationships that humanity had to offer (I was, after all, finally learning enough to know that my life at home was not normal or good). This mixture of emotions contributes to codependent relationships, manipulation, many different forms of abuse, and an inability to escape these things because, culturally, US society places a huge degree of importance on the power of love to overcome and redeem those who ahve hurt us.
Continue readingReflection
I’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 readingI’m Gonna Make It Through This Month If It Kills Me
In the last five days, multiple news anchors have called for the death of homeless people and they all still have their jobs. Other people have stated, with no spin or hyperbole, the beliefs of a man who was killed in the middle of making excuses for mass shootings being an acceptable loss for the right to have guns and gotten themselves fired, doxed, or stuck on administrative leave as a result. People have come out of the woodwork to praise a man who spoke only hate merely because he was killed. An entire factory of temporary workers were abducted by ICE and had their human rights violated while imprisoned, which isn’t even the worst thing that happened that week. The president of the United States of America has called on the various executive powers of the government to start investigating anyone who has spoken ill of him publicly (culminating in Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air for incredibly innocuous comments, but that seems to have broken through to the general public in a way nothing else has so far, which feels both horrendous and mildly relieving–horrendous because so much worse has happened already and mildly relieving because finally, something broke through to the public). A man going about his day-to-day life was killed by ICE agents who lied about what happened and will likely face no real consequences because there’s no way to know for sure who did what because they’re going around with their faces hidden and all identifying information removed from what can’t even be called their uniforms. All of this, and so much more I can’t bear to write about (or don’t dare to write about) has happened in the first half of the month (September, 2025).
Continue readingThe Griefs Of Immortality And Moving On
At the end of last week, I wrote about the anime Frieren and walked right up to discussing why stories about immortals learning to deal with losing the people who were an important part of their life is of particular interest to me. I actually wrote a couple paragraphs about that, but it didn’t really fit in with talking about the anime in general or the specific parts of it that I found the most engaging while watching it, so I cut them out and morphed them into this blog post. After all, that idea, the core of why those kinds of stories are interesting to me, is what prompted me to write about Frieren and I want to explore the space a bit more than I could while discussing the show itself.
Continue readingClearing A Low Bar With My Birthday Celebration
For most of my life, I haven’t enjoyed my birthday. Once the shine of new toys and celebrations wore off during my childhood (following yet another ruined birthday party) I was mostly only interested in my birthday as the vehicle my parents used to give their children toys. Most of the time, unless we got a gift of money from a relative (this only applied to cash since all checks were deposited in our college saving account), got a reward for good grade, or saved up our allowances, our parents wouldn’t buy us anything unnecessary. They’d take us to the library or to the video rental store (and eventually the video game rental store) once a week each, but we rarely got anything permanently ours outside of our birthdays, Christmas, and the one souvenir we were allowed during family trips that happened to go somewhere that had a gift shop. Which meant that by the time I was eight or nine, birthdays had become just a means of getting new toys and books that I could keep (being able to keep something as my own was a big deal as a kid with three siblings and a “we will buy ‘big’ things for the family but not a specific child” family rule). They stayed that for a few years and, after the month of August was basically ruined for me by a few years of consecutive traumas during the month, stopped being special. I mean, I was so detached from my birthday that I got through all but the last half hour of my eighteenth birthday before I remembered that it was, in fact, my birthday since I was so busy at college with my new friends and my family wasn’t the sort to reach out via phone calls or texts at the time.
Continue readingHow To Not Have An Opinion About Something On The Internet
Just don’t talk about it!
Now that this… I don’t know, fakeout? is over, I’m here to actually talk about Final Fantasy 14 and my suddenly rampant and runaway focus. I wrote out most of a blog post talking about not having an opinion about something and fell into the ancient trap that is talking about not having an opinion is still having an opinion, so I decided to delete all that but wanted to keep the title and the new opening “paragraph” because, really, this is advice that a lot of people out there need (myself included, clearly!). Thankfully, I managed to avoid contradicting my own advice since pretty much the only thing I think about these days is trying to get into some kind of actual loop in Final Fantasy 14 now that I’ve got the energy to do other stuff and have changed how I’m playing the game. My whole “take a relaxed approach and just do whatever” thing doesn’t really work anymore since my once-forgotten default (relaxed puttering) for that kind of approach is slowly morphing back into “just keep doing stuff without end” and keeping me up way too late at night. I need to create and enforce some structure on myself so I can still do fun things but maybe do them without also staying up past two in the morning–which I need to stop doing so I can actually take advantage of how much more potential energy I’ve got these days rather than my recent usual status of having a willing mind and soul but an incapable-due-to-complete-exhaustion body. Structure and a list of goals has helped with similar problems in the past–though they were coming at this from the other direction, of being so tired that I could barely push myself to do anything–so I’m hoping they’ll help again with my video game time so I can maybe return to getting a decent six hours of sleep most nights.
