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Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

When this post goes us, I’ll be busy attending to my soul and mental well-being by going on a hike with a small selection of my favorite people. After several weeks of being too tired to do much and a constant lack of days we can all gather, those of us who are available tomorrow are just going to do something regardless of the fact that half our group is missing. It isn’t ideal, I’d rather spend the day with all of them, but I need to get active and to spend time with people who help me forget myself for a while. With all the stress and anxiety that have been building the past three months, I need to ignore my desire to stay home alone to work on processing review suggestions and actually go do something I know I’ll love.

I’ve always enjoyed walking. I like losing myself in my gait as I wander from place to place, maybe listening to music or just taking in the sounds of wherever I’m at. Hiking is a sort of extension of that, because it takes me out of areas that always grate on me, cities with the constant hum of cars and neighborhoods with the quiet noises of people going about their daily lives. If you pick the right hiking location, you can go the entire hike without encountering anyone. You can embrace the quiet of nature and the irritating hum of modern life that most people only notice when it’s gone disappears completely. You can lose yourself in trees and the quiet emerald peace of a nature at its strongest. If you’ve picked a place with some nice elevation changes, there are a ton of great places to stop and admire the world around you. I’ve always enjoyed looking at the horizon and having an unobstructed view of the sky and there’s just something wonderful about getting both of those things as a result of being on top of something that rises above the area around me. Only in hiking trips can I get all of that at once.

Even though I’m going with my friends, I’ll be able to enjoy that. These are all people who know me well enough that there are no awkward silences to fill. I don’t need to worry about how to maintain a conversation or how to segue from one thought to another because they all just get how my mind works enough to not always need an explanation. I can just be myself around them and their presence doesn’t intrude on my sense of peace and quiet. For the past several years, we’ve always done at least a couple of hiking trips every month, though we’ve been doing fewer of those lately because of how busy everyone has been. They’ve been some of my fondest memories and include some of my favorite pictures. All of the background pictures you’ll ever see on my blog are pictures I’ve taken while hiking. If I could, I’d do all my thinking and writing in a spot that overlooks the surrounding area and has an unobstructed view of the entire sky. My dream house idea focuses mostly around a taller tower with what is essentially a glass dome on the top so I can sit up there and read or write as close to the sky as I can get. Heck, the whole thing might just be a tower of some kind. But it would have to be on the side of a mountain or on the top of a tall hill somewhere. That would be amazing.

After hiking, I’m planning to do the Pokemon Go Community day since I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about the game now that I don’t have my ex to give me a reason to keep playing it. I don’t really feel like it “our thing” anymore, thankfully, but I still wonder if I’m just wasting my time on something that isn’t really adding anything to my life since I have a tendency to play the game alone and let it distract me from the main purpose of my frequent walks. It’s so easy to bring alone and leave running in my pocket, but I’m not good at ignoring it when it’s in there and will start to feel anxious if I don’t check it for a while. It works the same way as notifications on my phone do. If I know they’re there, it will always cause me more stress to just ignore them than to skim through them and either open them or dismiss them. In order to save myself from needless stress, I’ve started disabling certain notifications on my phone and setting up hour-long notification silences so I won’t notice when they show up until the hour is over. I’ve also removed most time-waster games from my phone for the same reason. I also repeatedly install and uninstall Imgur as I cycle between just needing something to kill some time and realizing that I’ll just sit on the couch and browse through Imgur for an hour instead of going to bed or starting my writing. Which is why I’m still on the fence about Pokemon Go. I definitely benefit from still having Sudoku on my phone because it often works as a way of doing some mental stretching when I’ll feeling particularly tired or fogged up from how focused I’ve been on my work.

It’s a really nebulous balance and I’m probably going to be working on it my whole life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to just figure out how much work to do and how much relaxation to put in and when it’s already to simply escape instead of doing something genuinely relaxing. Even though I love writing and reading, they’re still work. Even though I’m super excited to start reading all of the amazing books people have written and mentioned to me on Twitter, there’s still a lot of work to do just to find all the links, titles, and authors. I want to just wake up in the morning and dig right in to my to-do list, but I need to take time to relax and hike and let my to-do list remain undone. I’m still doing at least four hours of writing or book recommendation collation a day, so it’s not like I’m slacking off, I just always feel like it’s hard to justify taking the time to wander through the woods or spend a few hours walking around the city with some friends while we catch Pokemon. I’ve only got so much time, after all. I want to get the most I can out of it and it’s, no matter how long I live, I don’t think it’ll ever be clear how to do that.

