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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The Price Of Burnout
After months (and perhaps even years, depending on how you want to measure it), I’m taking my first break where my depression hasn’t been a factor. Which means that, as I’m assessing myself and my well-being, my burnout is the remaining explanation for how awful I feel. Surprisingly, my depression was only about twenty percent of how bad I’ve been feeling for a long time and while it, and so many other factors, contributed to my burnout, removing my depression as a factor doesn’t decrease my burnout. It just shows me how bad things have gotten. Which is why I’m going to be taking a break from proper blog posts today and tomorrow. I’ve finally hit the point in this suddenly-a-full-week of vacation where I’m able to spend time and energy thinking about stuff, but I’m trying to avoid pushing myself too hard, so I will probably write posts, I’m just going to save them for maintaining my buffer after two days of posts and absolutely no writing as I felt myself by-and-large removed from reality by the personal collapse I’ve experienced as a result losing the tension and focus that has been keeping me going for the last eight months. So don’t look for a post tomorrow, but you can expect to see them again on Monday and I expect I’ll have plenty to say about all this which I’m sure you’ll be able to read next week at the latest.
No Post Today
It is Labor Day in the US and while the country is absolutely a garbage fire turning from a concerning blaze into the beginning stages of a city-destroying conflagration, we still have federal holidays for the time being and I’m absolutely taking advantage of that to rest up. No blog post writing for me today, which means nothing gets posted today. Go join a protest. Make a plan to call your representatives. Set up a schedule for calling payment processors. Labor Day isn’t exactly about rest, after all, but a recognition of the power of the laborers in this country and the things they fought for (and a reminder of what we’re slowly losing as unions are dismantled and power is coalescing into authoritarianism). Flex a bit of that power by reminding the world at large how strong we are when we work together.
Falling 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).
Continue readingWeary After A Weekend Of Not Enough Rest Despite My Best Efforts
This past weekend (as of writing this a week-ish before it gets posted) was not as restful as I would have liked. Between the on-going but slowly dimishing symptoms of my antidepressant withdrawal and the absolutely debilitating emotional journey of the Final Fantasy 14 content I was playing, I am going into my final day of “a restful weekend” feeling like I’ve gotten even less sleep than usual. I know that this is the fatigue from the withdrawal compounding what would have been an emotionally draining weekend no matter what, but it still sucks to have so thoroughly overestimated how much I could handle. I mean, I barely did any chore, spent most of my time sitting around in my apartment or trying to cool off my office without turning my AC on, and slept as much as I could, but I’m still starting this Tuesday even more tired than I started my weekend. All of the socializing in-game probably didn’t help, since social interaction has been incredibly draining during this period of withdrawal. It also didn’t help that I went through two heavy days of emotionally draining (in a good way) story quests in Shadowbringers and then followed that up immediately by getting absolutely wrecked by a side-quest (in a bad way) before pushing through it to do some social activities that were fun in the moment but were probably not a wise thing for me to do at that point. I had the distinct thought that I should probably shut the game down early and spend some time dealing with the experience I’d had and instead chose to avoid that and only shut down the game when the maintenance was about to start.
Continue readingGetting Back To Work And Thinking About The Future
I’ve been taking it easy for about a month now. Maybe a little more than. After we found out that the final release meeting of my project got delayed until just this past week (as this gets posted), I decided to take my long put-off week of vacation. I unfortunately did it after a full day of work on a Monday, but I still got a decent week away from work by taking the next Monday off. Since then, I’ve been dealing with the fallout of pushing myself as hard as I did and my current medication-induced exhaustion, all of which means that I’ve been avoiding overtime in my work weeks. Mostly by taking days off every week, forcing myself to avoid even doing the “here’s how much overtime I could get” calculous because I can’t get overtime until I’ve got 40 non-PTO hours allocated to a week and I’m not going to work eight “extra” hours without getting my overtime pay. It’d be better to just not use the vacation time in the first place. Anyway, I’ve taken at least one day off each week, mostly dictated by my messed up sleep schedule, overwhelming exhaustion, or my poor physical health. I expected, initially, that I was only going to take it easy for the first two weeks, the ones involving my planned week-off of work, but something has come up every single week since then that has left me with one or more days where I could not force myself into the office.
