I’ll be skipping this week’s Infrared Isolation post. Chapter 10 is going to need another week because, frankly, I’m pretty burned out and the thought of pushing myself to get it done and then asking my editor/alpha reader to get it back to me quickly felt like volunteerily going to hell for vacation. I’m not about that life so, instead, I’m taking a rare break and posting only this today. Not even gonna try to come up with some essay to fill the gap since doing OTHER work doesn’t really address the whole “too tired to do work” part of being burned out. Hope you’re all having a great weekend and that we’re not all drinking ourselves into a stupor following the apparent end of democracy in the US.
Rest
“Vacation” Just Means You Have To Work More Later
It has been a week since my close scrapes with having my car run over by a truck, running out of gas on the highway, and having a mental breakdown at my workplace. I got some rest, tried to unwind, spent some time taking care of the issues I could resolve on my own, and now I’m back at work. It is, unfortunately, like I never left. Yesterday was so busy that I had a stress headache and an overstimulated migraine at the same time, and wound up spending my evening sitting in a comfortable position on my couch while drinking plenty of water with all the lights off except the dim light of my television and my always-on christmas lights. All of which normally helps but didn’t this time (probably because of how long the combo migrache had been going on), so I would up turning to painkillers and eventually those helped. Sleep eventually killed the lingering effects of the migrache so I was ready to tackle today. Except this horrible combination of brain pains is already back because today is busy as well and it’s not like I magically got used to my new underclothes in twenty-four hours.
Continue readingPensive Rest
One of the best feelings in my life right now is waking up slowly. To be able to slowly swim to consciousness from the pure darkness of a dreamless sleep. To slowly resurface into the world around me as I slip free of a dream that has held me within its embrace through the night. To know it doesn’t matter when I’ve come to awareness because there is nothing going on that needs my time or attention until I’m ready to give it. Even when I haven’t slept enough to feel properly rested, it still feels comforting to know that I can take my time waking up or that I can just go back to sleep if I feel like it. Having that choice is a wonderful feeling.
Continue readingBreaking Points And Self-Care
I almost hit a breaking point last week. I’d been putting off getting gas because I was too tired to do it after work, in too much of a hurry to do it before work, and too exhausted to think of leaving my apartment for anything over the weekend. So I left my apartment with basically no gas in my tank and panicked during the second half of my commute about potentially running out of gas before I got to the gas station because I hit two patches of stop-and-start traffic due to massive tractors being on the highway. Then, it turned out the gas station I went to had ripped out every single pump and not just part of the parking lot like it had looked from the street. While searching for nearby gas stations (a lot of stuff in that area has closed in the past 2 years, so I wanted to be sure I went to someplace that was still open with what might have been the last of my gas), a stupid, massive pickup truck almost backed over me despite me honking at the driver and opening my window to yell. Either he didn’t see me or didn’t care, but I only didn’t get run over by this truly massive lifted pickup (large enough and high enough to have just driven right onto and over my car) because the people who had been blocking me in moved enough that I could get away. After that, I got gas, went in to work, took one sip of my morning coffee, and realized that if I tried to work through the day as I had planned, I was going to have a breakdown.
Continue readingMidweek Check-In
This upcoming weekend is my first weekend off in what feels like months. It has been long enough since I’ve had a weekend without commitments that I would have to carefully backtrack to figure out when it was and I’m currently too tired to do that, which means it has definitely been a while. I also technically don’t have zero commitment this weekend, either, because I’ve got three or four tabletop things planned (four if my Friday group meets), for a grant total about ten hours of tabletop gaming. More than half of which I’m running. Plus, most of my “relaxation” plans for this weekend are about cleaning my apartment since I haven’t had a chance to do much of that lately. Not that I’m living in filth or anything. My kitchen is clean and my bathroom is as clean as most bathrooms ever get, but it’s been a long while since I’ve done anything other than spot dusting and vacuuming. So I’ve got a lot more going on than pure relaxation this weekend.
Continue readingPost-Vacation Reflections
Welp, I did it. I went on vacation and survived. Everyone got along, we all had as much space as we wanted, and I got to enjoy having a largely unstructured week. The most frustrating part of the trip was that people would talk about doing something in the morning, I’d set an alarm accordingly (to ensure I was up and ready to go by the discussed time) and rarely was that true of anyone else. Which wasn’t really a big deal since I could just play video games or read or go for a walk or anything else I desired, so all things said and done, it was a pretty great trip. I do wish I came out of it feeling more rested, but I also didn’t spend more than an hour laying in bed, feeling super depressed before coming in to work this morning, so I think I benefited from the rest. Another week or two would have been better, but it would also have been better to have won the lottery, so I’m content with what I got.
Continue readingVacation Conjecture
Today is my first day back to my normal life following my vacation. I can only guess at how I feel right now, since I’m writing this two weeks prior in order to allow myself a break from daily blog updates during said vacation. The actual week I’m on vacation is going to be only flash fiction so I can avoid feeling guilty for not posting anything. I’ve spent a week in a distant cabin a few hours north of where I normally live, enjoying a getaway with two of my younger siblings and two of my friends (all of us made up my old Monday night D&D group back before I realized I needed to dial things back a little bit in 2021). Some of these people met each other in person for the first time while sharing a cabin with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and probably just a little bit too little space for all five of us to be comfortable together. As someone who has lived alone for two years, I imagine it took a bit of getting used to for me and that I found great solace in the ability to just go for a walk or sit outside in the shade.
Continue readingManaging Vacation Anxiety
As I begin the careful calculus of packing and planning for my vacation, I’ve started weighing the various options I have for types of entertainment to bring with me to this isolated cabin. I have so many options that are portable enough to consider bringing with that I’m concerned I might be packing more tabletop and video games than everything else put together. It has been a long time since I’ve done anything to relax that didn’t center being at my apartment for an extended period of time, so I’ll admit I’m overly anxious about how to adequately prepare for my vacation. To be entirely fair to myself, something bad has happened every single time I’ve taken more than one or two days off of work for the past two years, so these anxieties aren’t entirely unfounded. Since one of the main strategies for processing anxieties involves acknowledging the parts that are actually reasonable or at least reasonable-adjacent and then taking steps to mitigate them, I’m giving myself space to over-plan and over-pack.
Continue readingVideo Games: The Only Entertainment I’ll Let Frustrate Me Repeatedly
I’ve been getting back into a few games I started earlier this spring and thenfell off of either when new games came out or I hit intense periods of stress that drove me from new experiences to old comforts. I’ve never finished Pokémon Legends: Arceus or Horizon: Forbidden West, for example. I hit a point with both games, stopped playing, and never quite got around to playing either game again despite having enjoyed my time with them. The same is true of the new Pokémon Snap game. I got a ways into that, a new game came out, and I set it aside because it wasn’t a game that I could fall asleep to. That and getting up to change games in my Switch a whole bunch has never been fun when I’m trying to calm down for the evening.
Continue readingThe Slow, Onerous Grind of Change
(Another brief reminder that I write these a week ahead of time and while I hope nothing drastic has happened since I wrote this, it might not be an immediate reflection of the day it gets posted).
The past few days have been exhausting. Reeling from all of the expected but still devasting decisions by those sitting atop the judicial branch of the US government, I still had to go grocery shopping, clean my apartment, make myself meals, do laundry, and navigating a draining social situation that was one of my biggest anxieties which I’d been coping with by telling myself it would never happen. Because it’s not like my life grinds to a halt the instant something terrible happens in the world. I still need to pay bills, feed myself, maintain some kind of social connections, and take care of myself even when I’m trying to figure out how I can respond to the horrible things happening in the world around me.
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