 

Friday Morning Musing

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I have a great poem I’m working on that I’ll post soon, but I’m almost literally frying my brain in a reduction of stress and Overtime this week, so I’m saving it until I’ve got the time and energy to make it as good as I know it can be. I really want to write more poetry and actually stick to my plan of posting a poem a week, but it takes even more energy and time than writing a long piece for every Tuesday’s Coldheart and Iron post. When things are stressful or super busy, I just don’t have the energy and the past few weeks have been both. I’m still amazed I got something up for last week. I’d like to say I’ll definitely have it done for next week, but I might actually have to work this weekend (a first at my current company), so we’ll see how it goes. No promises, but I probably want to get a poem posted more than you want me to post a poem.

As much as I hate my long hours and how tired I am, I still appreciate that I can work these long hours and actually get paid for all of them. I know a lot of people still working long weeks who don’t get adequately compensated, either because they don’t get overtime, because they’re salaried, or because their hours are split between several low-paying jobs and would get fired if they asked for overtime pay or anything like that. Thanks to paying off my car loan, I appreciate my current position even more, since I don’t even need overtime to make ends meet or have a little freedom in my finances. It feels good to get paid.

On the other hand, I’m only working this long because of some questionable organizational decisions made by some of the people I work with and, while I’ve got a plan to fix our processes so this doesn’t happen again, it unfortunately hinges on a lot of people who would rather complain about problems than fix them. To be entirely fair to them, they mostly do that because they’ve tried to fix them and nothing worked. Only one or two of them are frustrating and they’re frustrating for incredibly different reasons that actually cause each other, to some extent. It’s a kinda weird situation if I’m being honest. It creates and perpetuates itself. If I could figure out how to harness the energy that goes into it, I could solve world hunger or the looming energy crisis when the world runs out of oil and all we’ve got left is renewable resources my current government is refusing to harness. I’m a bit bitter today, sorry.

I’ve been struggling to stay focused and forward-thinking lately because I’m seeing a lot of parallels between my current job and the I job I left because it was destroying my soul. The reasons I’m staying late every day are matching up what happened at my old job to sink me further into depression and crush my soul, ultimately forcing me to quit in order to save my mental and physical health. They’re not nearly as bad yet, but the fact that I can draw any similarities between them is incredibly worrying. I still think I can head these problems off before they show up and I’ve actually got people on my side in my current job (including my manager), so I should be able to avoid another situation where I need to choose my livelihood or my health. That was a pretty awful decision to need to make and it has had a lasting impact on me. I actually almost had a panic attack today when I realized what is happening now is incredibly similar to how things started going wrong at my old job. Throw in the fact that I’ve had a few “I told you so” situations already this summer with people at work and I’m having a hard time believing things will wind up different, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.

I still hope they will be, though. I’m nowhere ready to abandon ship yet and I really want to believe I can change things so everyone is happier with how things related to my job work. And it will do that, if everyone does their part. I’ve spent the last year and a half listening to people talk about what they want, how things should work, and what bothers them, and this plan should make no one happy but everyone content. Well, I’ll be happy if it works, but that’s because I take incredible satisfaction in a job well done rather than because I tweak the process so it make my life easier. It’ll actually give me the most extra work since I’ll be taking over a few things that either no one does or that other people aren’t doing the way the process requires. Stuff like running meetings, holding people accountable, and enforcing the agreements we make during meetings. I’ll basically be setting myself up as the benevolent dictator of testing and, as long as everyone agrees to let me rule them, we shall have peace and prosperity.

