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.
Rest
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…
Continue readingExperiment Complete, It Is Unfortunately Back To Business As Usual
One of the worst habits I’ve got is my need for diversion. I’m constantly letting my attention wander if whatever I’m doing isn’t engaging enough to constantly hold it. Most of the time, it’s fine. I can turn on some music to occupy the part of my mind that wanders, turn on a podcast if I need more distraction, or just change activities if I’m not getting anything out of what I’m doing. When I can’t, though, I’m usually at work and trying to focus on something. Which means that my mind wanders to places that I have access to at work, which is unfortunately pretty limited. Though I save my webcomics into the day as long as I can, they’re still not enough to take up all of my “mind wandering away” time, much less that and my “I need to take a break” time as well. Which means I tend to wind up doomscrolling or just cycling through websites I’ve already checked without purpose, neither of which are great for my mental health. That’s why I removed imgur from my phone all those years ago. That’s why I’ve got a couple games on my phone. Those aren’t really one-to-five-minute activities, though, or things that work great it a “work a bunch and then take a break” style work day structure. What I’ve found that works well, though, especially after having a couple chances to try it out recently, is Final Fantasy 14. Unfortunately, I can only use that as my distraction when I’m working from home.
Continue readingRecovery Is A Process
Well, after pushing my limits as far as I could pretty much every work day for two weeks, my physical testing is one day from being done (well, for now. No testing is ever truly “done” and there’ll be more physical testing coming as soon as new parts show up and I’ve got so much software testing that needs doing that I’m starting to think about working on future weekends) and I am exhausted. My arms are sore, my hands are stiff, my forearm muscles have gotten much larger than I ever expected them to be, and I’m ready for another weekend of rest. And maybe another few days past the weekend. I wouldn’t mind some more time for my hands to recover, for my muscles to rest, and for my joints to get some relief. Even keeping my goals modest by sticking to fifty test cycles a day rather than aiming for my previous target of one hundred, the toll this work has taken on my body is considerable. My physical therapist, though, thinks it’s all a good thing since my problems seem to all be muscular now and that I’m as generally resilient as I am about it. I feel better each morning. I’m capable of moving in ways I couldn’t when I was on those medications. I actually got up from a laying-down position using core strength alone and It’s been a good nine months since I even attempted that. I just, you know, ache from repeating the same strenuous activity fifty times a day every day, on top of all my other laborious work. Normal stuff. Anyone else would ache as much, if not more than I do.
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