Hell is anxiously checking for a response to a message you haven’t even typed yet, much less sent. It is having made a decision that you haven’t followed through on yet, essentially forcing you to make the decision over and over again as your mind picks at it. It is knowing that you have to keep making a decision every day for years if you want it to ever pay off, despite how far away that moment might be. It is knowing something and being unable to act on it, not now and probably not ever. It is all these moments of anixety and powerlessness and more besides. These days, I find myself steeped in such things: conversations I don’t know how to start, things I feel foolishly compelled to heavily qualify before sharing, decisions made long ago that I must stick to because nothing’s changed enough to reevaluate them, and recognitions of problems I can do nothing positive to resolve. All my other choices are worse than whatever I’ve picked, acting on anything will most-likely return bad results, and no amount of practice is going to make it any easier to start conversations I feel weird for having because I was trained to ask nothing of people and still struggle to ask for anything that might require other people to put in effort on my behalf. I hate being in these kinds of no-win-but-the-long-run situations and even my therapist agrees that my life is pretty much entirely made up of them these days. I just want problems that are easy to handle, a society that doesn’t feel like it is on the verge of collapsing, and the ability to ask things of people without feeling the need to preempt all the potential negative directions the conversation could go if I was misinterpreted.
Continue readingStress
Burgeoning Burnout And Undeniable Exhaustion
It has been a difficult week. Following my therapy appointment a couple days ago, I spent the rest of that day and all of the next at home, taking time off work. Today, the day I’m writing this a week before it goes up, I’m in the office for a normal 10+ hour shift and mentally prepared to not go in to work at all tomorrow since I’d only need to spend two days of PTO at that point. If I’m not going to get any overtime this week because of how acute my burnout is and how exhausted I feel from coming face-to-face with said burnout, its causes, and the things keeping it the same size at best or growing at worst with each passing day, I might as well give myself an extra day off so I can maybe get enough rest to tackle next week without needing to cut my days short. I also just don’t want to be here. I have described, in detail, how much things at my job have wrecked me over the past two years and I can’t pretend, even for a little bit, that I’m okay with this, comfortable with what’s going on, or happy about any of it in the slightest. I mean, it’s not like I’m being actively tortured or anything, or abused by any meaning of the word. I’m just being taken for granted and have Hard Work’d my way into an untenable position where my entire team not only expects me to do a great deal of organizational labor that isn’t at all a part of my job, but will actively make my life difficult if I’m not doing it by complaining to my boss that I don’t seem to be working much at all. It’s not a great position to be in, especially because my boss agrees with them, or at least he did six months ago when he brought it up during my yearly review, and I’m not entirely sure what to do.
Continue readingAnxiety That’s Lingering Just As Long As This Cough
Yesterday’s post was called “On The Other Side Of Sickness” because it was a bit of wishful thinking about the future. I wrote it on a Monday, as I went into work while still unwell, and hoped that, by the time I was editing it, I’d be better. I am not. I’m also a bit behind in blog posts because work has been so busy and I’ve been so cotton-brained and tired that I’m having difficulty focusing. It is truly awful, to feel myself mentally diminished and be unable to do anything about it at all. And yet I must soldier on because there is work to do, money to earn, plates to spin, balls to juggle, and a small legion of crafters and gatherers and combatants to lead into a new Final Fantasy 14 patch (we’re up to six people, as of the night before I wrote the first draft of this). Lots going on and very little rest to be had despite my illness, which definitely hasn’t helped me get over the last bits of this. I’d be tired and unfocused at this point regardless of having a cold, so it’s no wonder that I still feel as loopy as I do. I wish I could say it was all bad choices, but only staying up late last night was a bad choice and it was a bad choice made knowing that I spent the two previous nights unable to fall asleep. Not because of coughing or congestion or anything like that. No, this was because I was too warm or I couldn’t get comfortable or my mind just wouldn’t wind down or I kept jerking awake as I was falling asleep for some reason. I don’t really know what’s got me in such a fuss right now, but I can definitely tell that it’s my anxiety coming at me like it hasn’t in a long time.