Sounds real nice, right? I figure it has a twenty-five percent chance of working, given that it requires people granting me authority over them in certain matters. It’s a lot like democracy or peace treaties. It only works so long as every agrees to play by the rules and then actually plays by the rules. If you start breaking the rules or altering them to help you at the cost of others, then it all falls apart. It also didn’t hurt its chances that it requires people to actually follow-through on the commitments we’re making to have each other’s back and stand together at all times so we can actually gain some authority for me to wield. There are a lot of points of failure, but even a partial adoption would be great. I honestly wouldn’t mind if someone else wound up with all the authority. I’m not much of one for the spotlight and I really dislike conflicts or confrontations, both of which would be common for whoever winds up with all the power since they’d actually have to wield it against everyone at some time or another.

Still, it’s better than keeping my head down and hoping things get better on their own. Change has to start somewhere and I value my time too much to let it get wasted like this. I’ll do what I need to and I hope that only means taking a stand against poor planning (well, probably a lack of planning) and asserting the right to have everyone’s voices heard when we make commitments.

I hope you have a great Friday and I’ll do my best to get some poetry up soon! These crazy weeks can’t last forever.

Sometimes, I Make Myself Sick

Chris 2 Comments

Literally. As a result of six weeks of long days at work, late nights writing, trying to get back into the things I care about, and reorganizing my life in a way that works for me, I’ve finally hit the point where I’ve stressed and pushed my body to the point where it has decided I am sick. Well, I’m pretty sure I pushed myself past that point because usually all I need is a good night’s sleep to not feel sick and this time, I’m actually sick despite sleeping a ridiculous amount.

Usually, I’m pretty good at maintaining my level of stress so I don’t actually go this far. I recognize when I’m getting close to this point and I pull it back. I take a night or two off from writing or trying to keep up with my friends in the various games we play together. I go to bed early and I actually get seven or eight hours of sleep at night. But I haven’t done that consistently in the past six weeks and now I’m paying for it. My head is pounding and congested, my throat feels like it’s lined with sandpaper that grates against it every time I swallow, and I’m just miserably sick enough to make everything sound worse than it is because my combination of symptoms is difficult to relieve without opting for something that’s going to make me sleepy. As I’ve already slept more hours since last than I’ve slept in any two nights this week, I think I’d rather do some reading, play a game, or watch a TV show. I mean, my roommate’s cat is being super needy and I’d really love to just occupy the couch for a few hours of cat snuggling and anime watching. But that’s hard to enjoy when all your day-time medication does is clear your congestion a bit.

Anyway, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on what lead me here between dreams about being a badass post-apocalyptic warrior using magic spears that can turn into magic axes or, when turned into on giant magic sword, can shoot giant pillars of holy fire at the evil scum I’m destroying so my people can be safe. If the swords, spears, and sword weren’t taken from fantasy games and books I’ve been reading, I’d seriously write that story. It’s a really good one. I still might, if I come up with a fun way to change it. Maybe that’ll be the next serial story once Coldheart and Iron is finished. It’d be fun to write since apparently I have a thing for apocalyptic stories turning up in my dreams.

Back to the topic at hand, though. My reflections have led me to believe I missed a lot of the warning signs I usually see. Because of the success I’ve been having lately, I’ve been feeling more fired up and ready to push toward my goals than ever. I’m only halfway through August and, thanks to a couple (mostly this one) reviews that got shared by the creators of the comics I reviewed, I’m only a couple of days away from having my best views month ever, despite the fact that my daily views have dropped into the single digits for the first time in over a month. In addition, the long hours at work have been paying off and I can finally see the light at the end of the debt-tunnel. I’m six days away from paying off my car loan and I’ve finally gotten my finances into order so I can guarantee a delightfully high minimum monthly payment. I’m working my way back into being socially active online after a mental health break that turned from two weeks into three months and I’ve been able to perform well in the video games I play with my friends thanks to a few things finally clicking for me.

I’ve had a lot of successes, lately, even if they’re really only small wins in the war for a big win, but they’ve been all I needed to keep relentlessly pushing forward. I’m pretty sure part of me recognized a fall was coming, though. This whole week I’ve been preoccupied with trying to figure out where all of my time is going since I feel like I’m not writing as much as I could be and I’m definitely not sleeping enough. I even bought a whole pile of notebooks so I can start journaling and tracking what I do/how I feel every day in an effort to find any habits I can improve. I think that’s going to pay dividends eventually, when I can look back through it and find out what stuff might be affecting my mood over the long-term. In the short-term, I’m hoping it’ll help with productivity because I’ll actually be writing out everything I want to get done, both at work and at home. Tangible to-do lists always seem to hold more sway in my mind than intangible ones on the computer screen.

