I spent most of my weekend streaming and trying to get back into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It wound up working, thanks to me stumbling from what I thought was just exploring something that looked interesting into recruiting a new sage. I sat down at just before midnight on Saturday with the thought to take an hour, work out how much ground I’d maybe need to go over again thanks to playing my first eighty hours without the sensor, and then do my actual best to reinvest myself in my existing save file. The deal I’d made with myself was that if I put in a genuine effort and still couldn’t get myself caught back up in the game, I’d allow myself to start the game over and then spend most of my stream time doing major quests and storyline stuff while my offline gaming would be exploration, shrine hunting, and resource collection. About four and a half hours later, as I blearily looked out my window at the lightening sky while I finally shut my Switch off, I knew I was back in it for good. Being back into the game felt nice enough that I didn’t even mind royally messing up my sleep schedule during what was supposed to be a proper recovery weekend.
Continue readingRest
The Nature of Rest and My Need for Proximity
I write a lot on here about my levels of stress, of anxiety, of exhaustion, and how difficult it is for me to deal with them in a healthy manner. I often say that I’m bad at resting or I’m not sure how to rest and recover when it comes to mental and emotional drain. One of the things I typically leave out (ultimately, anyway, since I’m pretty sure half-explanations of what is going to be the topic of this blog post are my most-deleted writing on this blog) is that I know of ways for me to get rest. I know of things that soothe me when I can’t seem to unwind or relax. The main problem is that they’re difficult for me to access in ways that keep them soothing or in sufficient quantities that I can actually recover enough that my progress doesn’t vanish the instant something stressful happens. I’ve written before about my need to escape civilization, to get far away from cities and noise and the humdrum of my daily life (I call it “Tree Time” in my head, since I associate this with being in heavily forested areas). What I havent written about is that probably the most restful or soothing thing I can do is connect with other people.
Continue readingPlanning My Rest Around My Exhaustion
I finished unpacking over the weekend. I still have some cleaning to do, and there’s plenty more stuff that will get done in time such as hanging lights, putting up art, figuring out if I need more rugs, and deciding what to do with my balcony. All of that is work that will take weeks and isn’t really a part of unpacking. It sort of is, in the case of the art and lights, since I packed those up for my move, but none of them are things that I feel inclined to do immediately the way I felt the need to empty boxes and get things situated. In short, I’m done with my immediate grind and while there is work to be done on the horizon, none of it needs to be done today or tomorrow or even this week. Now, finally, after an exhausting four weeks, everything is done and I can finally rest. And I’m finally out of obligations for the year, so hopefully I can actually get some this time.
Continue readingNo New Chapter of Infrared Isolation This Week
Between my total exhaustion and my editor being sick, there will be no new chapter of Infrared Isolation this week. Despite my exhaustion, I’ve kept writing, so there WILL be a new chapter next week. I just need to give my editor time to rest up before she reviews it and myself more time to rest up before I try to crunch out another one. Rest is important.
Going on Another Trip
I am once again departing on vacation. I’ll even be seeing the same group of people. This time, though, I’m just driving to New Jersey and then staying there for a week before driving back. The trip to Spain was with a wedding party and now it’s time for the wedding! Sure, I could bring my laptop and try to write while I’m on the East Coast, but I think I’ve got enough going on as it is. I’m going to do my best to rest between visiting friends, finishing my preparations for the wedding, and then being in the wedding. I’m also going to play as much Tears of the Kingdom as I can, so I won’t have a lot of time for writing. Any writing I wind up doing will likely be just for fun and to keep my writing muscles loose during this period of rest, just like while I was in Spain, so little of it is ever likely to see the light of day.
Continue readingMy (Incredibly Loose) Summer Plans
Now that I’ve finally finalized where and when I’ll be moving next month, I can start to make plans for the rest of the summer. Broad strokes only, of course, since I’m still too far out from any chance to rest to get specific. Gotta pace myself, you know? I don’t want to give myself so much to do that I wind up just exacerbating my current burnout. So I’m mostly focusing on the ways I’ll spend my time in general rather than things tied to specific dates. Which, in my case, means video game plans. After all, there’s a whole lot coming out this summer that I’ve been looking forward to, so it’ll be a good summer for gaming, even if I might want to (eventually) make some plans to get me out of what will hopefully be a much cozier, more comfortable apartment.
Continue readingFinding The Silver In All of Last Month’s Grey
The past few weeks have been a study in living with anxiety for me. After my coping mechanisms were overwhelmed during an incredibly stressful week, the nearness of my recent trip prevented me from taking the time I needed to recover. As I’m learning, though, it prevented me from taking the time I thought I needed to recover. This isn’t to say that I somehow did better because I was so busy, or even that I managed just fine. I think time to properly rest would have benefited me, of course, since I felt a deep, aching weariness by the time I had to drive across half the country for a flight and that drive, the flight, and settling in to my trip just added their own spins to my exhaustion. But I managed just fine and I don’t think it was even as self-destructive as I thought it might be. As it turns out, since I was so focused on doing something new and had to take care of or at least confront a bunch of personal issues I’d been putting off, I’m probably better off for being put in this position.
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 readingYou’re Probably Going To See A Lot of “No New Infrared Isolation Chapter This Week” Posts This Month
Life is, once again, kicking my ass. I’d like to say that I listened to my friends for once and decided to take it easy rather than continue to work through the stress, exhaustion, and series of incredibly demoralizing events involved in the past five days, but I genuinely just have not had time or energy to do anything, no matter how much I’d like to. Work has been busy, life has had a series of unfortunate events for me (nothing emotionally destructive like most 2023 prior to last week, thankfully, but it has still been a lot to process and work through every. single. day.), and I’ve been struggling with depression again because of all that on top of returning sleep struggles. It has been a pretty miserable and unredeemable week only made manageable because I’ve been getting a sense of accomplishment (and utter mental/physical/emotional exhaustion) from my day job, so it’s been a bit easier to go without all the writing I normally do to get that.
Anyway, if I keep going too long here, it’ll turn into a full post and the whole “do less so I don’t hate myself, my life, and the entirety of creation” thing I’m trying to do will have failed, so I’m gonna go. Have a great weekend and get some rest. I’ll be doing my best to do that while also attending to the million other things I’ve got to do this month… No real rest for me until April, unfortunately. Who knew international travel took so much preparation?
Taking A Day To Rest After All That Bullshit
No new Infrared Isolation chapter today. If you want to know why, you can just read yesterday’s post. Dealing with the folks who inspired that post, in the days before writing that post and the days following it, has drained me of pretty much every bit of extra energy and willpower I had. So I’m skipping today and just trying to desperately rest in hopes of breaking out of this continuing spiral of awfulness that has been my experience of 2023 so far. Honestly, there’s not much left that can do sour or bad, so hopefully it’ll stop before much longer. In the meantime, I’m going to play Minecraft, as much Splatoon as I can manage, and then try to enjoy a game of Star Wars 5e with the remaining members of my TTRPG group.