I had to do a presentation at work today. I had time to prepare for it, but I felt a decent amount of resentment that I’d been forced into needing to present at all. The testers at my employer meet once a month (virtually) to watch (or at least listen to) a presentation by representatives from one of the testing teams. The goal is for each team to take turns presenting some aspect of their work in order to foster inter-team communication and provide each other with information that could prove useful in our testing work. While this makes sense for some of the teams, it is pointless for others. It is especially pointless for my team. While a few teams in the Research and Development department work together or work on related products, our company’s diversification means that a lot of us work on entirely unrelated things. Literally no part of my testing work will ever be useful to anyone who isn’t on my team and we already share everything internally, so there’s no point to me going to the meeting. The whole meeting only exists because of a bit of political maneuvering as two people higher up the corporate food chain fought over control of the testers for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s not like either one of them has any actual authority over the rest of us. Neither of them was, is, or ever will be in my management structure. But I still have to go to these meetings and take multiple hours out of my day to prepare a presentation for them, for some reason.
Continue readingStress
No New Infrared Isolation Chapter This Week
I’ve been struggling to write, lately. For some reason, I’ve been feeling emotionally drained and all the work I’m doing takes more effort than usual. Almost like I’m consumed with other matters and unable to properly focus on resting, let alone my work. There’s no new Infrared Isolation chapter this week, but there will be one next week. Who knows what will happen the week after that. I’ve got a lot on my mind these days and it’s difficult to push through it all long enough to make any progress on creative writing, so each new sentence feels like pulling teeth. Just maintaining this blog is enough to finish exhausting me after a day of work, lately… I hope this stress will end someday. I hope things will get better. I’m prepared for them to get worse, though, since I’d rather be surprised by improvement than degredation.
Anyway, happy Saturday and I hope you’re doing alright. I’ll be fine. I just need to spend more time resting and processing stuff for now. See you next week for Chapter 23.
Today Was A Grey, Smokey Day Inside and Out
Content Warning for a long, metaphor-rich discussion of my experience of depression.
Continue readingThe 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 readingTrying To Take It All In Stride
Have you ever had one of those moments where, after telling yourself or someone else that something is fine, finally take a real look at it and realize it isn’t even sort of fine? There’s a wide range of situations that can involve this sort of feeling or experience. It could be something like thinking to myself that my headphones are fine, but then going to put them away and realizing that they’re almost unusable because one of the pieces of tape holding them together came loose and it suddenly struck me that the reason I fold them so oddly these days is because I’m trying to avoid putting any tension on any one of the many pieces of tape. Or it could be a situation like me telling someone that something I’m dealing with is fine and not a problem to the extent of it becoming a small argument only for me to go home, sit down for a bit, and realize that I’m actually completely exhausted and burned out by that thing I said wasn’t a big deal (it has been a few years since this happened, but I’ll never forget the sequence of events). There are a lot of times these little revelations can strike you out of nowhere, especially if you’re as invested in trying to get through your day as I am during times of prolonged high stress like pretty much all of 2023 has been so far.
Continue readingPost-Move Exhaustion Blankets My Mind
I survived my move. As has most of my stuff (so far as I can tell, anyway, about 48 hours after just getting it all into my apartment and then being forced to leave it alone for about 48 hours due to needing to clean out the old place, drive my sister home, and then go to work the day after all that). It was rough, since we had merciless sun in 90 degree (fahrenheit) weather and went from 10am to 4pm, basically. There were plenty of breaks in there and I encouraged everyone to hydrate and rest as needed, but I think several of us wound up with mild heat exhaustion despite my best efforts to keep everyone rested and hydrated (I am one of the people who had it, so clearly I was not pushing people enough). Still, we got it all moved and into my apartment. We then all pretty much collapsed after pushing ourselves to make sure that myself, my sister, and my friend had places to sleep that night. It was a rough evening.
Continue readingI’ve Got Moving On The Mind
One of the major upsides to being an orderly person is that packing does not take as much mental effort. Sure, there’s a bunch of stuff I have to figure out if I want to keep it or throw it away, but I don’t really need to organize my stuff. It’s already very organized and I’m just going to be moving it from where it is to a series of boxes and then back out somewhere that at least sort of matches where it currently is. Books will still be on shelves. Games and puzzles will still probably be in a closet somewhere. It’s not like i’m going to change how my books are sorted. Everything that needs to get packed together is already together. Everything that hasn’t moved from where it sits in my closet in the three years I’ve lived in my current apartment is automatically marked for “keep or toss” assessment. I’ve still got all my old boxes, I haven’t added to my collections much (thanks to the austerity I’ve observed over the past three years), and now all I’ve got to do is slowly, carefully pack it all up and set it to the side to be eventually deposited in whatever room winds up being my library/living room/office space.
Continue readingWork Hasn’t Been Horrible, Lately
As hectic, busy, and downright exhausting as work has been recently, I’ve actually been enjoying it more. I don’t know if it’s because I have stuff going on in my evenings again or it’s just because I’ve been working more with people I like who appreciate my thoughts and no longer feel like the work I’m doing doesn’t matter. Well, now that I’ve typed it out, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Or, you know, both of them with most of the change in outcome being a result of the latter. Feeling like the work I’m doing matters is kind of a big deal to me because there is little more I hate than feeling like I’m wasting my time and going to work every day at a job that felt like it was wasting my time was really not a happy place for me to be, mentally speaking. I mean, I knew the work I was doing mattered, but there were sure a lot of days that it didn’t feel like it did, no matter how much I reassured myself otherwise.
Continue readingSocial Anxiety And Public Speaking Do Not Mix Well
I do not feel like I’m a particularly strong public speaker. It feels weird to admit that, given how readily I take the Game Master’s chair in gaming groups and how willing I am to expound at length on just about any topic I know well, but it’s true. I dislike being the center of attention and am just better at getting over it in smaller group settings. Plus, if you’re making up a fun pretend world for your friends, you are, by definition, the foremost expert in it, so it’s not like you have to worry about being wrong. I recognize that this sort of improvisational skill is an entirely separate thing from public speaking, as is being a good conversationalist, but I frequently feel like I should be good at all three since I’m better than average at two of them. Also, to be entirely fair to myself, I’ve only done a few bits of public speaking after college (and most of my college experiences barely count since it was just to classes of usually fewer than thirty people) and only one of those was a mild disaster.
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