I’m on day two of journaling and I’ve already had to move some to-dos around thanks to being sick. I don’t have the mental fortitude to write a poem right now and I obviously didn’t go to work so I can’t do any of my work tasks. They’ll carry over until Monday, though, and I’ll have a decent chunk of writing time this weekend, when I’m watching my youngest sister. Our parents are doing some traveling so us older kids are taking turns keeping the youngest one company. Thankfully, most of my siblings live around Chicago right now, so I won’t have to travel much to help. Just this one weekend.

Which is why I’m just gonna go back to bed now. I’m already tired again and I have a lot of driving to do over the next two days, so the more I rest now, the healthier I’ll be for the weekend. I hope you have a great day! Check back tomorrow for a return to our regularly scheduled programming!

At End of Day

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When the day is done and the fire’s stoked,
When the night is fresh and the world is cloaked
In star-soft mantle of darkening blue
I still have one last job to do.
I compile the words I have found,
Feeling out their shape and sound
As I sort them into categories
In preparation for all the stories
I haven’t had the chance to tell,
Until the fire’s down to a sullen swell
And the first glimmers of morning sun
Tell me that my work is done.

Saturday Morning Musing

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I started this year, 2018, by telling myself that I was going to put my writing first. Instead of sacrificing my writing time in favor of my friends, catching up on sleep, playing video games, reading books, or building relationships, I was going to write. Not all day, but for at least two hours a day. That seemed perfectly reasonable, since I was already sort of doing that anyway with my, at the time, two months of daily blog entries. Turns out, it is a lot harder than I expected. Not so much the writing time part, because I can make the time for it, but actually making it my number one priority.

When my roommate went to the hospital, I gave up all of my writing time for that day to visit him. I’ve given up multiple days each week to spend time with my girlfriend. I started playing D&D on Monday nights, which often means I’m too tired to write when I get home at 9:30 or 10. I’ve been going to foam fighting practice almost every week, which definitely leaves me too tired to write when I get back. I am prioritizing people and social interaction over writing rather consistently at this point. I do it without thinking. I have a natural tendency to put other people’s desires, or what I think are their desires, before my own, so it can be a difficult habit to break even on my best days.

I don’t really regret it, though. As much as I’d like to have a bunch of writing done or have rebuilt my buffer so I’m not writing blog posts the evening before they’re supposed to go up, I really don’t think I should have made my decisions differently. I want to prioritize writing above everything else, but the world is full of things that are actually more important than getting a thousand words written, no matter how much I want to have written those words. Honestly, I can’t even really say that I prioritize my writing over other things like resting or playing video games. If I’m too stressed or exhausted, I won’t be able to write well. I can sit down and produce words no matter what, but there comes a point when it is easier to just take a break to rest and try again some other time.

Recently, I haven’t been writing as much as I planned. I intended to write an extra thousand words every day this month, on top of maintaining my blog, but I’ve written exactly zero extra words. I sit down to write and wind up feeling too tired to get anything written but the stuff I absolutely need to. I only ever sit down to write at the end of the day because I’ve been spending my work days prioritizing work (as I should be, since it pays my bills and allows me to participate in society) and then I come home and wind up spending time with my roommates or making dinner. I can’t say these decisions are the wrong ones to make, it’s just that I find myself realizing that there’s not really anything to prioritize writing over.

I only play games and read when I’m stressed to the point of needing relaxation in order to sleep at all. I try to sleep enough every night because sleeping too little leads to depression spikes like last week’s and a haze that coats my mind is thought-slowing cotton. I can’t skimp on meals because the act of preparing and consuming a meal is very relaxing to my. I have been letting a lot of my cleaning go, lately, but that’s reaching the point where not doing it is stressing me out more than I’m benefiting from the extra fifteen to sixty minutes I gain from not tidying up my living space. I definitely can’t work less since I can barely avoid my life as it is. If I worked fewer hours, I probably wouldn’t be able to make ends meet or I’d be so stressed that I wouldn’t be able to do anything but desperately avoid thinking about my finances or panic about my finances.

