I hit a point last night where I just…. couldn’t anymore. Between my two workshops, my raid group farming for wings, the roleplaying wrestling league, and my two dearest friends have their characters get married in-game, I just… don’t have any more. So I spent two hours staring at my computer as I tried to figure out something fun to do last night after logging out, gave up and asked for recommendations, and didn’t get much from that, so I just hung up and… stared into space for a while. I’m so burned out, but even that doesn’t explain the depths I sank to last night (as I’m writing this, but at least a week ago as you’re reading it). Something just caused my depression to spike immensely, to the point of withdrawing from people, and I couldn’t push through it to do anything because even the stuff I normally do to stay occupied during those times felt just as pointless and boring as everything else I considered. So I moved to my couch and started into space for half an hour, intermittently crying as I tried to figure out why I felt so bad and why stuff that I generally liked doing suddenly felt so odious and awful. Because that was the thing. Minutes before this happened, one of my other friends asked how my day was and I told her “good,” but then I’m suddenly crashing and feeling like even doing the small tasks of normal preoccupation in Final Fantasy 14 were going to rip my soul out of my body if I forced myself to do them.
Continue readingStress
Trying To Recapture The Joy In Old Hobbies
Once upon a time, just about four years and change ago, I enjoyed little more than spending some time muttering to myself while listening to a podcast or two and putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It was very fulfilling, incredibly engaging, and a different kind of mentally taxing than literally everything else I was doing at the time. It was mostly refreshing to be quite honest, and while I would definitely make my back, elbows, and shoulders ache with how much I’d hunch over my table to participate in this diversion, it was still a net positive that fell by the wayside when I moved into my current apartment. I still have the table I used, complete with padding I’d place on top of the puzzle so I could keep using the table without needing to carefully move the partially-finished puzzle around, but I just don’t spend much time on that floor of my apartment when it comes to my own entertainment. I should spend more time down there. I should stop committing myself to my upstairs area with my video games and office and start finding ways to be more comfortable in the downstairs area. Clean off the mail couch and vaccuum the chair next to my bird’s cage more often, perhaps. Move some books from my to-be-read pile to somewhere downstairs so I’ve got stuff to read and no longer need to feel like I’m making a choice I must commit to every evening. Dig out those puzzles. Maybe even just build a lego set. Anything to get me out of that office and away from my computer. I really need to stop spending so much time in there.
Continue readingMy Severe Depression Rears Its Head Once Again
I’ve been more depressed than usual for a while now. I don’t know if my antidepressants stopped working or if, maybe, I would be worse off without them. It fades sometimes, for hours or an afternoon or an evening, which makes me think they’re still working, but it always comes back. Maybe my meds are less effective than they used to be. Maybe I’m more depressed than I used to be. The latter stands to reason, given the way the world is going, but the former is an unanswerable question so it is where my mind dwells. I do not know how I’d even begin to figure that out. I doubt that there’s a blood test of some kind my doctor could perform that would tell me and while I expect there is some way of figuring it out via brain chemicals, the actual process of testing my brain chemicals seems like it’s not the sort of thing you do to figure out if your antidepressant’s effect is weakening. And it’s not like I can ask my therapist if I seem more depressed than usual. Of course I seem more depressed than usual! Have you looked outside? Have you follow any amount of news? Why WOULDN’T I feel depressed with all that going on? I can’t even say it’s probably both because either one could have this effect on me by itself! So all I can do is wonder while I interrogate my feelings and continue getting the same “I’m too tired to feel anything” response no matter what.
Continue readingDrawn-Out Breakdown Or Recognition Of My Need For Rest
I am struggling to make it through my “normal” work weeks these days. Fifty hours of work was once the norm I lived under but now I can barely make it through a ten hour day. I know how bad that sounds, but working 50-hour weeks was my devil’s bargain for living alone in this expensive modern era. It was the thing that gave me the hope that I’d be able to pay off my student loans “early” (which feels dumb to say considering it has been thirteen years since I graduated college as of the second weekend of May). It is what has enabled me to live with the rising cost of a not-shitty apartment and my unceasing eleven-hundred-dollars-a-month student loan payments (which have finally begun to snowball thanks to paying off one loan with a particularly large quarterly bonus last year). I have depended on it for five years and counting, and I don’t know how I’m going to keep it up anymore. I’d have to move someplace much cheaper if I stopped. I’d have to trim back what few luxuries I allow myself like decent coffee, fresh chicken (that I then freeze, sure, but it’s still better than the already frozen stuff I used to buy), and enough vegetables that I sometime don’t eat them all before they go bad. And the “expensive” frozen pizzas instead of the cheap, crappy ones. But I am so burned out and tired that I can’t really force myself to keep this pace up most weeks and I’m not sure if failing to work that much is me recognizing I need rest more than I need money, or if this is a drawn-out breakdown due to overwork, stress, and isolation combining into the most gnarly, horrible burnout I’ve ever experienced.
Continue readingChased Into A New Day By Last Week’s Problems
This past weekend (as I’m writing this, anyway) was just long enough for my exhausted mind to forget everything that was going on at work. Unfortunately for me, what was going on was investigating a bevy of bugs I’d found and all of them were waiting for me when I got in on my Monday morning. As was one of the German software developers I work with (the one I get along with better, thankfully). I then proceeded to spend seven hours on the phone with him, some of them testing and some of them just shooting the shit while we waited for the very slow test (that was supposed to be much faster) showed whether or not we’d managed to eliminate the bug by changing on of over a dozen variables. It was time-consuming and exhausting work, and honestly some of the most exacting testing I’ve done in a while since the project I’ve been working on for a while now is more of a “does it feel alright? Cool, next thing” type project than a “change dozens of tiny variables one at a time and review the results of a repeated action with each set of variables, all of which must be recorded for historical purposes and further investigation by my developer coworkers. It has left me drained even after getting a couple decent nights of sleep, moreso even than I felt the week prior when I was dead on my feet from not sleeping enough at all. Mostly because the busy afternoon wrapped up with me returning to my desk to find that a recently departed (for the day, not from this mortal coil) coworker had set up a meeting for us to learn about how other departments us AI testing tools.
Continue readingEternal Internal Conflict Over How To Feel About… Everything, I Guess
A lot of my favorite stories and bits of wisdom shared therein tend to revolve around the idea that we, ultimately, are the ones who choose our mood and outlook. From the “I choose joy” speech by Merle Highchurch in The Adventure Zone’s first season to “life does not have to be a perpetual conflict” from the excellent webcomic Little Tiny Things, and all throughout the lexicon of stories from varies points of my life, the idea that we are the one who gets to set the tone and timbre of our response and attitude towards the world is one that appeals deeply to me. It’s one I believe in, with a degree of faith that I’ve rarely managed to muster for anything else except my days of devout Catholicism (when I didn’t know there was anything else out there). A comparison I make because I’m not sure it’s true and it’s definitely not a pearl of wisdom I am living by. As you’ve probably seen by the weekly posts on my blog, I tend to react strongly to the world around me. My emotional state is often dictated by the situations I’m in and the events that occur around me. I have little emotional… inertia, let’s say. I will cry at the drop of a hat if you tell me the hat dropped because it couldn’t stay on a head no matter how much it wanted to. I will get incandescently angry if I see someone mistreated. Whatever mood a room takes will bleed into me no matter how else I’m feeling. I rarely feel like I am in control of my emotions these days, despite how skilled I was at emotional control earlier in my life.
Continue readingA Busy Weekend Is Enough To Wipe Me Out
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 readingKeeping 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.
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