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With E away visiting for this school holidays and D in Wellington for part of school holidays / all of quilting symposium, my expectation was that I would be able to take the energy I normally spend on them and redirect it to a) easier work hours b) downtime c) catching up with people I haven't seen in ages and d) the long list of things wanting to be done around the house.
Narrator: this did not happen.
Well, (a) kind of happened and some of the other things partially happened.
* I went to a KAOS party and got the gallery done within a couple of days, after doing the outstanding gallery from D's mum's memorial (see previous post).
* Approximately my usual work hours.
* A little cleaning and tidying, but nowhere near as much as intended.
* Cooked a wider variety of foods for myself than I probably would have prior to D's patient cooking lessons, also thanks to the air fryer (ongoing the single most useful item we received as a wedding present) and the more recent acquisition of a toastie maker.
* Finished off a game of FreeCiv which had been consuming too much of my time the past few weeks. Played a little Path of Exile.
* Made my previous post over a week after I originally expected to do so.
* Watched one DVD (The Last Witch Hunter).
Which might read like a lot but compared to the amount of time/energy I theoretically had available to me is really rather limited.
Mostly what happened was that when I freed my body clock of being dragged up at 7:30am to take E to(wards) school and fighting the late-afternoon traffic to get home for dinnertime I basically crashed/slept a lot. I rolled with it, preferring to try and find my current unforced cycle again before returning to try an modify it gently, and also because I wasn't being given a great deal of choice.
I think 11am was the earliest I ever managed to make it into the office, despite several sunny mornings (to be fair, this is perfectly normal :( ). At the other end of the day though, not having to leave work until I felt ready saw me being reliably comfortably productive through until after 6pm, even until nearly 8pm one day when I just couldn't give up on a problem. I still only managed the lower-end of what I have been doing in hours. And no traffic issues getting home, with (usually) spoons left to actually cook something for dinner.
[aside] work has been a mixed bag lately; one project that I am very glad to see the last of was canned, terrific mental/emotional weight suddenly lifted, but life took our shiny new developer away from us just a few weeks into the job, so we're suddenly back to two-down...
Accompanying the extra-bed time came a whole lot of not unfamiliar depressive feelings that I guess I just haven't had the time or energy to even acknowledge for a while. (I could perhaps describe it as falling back into old habits, but I don't know that it is at all accurate to characterise them as habits.) Not just negative thoughts and paralytic levels of executive dysfunction but the whole feeling physically hollow, somewhat in the chest but primarily in the skull. (Granted some of that may have been related to dehydration at times.) My ability to focus on a task has probably not been greatly more fragmented than usual, but it is in some ways more obvious when one is allowing oneself to flow with it and be gently distracted rather than pushing through / having additional interruptive externally imposed distractions.
It wasn't until Friday that I actually woke up feeling really refreshed, and then I am afraid I may have rather overdone things on Friday/Saturday. Today hasn't been a complete write off, but has had to be very gentle (with yet more intentions/aims falling by the wayside).
I miss the days when I could pretty much guarantee to be awake at 7am and be constructive on many different things over the course of the day. I mostly lost that when a period of unrecognised-at-the-time depression and burnout settled on me ... I might be able to use my journal to find out the year if I cared enough, but it was in the WRONZ or Canesis days. Over a decade ago, maybe two.
I can't help but feel that I am typing around my ultimate point here. I'm not entirely sure what the point is - it slides away whenever I try and focus on it. I think it is something about for the sake of my mental health needing to make my time more my own again, which means taking it away from D & E, which means setting and enforcing boundaries within our little family, which is something I absolutely fail at on this front.
(E was informed before the end of term that the morning rides would not be happening now that the mornings are sunny again. She is perfectly capable of getting where she wants/needs to go and was doing it perfectly well before coming off her push scooter and getting a nasty scrape and a fright earlier in the year. That one is not only about my time, but also about her independence and facing her fears.)