Continue readingAvoiding My Reflection In Wanderstop By Not Playing It
Back when I originally conceived of my post-work-project vacation, I realized it lined up with the release date of the game “Wanderstop,” a fact that tickled me to no end since Wanderstop is about burnout and I was (and still am) incredibly burned out. I thought it would be incredibly appropo if I played the game about burnout while recovering from my own, but that was before I got into Final Fantasy 14 and developed a bit of an dependence on the escapism it provides (since it has been my sole escape for three solid months as of this post going up). Still, one of my friends was interested in it and I was in a bit of a giddy mood since the game had come out, my project had released, and I was putting my break off for an unknown amount of time, so I decided to stream it for my friend over discord. I booted it up, started playing it, got through the stage-setting stuff at the beginning, and then promptly got my ass handed to me by the game as I played it like I’d play any game and it was absolutely prepared for me to do that in ways I didn’t fully expect. It all but called me out by name as I played it for an hour and a half, to the degree that I closed the game to go to bed that night and have been kind of afraid to open it again. It’s not every day that a game holds up a mirror for you to see a perfect reflection of yourself and I’ve been so mentally and emotionally fragile lately that I didn’t think I could risk it.
Continue readingI Can Have One Week Without Schedules Or Plans As A Treat
I’ve been putting off taking some kind of vacation for a month now (as of writing this). I started this year knowing that I’d need to spend the first three months focused, working a lot of hours, and not taking any time off to rest because we had a super important deadline we all needed to meet. Then, once we met it, I’d need to stick around for a while in case anything came up during or immediately after the product’s release. That sort of thing doesn’t happen often since my team is really good about doing high-quality work and not missing problems during our first pass, but it does happen sometimes and this project was important enough that I could get called in from any vacation I was taking that didn’t involve me leaving the state. Then all of this planning became reality and I was right on the money until it came time to do the final release meeting for the project. Turns out that this release meeting was delayed for another four-ish weeks due to internal reasons I’m not going to go too deeply into (for the same reasons I don’t talk specifics about my job) while I was working from home due to being ill a week ago (as of writing this). Which means I got to come into the office after all that was done, learn that most of the people I worked on the project with were gone on vacation, and then, after a day of exhausting myself with frustrated spiraling, realize that I could take a whole week off since I’d already told my boss that I had a week of vacation time in the chamber. So I did that and now I’m sitting in my home office, Final Fantasy 14’s title screen music playing in the background, as I write this over the remains of the Chinese food I picked up from the place down the street for my lunch.
Continue readingStaggering Exhaustedly Into Another Week
Adjusting to my new medication has been rough. Not as rough as the last one was, sure, but given how long it has been since I’ve felt like I was near one hundred percent (and the fact that I started this medication as soon as I felt I could when coming off the last one), it feels maybe worse than it otherwise would. There’s a lot of emotional weight behind the thought “I don’t know how long it has actually been since I felt more than alright” and it occasionally winds up one hell of a sucker punch to throw my way when I’m feeling down. It doesn’t help that the benefits I’m supposed to be seeing from this medication haven’t really materialized yet and I don’t know if they ever will. It’s entirely possible that this one just doesn’t work for me and that I’ll have spent two months waiting for something that just won’t materialize. Or that has somehow materialized without me knowing it? It’s difficult to say, sometimes, given how much the tiredness from this medication is just sort of casting a pall over my life. That’s the problem with such overwhelming tiredness: it’s difficult to keep track of anything at all, much less how you’re feeling, when your predominant physical and emotional state is “ready to fall asleep the instant I relax” all day, every day.
Continue readingSick Of (And From) This Weather
As often happens, when the temperatures rise and fall pretty rapidly from one day to another, I’ve gotten sick. It definitely doesn’t help that I’m super burned out and exhausted from the pains of last year combined with the project I’ve been doing for so long at work that I’ve forgotten what it is like to not be constantly thinking about it. All it takes these days is a tiny disruption and I am down for the count, especially now as I’m trying a new medication and tiredness/low-energy seems to be one of the common side-effects that I’m trying to cope with. Which means I’m working from home today (the day I’m writing this) and doing my level best to actually rest a bit. I’m really not sure how much more of this I can take, if I’m being quite honest. I know I’m physically reaching a breaking point, but I’ve got maybe another week or two before the project is fully done and I can just take an entire week off from work to sleep, rest, do nothing, and try to start undoing the damage all this constant stress and burnout has done…
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