Coronavirus SIP, Day 40
Apr. 21st, 2020 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebe
Even though we get to work from home, the day job has been wiping us both out over the past several weeks. R. works for a state university as one of their more senior employees, so he's got great job security, good pay, and he's learned a number of transferrable skills through his position. At the same time, he's always needed and often asked to do things outside of his scope. It sucks to be pulled in multiple directions at once, and it looks like that's what's happening here.
My job has its own stressors that I don't want to write about here. Let's just say that you have to get used to a lot of uncertainty and making quick, meaningful decisions. As someone who is petrified of failure, it's really hard to keep it together when there's no consistent policy to speak of, and you're expected to thread a needle between using your own discretion and escalating quickly and efficiently to an internal contact who may or may not actually be the best person to escalate to. Every ticket feels like a minefield, and I'm expected to solve them fast and right.
Even in a normal situation, I think we'd both be feeling pretty wiped from the extended onslaught. But on top of that, there's the background anxiety of the pandemic, the economic and political fallout, and the lingering guilt we feel about not being more productive with all of the free time we have. It's tough to relax, because you always feel like you could be "relaxing better".
Again, I'm trying to be as gentle with myself as possible. I know that I'm dealing with a lot even without the unprecedented global situation, and I'm always perilously close to being out of spoons. At the same time, I want to push myself away from my worst habits -- like just checking out of life as much as possible through meaningless games and YouTube trails. I think that writing, reading, and socializing can be much more enriching ways to decompress -- hell, they used to be -- and now's an excellent time to rediscover the ways they helped me feel better.
And that means dealing with a lot of the bullshit I've attached to those actions. I think somewhere along the line I took on this baggage about being a good friend, or an avid reader, and I compare myself with who I was in my youth and...I don't like who I am in that regard. It all becomes a chore, something that my brain nags me about doing, instead of this wonderful thing that I want to do. I don't know how we can twist ourselves up so much that the things we love become these anchors that drag us down.
But that takes work, which requires spoons, which are in short supply right now for so many reasons. I can recognize that some days I just won't have it in me to develop better coping mechanisms and I'll fall back on a YouTube/Hearthstone binge. That's OK. But I also want to make an effort to have fewer of those days. It's a difficult balance.
I've gotten into the habit of doing more of what I can, when I can. There are times where I recognize that I'm just done, and I don't push as hard. But most of the time? I keep pushing. Even during the times where I am just out of juice for the day, some gentle pushing from R. is enough to get me to do more. That's been a pleasant discovery, actually -- the knowledge that I can do a lot with enough will and a bit of energy. It changes the way I see myself, and I think I'm developing a clearer sense of where my emotional limits are.
Anyway, shit's real stressful and I never feel like I'm doing enough, but I'm doing more than I thought I could.
We finished "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" over the weekend, and the finale resonated with me in this surprising way. I think, like Rebecca, I use stories to chew over things and figure out who I am and what I think. If I'm not conscious enough about that outlet, or just how important the act of writing is to me, I begin to lose my sense of self. This probably means I'll always have this slightly-confessional style to my prose, because I'm pretty open about the things I struggle with and there's a pretty short line between that and the themes that might pop up in my fiction. But having it framed in that way crystallized writing in a way that makes me really motivated to tell stories, to tell them completely and well. Maybe I can actually work out some big, fundamental shit just by...taking a character through a journey.
It also forces me to think more deeply about the stories I'm telling, because now I know that the personal connection to the themes in that story is what will pull me along. Writing for one of my Pathfinder games is pretty easy because I've hitched it to a theme I care a great deal about; the other one is a bit trickier because it's more of a Twin-Peaks-meets-Game-of-Thrones type deal. I'm happy with the direction it's taken, but thinking of the story that gets these characters to level 20 is a daunting task. It might be that I have to read about mid- to high-level campaigns to figure out how they work; the 3.5E game tended to break up into three phases: levels 1 - 7 are the most fun to write for, and where a lot of the most iconic moments tend to be; 8 - 14 (where I am) is where the game gets complex, and the concepts start blossoming through mechanics paying off or abilities being stacked; 15 - 20 is the real epic shit, the stuff that we're heading to, where it gets super-duper-crunchy.
