I had a busy weekend. Not the busiest I’ve ever been, but I had stuff going on every day since Wednesday (of the week before I wrote this) on top of a being incredibly busy at work every day, and it has wiped me out. Only thing making today doable is that I’m working from home due to a blizzard. If I had to be around people and at least pretend to be nice and social, I would probably have lost it before the day was even half over. It is weeks like the one that just ended that remind me just burned out I still am. After all, it was busy but not horribly so. I still had time for fun stuff and social activities. I didn’t sleep as much as I’d have liked to, but I got enough. I shouldn’t be this tired. I shouldn’t be feeling like I need a vacation to recover from five semi-busy and mentally engaging days. And yet here I am, tired as well and wondering if one day of rest is going to be enough as I cycle through various tasks, trying to find something that keeps me engaged long enough for me to make any real progress while my mind wanders and I consider what it would be like to not have a giant list of stuff that needs doing and problems that need solving. I miss the days when I could just exist. When I didn’t have to chose between getting low-quality rest and burning more energy to get something done so that I can hopefully get better rest at some unknown point in the future when all the things on my mind that are stressing me out are finally done. I do not know when those days will return again, but it surely won’t be for a while.
Continue readingStress
Keeping My Anger On A Slow Burn
There was a period in my life when I did not consider myself an angry person. A pretty long one, actually. I only began to question that assertion once I no longer had a (sometimes healthy) outlet for any aggression I felt, which was in my mid-to-late twenties. I spent my entire childhood miserable, my teen years surviving, my college years starting to get in touch with my emotions, and still didn’t realize how angry I was about a lot of stuff until I was forced to grapple with the emotional toll of my grandfather’s death and my separation from my parents. You see, I survived most of my childhood by repressing my emotions in a way that had a lasting negative impact, as perhaps best exemplified by the fact that I didn’t experience any kind of mixed or nuanced emotions until sometime in my twenties. I only ever felt one thing up at a time up to that point and it was only as I began to unpack the way that my grief touched everything else I felt that I started to recognize the complexities of what I was feeling prior to that. And thus came the anger. It had been sublimated into so many other emotions, into so many parts of my life, that it was differnet to pull out and understand on it own, especially because I was raised in a particular masculine tradition where not even anger was a “proper” emotion for a man to have. The only proper emotions where love (for god, of course) and remorse (for not loving god enough), so I tamped down a lot of stuff in order to play the part I was assigned.
Continue readingThe Sleepless Spiraling Continues Into Its Second Week
Unfortunately, in the intervening week since I last wrote about my sleep problems, they have not improved. Sure, I managed to get a couple 8-hour nights over the weekend, but only by sleeping until 1pm and then 11am on Saturday and Sunday respectively. Still struggling with being unable to fall asleep and starting to get in a bad habit of giving up immediately when I don’t start to doze off after climbing into bed. It’s a frustrating self-perpetuating cycle: I can’t sleep so I get frustrated which makes it even more difficult to fall asleep which then makes me frustrated about being too frustrated to fall aslep. On top of all the anxiety and stress and stuff, of course. Just a real mess of a situation that I can’t seem to extricate myself from despite how tired and out-of-it I’m getting. I have a therapy appointment tomorrow, which I’m hoping that will help get my feet underneath me again, so to speak. I am going to need to do some work to make sure I’m ready for that therapy appointment, to get my thoughts in order and make sure I don’t miss anything in my exhausted haze or whatever I’ll be in tomorrow, but I will hopefully be able to manage it. After all, it’s not like I can stop thinking about how my life is an endless cycle of doing things because I am passionate about the cause, care enough to see that the work gets done, or feel obligated by either my sense of what is right or the feeling of needing to earn my place somewhere. Heaven forbid I stop thinking about that for even a moment.
Continue readingFear, Trauma, And Self-Regulation In Modern Times
Some days, time crawls. There’s no reason for it. It’s a normal day as far as you can tell. Things are happening, there’s stuff to do, but the minutes refuse to speed up and each second must take its time in the present before moving to the past. This feeling is magnified, though, when times are not ordinary. When your days are not normal. When you live in the years leading up to the rise or fall of a facist government where at least an attempt at democracy once stood, you can wind up with some pretty extraordinary days in the worst way possible and time absolutely crawls then. In better times, your escapes might have brought you relief or a few moments of inattention that let the clock speed up. In current times, there is no escape. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about what is going on in the world and even taking a break from all that to rest isn’t true relief because how can you really stop thinking about that? As someone with a lot of experience with trauma, I’m familiar with how that dagger of an experience can stick in your mind and heart in ways that resists all attempts to quickly dislodge it. I’m not surprised that there’s no real chance at escaping it, but it is still so exhausting and, on days when there isn’t enough going on to distract me, causes every minute to drag out unbearably.
Continue readingA Small Compromise To Prop Up My Mental Health During This Horrible Week
My Final Fantasy 14 workshop has been chugging along this week. There’s new mail in my mailbox every day as people turn items in, there’s a slow trickle of item allotments being claimed in the discord, and plenty of work for me to do as I try to keep up with what people are bringing to me. Since last week’s writing on the matter, I’ve done what I can to address the stress all this has been putting on me. Complicating that, though, is that fact that it just clicked into place that I went from passionately putting in too much work for D&D and my job to adopting a brand new cause to burn myself out on the instant the D&D stuff ended. Beucase that’s what this workshop is: I think my guild in Final Fantasy 14 should have opportunities to make in-game money and, now that the FC leader isn’t doing the work anymore, I’ve taken up the mantle. I didn’t change anything, I just swapped how I was wrecking myself. So, in order to address that, I finally started modding a bit more heavily than I did before. I would argue that it’s still “quality of life” stuff, but I know that’s not what I meant the last time I wrote about this stuff. I mean, sure, being able to update the base texture of my character’s form was huge. Getting rid of the boxiness of their limbs and fingers, a thing that has always bothered me, for just a few days has left me shocked at how bad things look now when I turn the mod off. I’ve also tried out some picture-taking improvements, a mod for trying out looks and adding things to your pictures, and the one that has made all the difference: an auto-crafter.
Continue readingWaiting For Something To Change
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 readingBurgeoning 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.
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