Continue readingThe Power Of A Laboriously Prepared Meal
In my many years of living as an adult in this crazy world of ours, I’ve learned that the number one thing I can do when I’m stressed or feeling like I have no control or just too anxious for my usual methods to handle is to take some time to rest and, most importantly, to spend some of that time cooking a large, elaborate meal. Growing up as part of a Catholic, Midwestern family, providing people with food was an expression of love, with more volumnous and/or more elaborate food making a statement about the depth of your care for the person (or people) getting the food you’ve made. After all, the much/elaborate food acts as a display of the time and resources you’re willing to spend on someone else’s fleeting, but still life-sustaining, experience. This hasn’t always turned out well for me, considering how much it ties into the whole “earn love through service/giving to others” thing that has fucked me up my whole life, but I’ve been able to reclaim it as an adult as a means of showing myself, in a way that hits all my senses and displays a degree of care about myself, that I can afford to spend a decent amount of money, time, and effort on something I absolutely do not need and merely want. It’s a lot like retail therapy–an assurance of your comfort and safety–but with the explicit reminder that this will only ever be a fleeting thing you’ve done for yourself. Additionally, the engagement of the senses is an excellent grounding technique, the effort of cooking an elaborate meal is involved enough that my mind can’t wander elsewhere, and I usually wind up with a bunch of good food to eat over the course of a few days.
Continue readingAn Out-Of-Mind Experience
Today, the day I’m writing this (a week before it gets posted), is the first day any of my relatives could have reasonably received the letters I sent out earlier this week. It might take longer than usual, given the government shutdown and everything, but today’s the day were my anxiety goes from “steadily bubbling” to “boiling over” as I begin to flinch every time my phone buzzes or it’s little “you’ve got a notification!” light turns on. I do not want to hear from any of them. I’m not interested in what any of them have to say immediately upon reading my letter and explicitly mentioned not sending me texts or calling me in the letter itself, so I should not be hearing from any of them. I will, almost certainly, be hearing from at least one of them at some point this weekend, though. Not sure what it’ll be about, considering the various relatives getting a letter and their wide range of knee-jerk responses to stuff, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually. After all, it’s not purely unhealthy communication if there’s not also communication when you’ve explicitly said you want none. I expect that the general content of whatever message I get will include some form of apology, some number of excuses or “explanations” for past behavior, and then either a statement that they’ll do what I asked in my letter (despite already contacting me) or some statement about the importance of family connections with a deflecting acknowledgement that our family communicates poorly. Bonus points if it includes both.
Continue readingMixed Emotions About Doing Different Activities Instead Of Final Fantasy 14
Not playing Final Fantasy 14 for a few days has been a weird experience. I wrote Monday’s post about taking a break from FF14 before I actually put it into effect. I stayed up pretty late on Sunday night to wrap up the Dawntrail expansion and solidified my decision to take a break betwen then and writing my blog post the following day during breaks at work. Then I left work early so I could participate in my Monday night Ultimate raid practice, spent a few hours making alternate characters on my now-open server to combat my anxiety, spent a few hours last night working on the final raid in the Alexander Savage raid series my group is doing, and then spent another hour and a half after that hanging out online and unlocking an activity that I was planning to do tonight. I haven’t really played all that much less than normal, at least looking at it on the basis of daily participation. I did, however, stop playing FF14 every night with time enough to still do other things before bed, which I didn’t used to do. And tonight I’m not actually doing the activity I unlocked because I was at work until my personal cut-off time (8:30pm, a time I will not work past except in the case of emergencies) and had to do my grocery shopping after that because my car is going to be trapped in my apartment’s underground garage for a few days while the parking lot is filled up by the roofing company that will be spending the next few days replacing the rooves of my apartment building and the one next door that shares a parking lot. So I got home super late, ate dinner late, showered late, and was too miserable and tired to want to hop online for thirty minutes or whatever. So I’m writing this instead.