I think I have an idea of how to take the party to 15th level, and I have a turning point that ushers in the endgame that would be amazing to pull off. But it's ambitious. It'll take a lot of work, and I don't know if everything will land. I'm worried that I may have actually turned off two of my players completely already, with no clear way to get them back. I'll really need to focus on this game if I'm going to do it well, and in order to do THAT, I need to figure out how I can work out some personal shit through it. :P
My job has its own stressors that I don't want to write about here. Let's just say that you have to get used to a lot of uncertainty and making quick, meaningful decisions. As someone who is petrified of failure, it's really hard to keep it together when there's no consistent policy to speak of, and you're expected to thread a needle between using your own discretion and escalating quickly and efficiently to an internal contact who may or may not actually be the best person to escalate to. Every ticket feels like a minefield, and I'm expected to solve them fast and right.
Even in a normal situation, I think we'd both be feeling pretty wiped from the extended onslaught. But on top of that, there's the background anxiety of the pandemic, the economic and political fallout, and the lingering guilt we feel about not being more productive with all of the free time we have. It's tough to relax, because you always feel like you could be "relaxing better".
Again, I'm trying to be as gentle with myself as possible. I know that I'm dealing with a lot even without the unprecedented global situation, and I'm always perilously close to being out of spoons. At the same time, I want to push myself away from my worst habits -- like just checking out of life as much as possible through meaningless games and YouTube trails. I think that writing, reading, and socializing can be much more enriching ways to decompress -- hell, they used to be -- and now's an excellent time to rediscover the ways they helped me feel better.
And that means dealing with a lot of the bullshit I've attached to those actions. I think somewhere along the line I took on this baggage about being a good friend, or an avid reader, and I compare myself with who I was in my youth and...I don't like who I am in that regard. It all becomes a chore, something that my brain nags me about doing, instead of this wonderful thing that I want to do. I don't know how we can twist ourselves up so much that the things we love become these anchors that drag us down.
But that takes work, which requires spoons, which are in short supply right now for so many reasons. I can recognize that some days I just won't have it in me to develop better coping mechanisms and I'll fall back on a YouTube/Hearthstone binge. That's OK. But I also want to make an effort to have fewer of those days. It's a difficult balance.
I've gotten into the habit of doing more of what I can, when I can. There are times where I recognize that I'm just done, and I don't push as hard. But most of the time? I keep pushing. Even during the times where I am just out of juice for the day, some gentle pushing from R. is enough to get me to do more. That's been a pleasant discovery, actually -- the knowledge that I can do a lot with enough will and a bit of energy. It changes the way I see myself, and I think I'm developing a clearer sense of where my emotional limits are.
Anyway, shit's real stressful and I never feel like I'm doing enough, but I'm doing more than I thought I could.
We finished "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" over the weekend, and the finale resonated with me in this surprising way. I think, like Rebecca, I use stories to chew over things and figure out who I am and what I think. If I'm not conscious enough about that outlet, or just how important the act of writing is to me, I begin to lose my sense of self. This probably means I'll always have this slightly-confessional style to my prose, because I'm pretty open about the things I struggle with and there's a pretty short line between that and the themes that might pop up in my fiction. But having it framed in that way crystallized writing in a way that makes me really motivated to tell stories, to tell them completely and well. Maybe I can actually work out some big, fundamental shit just by...taking a character through a journey.
It also forces me to think more deeply about the stories I'm telling, because now I know that the personal connection to the themes in that story is what will pull me along. Writing for one of my Pathfinder games is pretty easy because I've hitched it to a theme I care a great deal about; the other one is a bit trickier because it's more of a Twin-Peaks-meets-Game-of-Thrones type deal. I'm happy with the direction it's taken, but thinking of the story that gets these characters to level 20 is a daunting task. It might be that I have to read about mid- to high-level campaigns to figure out how they work; the 3.5E game tended to break up into three phases: levels 1 - 7 are the most fun to write for, and where a lot of the most iconic moments tend to be; 8 - 14 (where I am) is where the game gets complex, and the concepts start blossoming through mechanics paying off or abilities being stacked; 15 - 20 is the real epic shit, the stuff that we're heading to, where it gets super-duper-crunchy.
I think I have an idea of how to take the party to 15th level, and I have a turning point that ushers in the endgame that would be amazing to pull off. But it's ambitious. It'll take a lot of work, and I don't know if everything will land. I'm worried that I may have actually turned off two of my players completely already, with no clear way to get them back. I'll really need to focus on this game if I'm going to do it well, and in order to do THAT, I need to figure out how I can work out some personal shit through it. :P
