Yesterday when I wrote my post I was deeply looking forward to the Tuesday night FFXIV shenanigans. However as the day went on things went sideways. Its not so much that a sequence of bad events happened… but more a sequence of events that robbed me of every single “spoon” I had to give. I am very much a person who recharges my batteries by milling around by myself doing piddly things. Each social engagement, even if it is just saying good morning to the security guard on my way in the building… consumes a bit of energy that I have stored up in reserve. Now that I am in management… it feels like those batteries deplete all too quickly flitting between meetings and making sure my team is taken care of. One might question if management is really a great choice, but in truth it is one of those things that just sort of happened over time. I never set out to lead a guild, it just was something that I did because it needed to happen. Similarly I fell into my current position because it just needed to happened, and the alternative was to hope someone else did it.
As a result I came home last night, cooked some dinner… and by the time I had cleaned and sat down on the couch I completely lost sync with time as a construct. So at 8:30 I found myself apologizing to the FFXIV crew for needing some “turtle time” where I pull my head into my shell and pretend the world doesn’t exist. I feel like this has to suck to experience from the other side of the equation, because I don’t always know when it is going to hit or what the ramifications are going to be. All I know is when it does I just cannot deal with communicating with other people. I have friends who experience the same sort of thing, and it is at least comforting that I am not the only person who goes through it every so often. The only problem is the more I do it… the harder it is to break out of the cycle. It reminds me in the days of this blog before I went on the whole crusade of regular posting. The longer I went between posts… the harder it was to make the next one because it felt like this invisible audience was somehow expecting me to poop sheer brilliance out on the page every time I posted anything. Similarly it feels like each time I withdraw, I have to psyche myself up to be some sort of rockstar version of myself to make up for the fact that I was in hiding. I mean I know that is not actually the case, but it is super hard to explain that to anxiety brain.
What did I do instead last night? Well I spent some quality time with Netflix… and tried to chill out and remember that everything is okay. Over the last couple days I have watched the first episode of American Gods… which makes me realize how damned long it has been since I read that book. Things felt familiar in a fuzzy melange of the details I sort of remember about the book, so I guess that is a good thing. I also watched Maria Bamford’s Old Baby… which was delightfully bizarre. I mean I suggest it, but you need to go in expecting it to not really be like any other comedy special you have ever seen. I watched a handful of episodes of Dear White People, which I really enjoyed on a bunch of different levels. Finally I finished the night watching the three available episodes of Handmaid’s Tale that were on Hulu. The last one I am not sure if you can actually enjoy… because it is fucking disturbing. I am hooked but on a stomach turning level… I mean for whatever reason I never read the novel, and I think I probably should. Probably not the best thing for an anxiety riddled mind, but I am glad that I watched it.