I asked myself the other day why I wasn’t writing. I came up with a few interesting reasons.
The first is that my main thing to write about is my job. My job has been very, very consuming since last summer. It got worse in October and has steadily encroached into my free and personal time. This leaves me with less to write about because I have not written about my job here. It also leaves me with less energy to write because the demands of my job have become consumptive. It also leaves me tired and litless because my job absorbs a huge amount of creative and emotional energy.
The second is that I lost the schedule of writing I had developed when I stopped writing about Eve. The ‘what’ to write about thinned out. My job and my story ideas are both things to write about. Inty is something to write about as well but I find it hard to write about him since he mostly trots around and acts like a hyperactive asshole harassing the dogs and cats or wanting to be rubbed nonstop. While amusing even I struggle to describe it. Also, work again. I see him for 1-2 hours on the days that I work. My entire personal life is condensed into 1-2 hours where I come home, make dinner, pet the dogs, talk to my husband, and go to bed.
The third is my slowly healing burnout. I’m better, but it has taken a year. I wanted to be where I am now, at this time last year. It didn’t happen. That frustrates me. I cannot get that time back. It also highlights my habit of underestimating the impact that things can have. The two years that I plunged into the morass of Eve Online’s society as an elected rep was a fascinating, wonderful, and destructive time. Destructive because I am an introvert and I forced myself out of my shell.
People tell you to fake it until you make it. To do something until it becomes the truth. When it came to me being some type of social presence, I never became it. I never made it. I stayed myself and the pressure of it started to crush me. It is amusing in its disappointment. I was supposed to become more, bigger, better. Everyone swore to me that I’d grow into it and this change would happen.
Instead, I’ve suffered a year of exhaustion that I almost wonder if I’ll recover from. I know I will because I have started to. Yet, small socializations are still hugely damaging. With my busier work life and the unfortunate situation of taking on responsibilities in my personal life, I struggle to have enough quiet me time.
It makes me a bit mad. Work, well I could step back and get my old position back. I’m rather sure that I would be more unhappy. As for home? I am giving up one of my days off every week to work on cleaning out my mother’s house because she will not do it on her own. I find that I am becoming resentful. I don’t want to do it and it makes me mad that she can sit back and just abandon her life and intrude on mine. That is because I am enabling her. Now that I’ve gotten myself into this I have to get myself back out and I can kick her out and tell her to go clean up her own life but I’ve decided not to. None of that stops the resentment that I am having about it. I can’t seem to just give up on life and not do anything unless anyone helps me but she has. It is the story of our relationship and I’ve told her that she has this year to get her things together and figure out how she plans to handle the rest of her life.
The loss of a day shouldn’t matter much, but it does. My job has been taking my other free days. I’m having weeks where I have things to do for the bulk of the day every single day. It is wearing at me. I really do want to be left alone more often. I don’t know if work will improve. I doubt it. I have a time limit for my mother. As for myself? I’ll get through this but I will take a lot of learning away from the past few years.