Continue readingStaggering Over The Finish Line After Today Kicked My Ass
Some days just kick your ass and all you can do at the end of the day is stick to the list of chores you gave yourself and hope that tomorrow will suck less. Today’s one of those days for me. Got to work a bit late (but no big deal, I’ve got no obligations so I can just stay late) and immediately got plunged into the shit. Catching up coworkers who were out, starting on things that I’ve been waiting for people to get back into the office to do, having to chase people down to get my testing setups fixed, losing hours and hours to a problem no one can figure out, having my boss skip our one-on-one meeting when I’ve got stuff to talk about, and finding out that my coworker who has been out a bunch will be out even more (and I can’t even just feel angry at him because he’s getting surgery to fix his knee, so I’m also a little scared about what this will mean for him since he’s nearly sixty and this could have a huge impact on someone who is, sure, a frequent source of frustration for me, but also someone I care about since I’ve worked literally side-by-side with him for the last eight and a half years). It’s all been a bit much today and yet I’ve still got to go grocery shopping since I won’t have a chance to do that again until thursday, I’ve still got to do my chores because I’ve got other ones every single day between now and when my friends show up (which I’m very excited for), and I still have to find time to eat dinner and have at least a little fun somewhere in there so I don’t go to bed hating my existence as much as I do right now.
Continue readingCaught Between A Horrible Week And Another Rough One
Between this week’s cruel irony, yet more horrible back-to-back hour-long phone adventures trying to take care of problems caused by an incredibly shitty healthcare supply company, and a few knife twists at my day job in the same vein as the ones that started this worsening burnout, I have found a new depth of burnout. My back muscles are knotting up from the stress, it takes focused effort to not clench my jaw, my recently-normal indigestion is blossoming into full sourcelss nausea, and I’m so tired I could fall asleep in an instant. I am scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what I can make myself do and I still have more stuff to do that I can’t get around. I need to go buy food for myself and my bird. I can’t put off taking the trash out for another day. I need to get in my usual overtime so I can remain financially solvent. I need to actually do stuff over the weekend so I don’t spend the whole thing wallowing in misery. I also really need to go for more walks, get more sun, and make sure I’m geared up for whatever horrible weather might or might not pass through my area this weekend (there’s lots of vague warnings about potential weather events but little that is certain [and basically none of that hit my area]). All while I’m so worn out and exhausted that there isn’t a single treat, little or big, that I can think of that would improve my mood. Everything feels like an equal hassle, which is usually a sign that I’m overwraught or dealing with a nasty depression spike, but knowing that doesn’t help me any. I have to figure out how to solve this problem because it’s not like anyone else is going to figure it out for me. I’ve got no one in my life who can do that work for me and I unfortunately saw my therapist the morning before this entire week went to hell, so I’ve got another week and a half before my next appointment.
Continue readingLaboring To Make Sure My Value Isn’t Only Seen In My Labor
I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be the sort of person who, in multiplayer video games, tends to be the one doing infrastracture projects. The best example of what I mean is back in my old days of playing Valheim with some of my friends. There was a lot of cooperative labor and effort put into what we were doing in that game because the very nature of the game demands it (or at least strongly encourages it), but we all had our own time to work on individual projects and it was very telling that all of mine were things like building new bases for us to share, creating pathways to ease travel to resource clusters, and setting up various mechanic-based game features (things like resource farms and safe places to go AFK (Away From Keyboard)). I’d make roads so that, when we were mining, it would be easy to move the cart back and forth with everything we’d gathered. I’d do research into how base raids would start and what prevents monsters from spawning so I could make what we wound up calling “AFK Island” so that the server’s owner could leave it running with his character in-game so the rest of us could play whenever we wanted to (and so we could go AFK without worrying about being swarmed by goblins or dragons or whatever the current threat was). I even set up monster farms with safe sprinting paths so that we could collect resources that were normally a pain to acquire without too much fuss or danger. I’d make minecart pathways and Nether roads in Minecraft. I’d maintain the group’s purse and resource allocation in multiplayer Stardew valley. And now, in Final Fantasy 14, I’m taking it upcon myself to craft a bunch of food we use for raiding.
Continue readingFeeling Seen As I Do My Best To Be Ignored
Earlier this week, one of my friends (the friends-as-family type) sent me a playlist he’d been putting together of songs he thought I might like. I was a really nice experience, to have this sent to me, since he was absolutely correct on all counts, so much so that I’m still listening to the whole playlist over a week later. It was funny to immediately see that two of the songs on the playlist were songs I already loved and listened to regularly, but the rest were all new to me and all absolutely perfect songs. Well, perfect for me. It made me feel incredibly “seen” in a way that feels increasingly rare these days, especially as I’m often living in a conflicting manner when it comes to the various major portions of my life. At work, I do my best to not be seen and known in this way because I don’t trust my coworkers (which has gone from a general trepidation about being vulnerable with my coworkers and grown into an entirely justified mistrust), which is at odds with the way I live my life online or with the people I trust who I try to be as genuinely myself with as possible. Throw in a couple other places where the way I live as myself is different–the discord for my Final Fantasy 14 Free Company where I try to be myself but lightly and with little revelation of personal details for example, or my local friend group where I was forced to withdraw into myself in order to cope with last year’s pain and sleeplessness–and you can probably start to imagine how much internal conflict I’m dealing with most of the time. I have only one small space where I can be genuinely myself and it is in text messages I exchange with my closest friends, which feels incredibly stifling and makes me feel like I’m being ignored by the whole world.
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