Continue readingWeird Anxiety Spikes Are Still Less Trouble Than My Depression Was
Two months into my current dose of antidepressants and I’m pleased to say that my old misery/constant depression has stayed consistently gone. I’ve had my ups and downs during this period, my sleepless weeks that make the whole world seem darker, but it has been a weight off my shoulders to not have to fight myself every step of the way. Well, mostly. I’m still fighting myself occasionally, in ways that I was only sort of prepared for, and that by only one weirdly intense interaction with someone and the constant refrain of people complaining about weird increases in anxiety. Turns out, one of the side effects I’m experiencing is irregular but intense anxiety spikes. My brain will pick one specific thing and get incredibly bent out of shape about it no matter what that that thing is or what I tell myself. The first one was about a weird experience I had in a discord server and how I should have responded, where I worked myself up like I haven’t in a decade despite my best efforts to calm down and work through it myself. The second one was about my birthday, though I didn’t recognize it for a strange anxiety spike given how negatively I normally feel about contemplating my birthday. Currently, I’m struggling to contain the anxiety I feel about knowing that the world population status on Final Fantasy 14 has changed as part of today’s update (the day I wrote this) and the intense feeling that I need to take this time to make alternate characters because there’s no telling when the world will close again or how long it will be until it opens up again in the future. I’ve had a couple other spikes here or there, but they were all easier to work through: things that took a few calming breathes or waiting a few minutes for my mind to calm down rather than the day or days that these other ones are taking.
Continue readingToday Is A Day For Rest
Needing to take a day to rest so soon after taking an entire week off has me thinking about my long-term plans. I typically try to space out my rest days and PTO usage a bit more, so I don’t burn through it too quickly. Plus, you get way more bang for your buck during weeks with holidays and it gives me a good reason not to work insanely long days in order to make up for not getting overtime on the day that I’m off work already (which is all part of the particulars for how my employer handles overtime and overtime eligibility). Spacing them out has been my way of maximizing my rest over the past couple years, by doing sprints instead of long marathons, but that has not stopped my burnout from slowly getting worse and worse. Taking a longer rest really hasn’t been an option at any point, though I’ve gotten close to it being an option a few times before something happened to return my financial situation to the edge of precarity. For these last few years of rising rent and cost of living, I have to carefully manage my time and energy so I can maximize the number of weeks in a year that I’m working as much as I can handle. I need the money, after all, and overtime is much more time-efficient than getting a second job. Ten hours of overtime each week gets me three quarters of a week’s pay per paycheck and none of the side jobs I can find would come even close to matching that level of income for the same amount of time. No matter what I do, no matter what numbers I crunch or how I try to rebalance my budget, there just isn’t more I can extract from myself without descending into misery. And yet, despite knowing all that, I’ve already hit a point where I can’t keep pushing myself to work and I haven’t even been back in the office working for three weeks.
Continue readingThe Burnout’s Back Already
It took about two full weeks of my normal work schedule, but my burnout and related exhaustion have come roaring back. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve been struggling to sleep due to stress about things going on in the world and the mounting anxiety that there’s something I could be doing that I’m not doing (which, by it’s very nature, is an impossible anxiety to resolve given that I’m already doing as much as I reasonably can and don’t know of anything else I could actually do that’s also useful). There’s just no escaping any of the mounting pressure I’m feeling, at work or at large in the world, and it has left me more brittle than even I expected. I had thought that, between my antidepressants and a week off of work, I’d recovered some of my resilience–my ability to endure–but that does not seem to be the case. Maybe if I was sleeping more, that would still be true. Maybe if I could get away from the stress of it all for more than a few moments here or there, it would still be true. I don’t know. Maybe if I actually got out of bed on time, maybe if I could force myself back into a proper workout routine, maybe if I wasn’t feeling sweaty almost constantly due to the one annoying side effect of my antidepressants… So many maybes and I have no certain answers. I don’t even know if I can get any more certainty than I’ve got, even, since it’s not like there’s much left for me to try in terms of my day-to-day life that won’t definitely make things worse for me.
Continue readingI’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.
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