The time I give work is by nature a closed-ended commitment. Aided by the fact that I simply become incapable after a certain amount of hours. They would love me to work more hours and I would frankly love having the extra money in the budget, but that's not happening right now.
The time I give my relationship/s is by nature more open-ended, an my attempts to be firm with boundaries usually come across as being grumpy/snappish (to be fair at the point I am actively/firmly trying to enforce boundaries I am usually annoyed to the point of at-the-very-least grumpy).
(This is something we /are/ having an ongoing conversation about as a couple, as we are still learning each other's signals/languages around such things even when one of us is trying to explicitly say that a boundary has been reached / breached. It is complicated by our different thinking styles; I often want to shelve, backburner or mull a big, non-urgent issue (involving e.g. money) for a few days or even weeks while I consider various angles /or/ I can assess an urgent situation and come to a decision quickly while D right-away needs to talk through every aspect she can come up with.
These are actually really complimentary, as she has a number of times caught something my quick assessment has overlooked, but the majority of the time I just frequently /do not have the spoons/ for an immediate conversation about something with little or no practical urgency.)
Fundamentally my fear/dislike/strong negative emotional response to the risk/idea of upsetting the other person (and this conflict aversion is a general issue, which may surprise some people who have only seen me toggled into "assertive" mode) consistently gets in the way of calling a boundary early enough, which is resulting in rationally undue both stress on me and upset to my wife.
As I said above, these are issues we are already working on together. D is really supportive in trying to give me what I need, but the issue is that I really need more energy in my day and to achieve some of the outstanding projects that I have not / can not let go of / give up on, and I have no clue how to reach that point. Maybe that just requires extensive rest and relaxation i.e. time to myself or time explicitly set aside for non-intensive activities. Maybe a medical intervention/recognition could help, but with the current state of our health system any diagnosis would be literally years away (I have already discussed this with my doctor) and there are higher priorities which have to be addressed right now.
(A second income would help greatly. But that is a long term plan or a drastic improvement in government social welfare policy :( )
~~~
Tomorrow it is back to work and D returns, although E is away for a few more days so D & I will have some just-us time over the rest of the week.
Narrator: this did not happen.
Well, (a) kind of happened and some of the other things partially happened.
* I went to a KAOS party and got the gallery done within a couple of days, after doing the outstanding gallery from D's mum's memorial (see previous post).
* Approximately my usual work hours.
* A little cleaning and tidying, but nowhere near as much as intended.
* Cooked a wider variety of foods for myself than I probably would have prior to D's patient cooking lessons, also thanks to the air fryer (ongoing the single most useful item we received as a wedding present) and the more recent acquisition of a toastie maker.
* Finished off a game of FreeCiv which had been consuming too much of my time the past few weeks. Played a little Path of Exile.
* Made my previous post over a week after I originally expected to do so.
* Watched one DVD (The Last Witch Hunter).
Which might read like a lot but compared to the amount of time/energy I theoretically had available to me is really rather limited.
Mostly what happened was that when I freed my body clock of being dragged up at 7:30am to take E to(wards) school and fighting the late-afternoon traffic to get home for dinnertime I basically crashed/slept a lot. I rolled with it, preferring to try and find my current unforced cycle again before returning to try an modify it gently, and also because I wasn't being given a great deal of choice.
I think 11am was the earliest I ever managed to make it into the office, despite several sunny mornings (to be fair, this is perfectly normal :( ). At the other end of the day though, not having to leave work until I felt ready saw me being reliably comfortably productive through until after 6pm, even until nearly 8pm one day when I just couldn't give up on a problem. I still only managed the lower-end of what I have been doing in hours. And no traffic issues getting home, with (usually) spoons left to actually cook something for dinner.
[aside] work has been a mixed bag lately; one project that I am very glad to see the last of was canned, terrific mental/emotional weight suddenly lifted, but life took our shiny new developer away from us just a few weeks into the job, so we're suddenly back to two-down...