I honestly don’t have much in my life that isn’t something I need to try to be healthy. I probably don’t need a girlfriend, but I really like having one and she’s an immense positive influence on my average mood throughout the week. I don’t really go on trips, I don’t waste time with things that don’t benefit me, like phone games or Imgur, anymore. I’ve cut out a lot of crap and tried to reinforce my life with things that positively influence me. I read more, now that I’m not browsing Imgur for hours every day and I get more done at work now that I’ve removed most of my handheld distractions.

I really should be seeing an increase in the amount of time I spend writing and the amount of writing I get done. I’m really not sure why I’m not, and I don’t even know where to begin trying to find out…

Intertia

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Inertia rules my existence.
It wears the crown and bears the scepter,
Commanding me to march and obey.
I’m no conscientious objector.
I would gladly march like a toy soldier
To keep away depression’s specter.

So long as I am moving forward
I can pretend everything is fine.
If I take a break or push too hard
I will fall into a self-made mine
Where crystallized despair waits for me
Like an old god sitting in its shrine.

Do enough to be making progress
But not so much I will fall apart.
With fiery determination
And bone-deep weariness in my heart
I know I’ll someday find my balance
Even if I don’t know where to start.

We Try Things. Occasionally they even work.

Chris 1 Comment

So, I’ve once more been struggling with my depression. Big surprise there. Kinda snuck up on the back of some of the stuff I was writing last week and just overwhelmed me when I wasn’t paying attention. Luckily, with my renewed focus on watching for it and the help of my friends, I was able to notice it quickly and come up with a few plans to circumvent it.

Historically, working out every day has been a good way to deal with my depression for a few reasons. There’s the health reasons, studies that suggest that regular exercise can have a significant positive impact on one’s mental well-being. There’s the easy reasons, that I’m generally too tired after a heavy workout (and those are the only kind I do) to be anything. Then there’s the mental reasons, that I’m finally making progress on one of my big goals by losing weight. All of that together leaves me at least neutral for as long as I can keep it up (usually 3-5 weeks) though I get almost nothing else done.

Another, more mentally productive, way to deal with my depression is by creating something. Writing is often a good way for me to take a step away from everything and let my mind work out my problems through my stories. When I was in college, working on building a set for a show or helping put together some internal improvement project for the theater was always very relaxing, letting my focus and keep busy while leaving my mind free enough to work through things in the background. Unfortunately, I’m not very good with music or visual arts, but I’m certain those would be just as helpful. Anything that gets me focused on and engaged in the act of creation always helps.

Sometimes, even working a lot (at my job) can help, if I’ve got the right kind of projects. Put in some overtime, rake in that delicious OT pay, and start making even more progress toward being debt free. A good amount of rewarding work (people recognize what I’m doing as being useful and I can contribute to the good of my team/company) is just the right kind of mentally exhausting. I get so wrapped up in what I’m doing to let my problems in and then I’m too tired to make myself fret about anything.

All three have worked individually in the past. Unfortunately, none of them would last for long. I wear myself out to the point of not being capable of working out again, or I get finish a project and can’t figure out the next steps, or I finish whatever work project had me so focused and I’m unable to find a new one to fill that hole. Eventually, they all come to an end.

Which is why, this time, I’m trying all three at once. Work 10 hours days and try to get super invested in an interesting work project. Workout immediately after work. Come home, eat something, have a cup of tea to help me stay awake, and then write/try-to-write until 11 or 12. The idea being that, when one of the three fails, I should still have the other two continuing on to prop me up until I manage to get the third one going again. So far, it’s working out pretty well.*

First, I pushed myself too-hard in my workouts initially and had to really dial it down, but that means I’ve just got a little more time and energy for writing. Then I picked my workouts back up again, full-force, and was too tired to write for a couple of nights, but since I workout after work I was able to continue investing in my latest work project.

