I am officially one week into dropping streaming and specifically not replacing it with other projects. I have actually done my best to rest, even if I wound up spending an entire weekend busy and emotionally exhausted from a variety of frustrations, some disappointment (which has only contributed to my emotional exhaustion because I spent the time and energy to emotionally process it), and a very Midwestern party. I have not entirely succeeded in resting over this past week, since my sleep schedule is still royally messed up, but I actually had the energy to write two long blog posts and most of a chapter of Infrared Isolation (which will be going up the weekend after this post does, meaning I’ll have skipped another Saturday update) yesterday. It felt great to be able to work on something and actually have the mental fortitude to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Which I mostly lost between yesterday and today because I was up too late playing a game (Cassette Beasts is great and I’ll eventually be writing about it), but that will hopefully be mostly fixed if I can actually get some sleep for once.
Continue readingStress
Skipping Another Week
There’s no Infrared Isolation post today. While my rest is having a positive effect, it is not an instantaneous one, nor is it swift. It is a slow process that will hopefully bear fruit in coming weeks. The chapter for next week is already written and sent off to my editor, so it will be good to go for next week. Since I finished that early, I’ve even already started work on the next chapter (by which I mean I renamed the document, moved some things around, and reviewed the old chapter that is being rewritten into Chapter 25). If I manage to actually get more work done on it this weekend, between my various other activities, that will be even better. I don’t know if I’m quite that recovered, though. Just because writing during the week has gotten easier doesn’t mean that I’m quite ready to start spending time on the weekends working on writing projects. Especially this weekend, with my last two days of preparation for my new tabletop campaign and my on-going attempts to not mess up my sleep schedule all over again. I’m a bit more hopeful than I used to be, though. Now, recovery and a return to my old, non-exhausted way of living actually seems possible. Only time will tell, though.
Filling My Free Time
As I go about planning how I’m going to spend my time, conscious of both my need to rest and my desire to fill my day with things I feel are fulfilling and rewarding, I am finding it difficult to strike a proper balance. Since I stopped streaming because I had overburdened myself, I now have a bunch of time available. Sure, it used to be filled with something that I found enjoyable, but it was also frequently more draining than it was restorative. Right now, I’m trying to keep this time clear so I can actually get the rest I need to recover from the past eight months, but I’ll admit that I’ve already begun to think about what else I could be doing with that time. It might seem like this is happening too quickly, but I’m pretty surprised that it took two whole days, one of which used to be a streaming day, for me to get to this point. Normally, I’d have expected myself to start planning what I could do with this “extra” time before I’d even made the decision to stop streaming. I dislike feeling like I failed at something, after all, and it is more difficult to feel like I failed when I stop doing something if I can convince myself that I can now do something else of equal or greater importance to myself. It isn’t more restful, though, so I’m trying to take it easy. And I mean actually easy, not “easy in comparison to my usual amount of effort.”
Continue readingTurns Out I Have Limits. I Know, I’m Shocked Too.
I’ve been trying to treat my recent period of rest and recovery like every other one I’ve gone through in the past few years. I’ve taken some time to do nothing, found something that interests me to work on, and slowly pushed myself back into doing things the instant I no longer felt exhausted. Unfortunately for me, the last eight months are not like any other period of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much go on in an eight month period of time. I can’t even really call that period good or bad, though I can say that the negative parts of it make it probably the second worst period of my life. The positive parts don’t really make up for that so much as exist alongside it. A lot of really great stuff has also happened in that time, after all, and none of it cancels out the bad stuff. That’s not how life works. I have had a lot going on and it has worn me thin in more ways than anything but the prolonged abuse and neglect of my childhood can compare to. I feel so out of sorts that I’m not even sure how I should be feeling. All of which means that my usual methods of recovery and moving on aren’t going to cut it. Nothing I’ve experienced in the past is really going to help with right now and I’m only just now beginning to realize that treating the last eight months like any normal period of stress in my life is only going to make things worse.
Continue readingRelief From A Weight I’ve Never Mentioned
I went to get a mole checked out today. I wasn’t super concerned that it might be a sign of some kind of skin cancer since I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, but it has long been an inconvenience at best since it sits right between my nose and my lip. It gets in the way of shaving, of blowing my nose, of wiping my nose, and it can interfere with sneezes if I don’t have them absolutely locked down. It tends to bleed easily, if I scrape or pinch it hard enough and it frequently itches in a way that encourages me to scrape or pinch it. If I shave too thoroughly and indelicately around it, it will bleed the next time I brush against it with anything rougher than my hands. That said, I’ve been living with it for as long as I can remember, so it hasn’t been an issue for much of my life. Only occasionally, less than once a year, will I accidentally cause it to bleed or otherwise hurt myself by absentmindedly interacting with it. It has been easy to ignore as I’ve dealt with more pressing issues because I had the tools and skills required to cope with it in an effective and safe manner.
Continue readingA Small Streaming Update
During my last several streams (well, okay, pretty much every stream so far since I got back to streaming following my move), I’ve been playing Ghost of Tsushima. It’s a very good game, but it can be a little intense at times, so I’ve been doing my best to monitor my mental health as I’ve played. I wouldn’t want to stress myself doing something that’s supposed to be fun, but trying to stick to a stream schedule means I have pre-appointed times to play the game for certain durations. Unless I skip a stream or break away from the game entirely, I can’t take much of a break.
Continue readingTalking To An Empty Room: Virtual Meetings with No Cameras
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 readingNo 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.
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