Accompanying the extra-bed time came a whole lot of not unfamiliar depressive feelings that I guess I just haven't had the time or energy to even acknowledge for a while. (I could perhaps describe it as falling back into old habits, but I don't know that it is at all accurate to characterise them as habits.) Not just negative thoughts and paralytic levels of executive dysfunction but the whole feeling physically hollow, somewhat in the chest but primarily in the skull. (Granted some of that may have been related to dehydration at times.) My ability to focus on a task has probably not been greatly more fragmented than usual, but it is in some ways more obvious when one is allowing oneself to flow with it and be gently distracted rather than pushing through / having additional interruptive externally imposed distractions.
It wasn't until Friday that I actually woke up feeling really refreshed, and then I am afraid I may have rather overdone things on Friday/Saturday. Today hasn't been a complete write off, but has had to be very gentle (with yet more intentions/aims falling by the wayside).
I miss the days when I could pretty much guarantee to be awake at 7am and be constructive on many different things over the course of the day. I mostly lost that when a period of unrecognised-at-the-time depression and burnout settled on me ... I might be able to use my journal to find out the year if I cared enough, but it was in the WRONZ or Canesis days. Over a decade ago, maybe two.
I can't help but feel that I am typing around my ultimate point here. I'm not entirely sure what the point is - it slides away whenever I try and focus on it. I think it is something about for the sake of my mental health needing to make my time more my own again, which means taking it away from D & E, which means setting and enforcing boundaries within our little family, which is something I absolutely fail at on this front.
(E was informed before the end of term that the morning rides would not be happening now that the mornings are sunny again. She is perfectly capable of getting where she wants/needs to go and was doing it perfectly well before coming off her push scooter and getting a nasty scrape and a fright earlier in the year. That one is not only about my time, but also about her independence and facing her fears.)
The time I give work is by nature a closed-ended commitment. Aided by the fact that I simply become incapable after a certain amount of hours. They would love me to work more hours and I would frankly love having the extra money in the budget, but that's not happening right now.
The time I give my relationship/s is by nature more open-ended, an my attempts to be firm with boundaries usually come across as being grumpy/snappish (to be fair at the point I am actively/firmly trying to enforce boundaries I am usually annoyed to the point of at-the-very-least grumpy).
(This is something we /are/ having an ongoing conversation about as a couple, as we are still learning each other's signals/languages around such things even when one of us is trying to explicitly say that a boundary has been reached / breached. It is complicated by our different thinking styles; I often want to shelve, backburner or mull a big, non-urgent issue (involving e.g. money) for a few days or even weeks while I consider various angles /or/ I can assess an urgent situation and come to a decision quickly while D right-away needs to talk through every aspect she can come up with.
These are actually really complimentary, as she has a number of times caught something my quick assessment has overlooked, but the majority of the time I just frequently /do not have the spoons/ for an immediate conversation about something with little or no practical urgency.)
Fundamentally my fear/dislike/strong negative emotional response to the risk/idea of upsetting the other person (and this conflict aversion is a general issue, which may surprise some people who have only seen me toggled into "assertive" mode) consistently gets in the way of calling a boundary early enough, which is resulting in rationally undue both stress on me and upset to my wife.
As I said above, these are issues we are already working on together. D is really supportive in trying to give me what I need, but the issue is that I really need more energy in my day and to achieve some of the outstanding projects that I have not / can not let go of / give up on, and I have no clue how to reach that point. Maybe that just requires extensive rest and relaxation i.e. time to myself or time explicitly set aside for non-intensive activities. Maybe a medical intervention/recognition could help, but with the current state of our health system any diagnosis would be literally years away (I have already discussed this with my doctor) and there are higher priorities which have to be addressed right now.
(A second income would help greatly. But that is a long term plan or a drastic improvement in government social welfare policy :( )
~~~
Tomorrow it is back to work and D returns, although E is away for a few more days so D & I will have some just-us time over the rest of the week.
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