Unfortunately, there are still some flaws. After an entire week of this, I hit Friday and couldn’t do anything after 1:30. I had to run a meeting about my project which taught me a lot and forced me to herd cats for an hour and a half. Senior Coworker Cats. Some of whom had been at the company longer than I’ve been alive. I went home pretty much immediately afterward and decided to take all the pictures off my phone as my day’s project. 800 pictures later, I played a few rounds of video games with friends and went to bed.

All-in-All, it seems to be working aside from a few quiet moments here or there were I just kinda feel sad, but those are growing shorter and less frequent after only a week. Maybe, if I can keep this up long enough, they’ll disappear entirely.

 

 

*Side-effects of the pursuit of three major goals may include drowsiness, irritability, a zombie-like demeanor, and a severe allergic reaction to social interaction. But hey! At least you’re not a depressed sack of sad!

A Title Would Definitely Help This Post

Chris 4 Comments

I’ve had a busy couple of months. Adjusting to my job followed almost immediately by the new Legend of Zelda game. I did nothing but play on my Nintendo Switch for about three weeks and then spent another week avoiding my TV and computer and Switch as much as possible while I recovered from my binge. No regrets, though. I’ve already started a second play-through and have a third planned that I might either record or stream. We’ll see when the time comes. I’ll eventually review the game as well, probably as my next post.

While all this has been going on, I’ve been taking the opportunity provided by not having my soul drained as a result of my day job to spend some time reflecting and growing, something I’ve apparently ignored over the three years I held that awful job. Its been interesting to see just how much I’ve changed as a person. I’m a lot less likely to take abuse (which is probably a direct result of said awful job), I’m a lot less likely to cling to the past, and I finally stopped holding onto stuff for no other reason than it stirs a strong emotion in me. Almost all of those strong emotions weren’t positive ones, to be honest. I was pretty subconsciously masochistic, apparently. It explains a lot. Coincidentally, my closet is now emptier than it has been in years.

All that being said, I don’t feel like I’m in much of a different place than I was when I last updated. I’ve only just started working on my writing again. I still don’t know how to push back against the insanity infecting the world and some of those around me. I still feel like I’m drowning in a sea of student debt and self-inflicted problems. If anything, I’m a bit less worried about it all and a bit more restrictive on how long I’ll let myself freak out about anything.

I do know I tend to feel tired more often, but generally in a much more balanced sense. My old job used to emotionally drain me or intellectually drain me. I never got a nice, well-rounded exhaustion from it like I do from my current job. Today, after spending almost 8 hours trying to figure out settings and hardware setup, I finally managed to get everything working and do the one hour (if that) of work I needed to get done today. It was frustrating beyond words. I nearly burst into tears when I made the adjustments I needed in order to add another piece of hardware to the system and everything worked on the first try (previous attempts had added at least an hour per additional piece of hardware).

It was exhausting physically because this hardware isn’t light. It was exhausting emotionally because I’m new and half the problems were me screwing things up. It was exhausting intellectually because I had to learn as I went and try to remember everything my senior coworker taught me. Now, I can barely make myself get out of my chair and the blog entry I’m writing feels like a rambling, barely coherent mess. But today, as I went to the grocery store to buy myself a bag of my favorite chips, I wasn’t buying them because I was tired and exhausted and my day was rough. Today, I bought them as a reward for solving a really tough problem, for being recognized by my coworker for doing a good job with a complex issue, and because I deserved some kind of self-recognition for succeeding when I wanted to quit.

That little change in mindset makes all the difference. I may not have the solutions to the world’s problems, I may be actively considering giving up my dream of being a successful novelist for the more practical goal of just being really good at my current job, and I may have very little desire to ever move from this spot again, but I did good today. I can say I gave 100% of my effort into something that was ultimately rewarding and fulfilling. It feels good. It is what will push me out of this chair in another ten minutes and it is what is going to sit me down at my computer after dinner to spent two hours or more working away at my current book project.

I may not be happy right now–I’m definitely grouchy bordering on almost hysterically tired–but I’m feeling more fulfilled than I’ve felt since I wrote the end of a story for the first time. To me, happiness comes and goes but fulfillment is something that can stick around forever. As long as I feel fulfilled, nothing else really matters to me.

I suppose I might be in the same place I was a few months ago, but I definitely know I’m headed somewhere new.