This is not the journal post I planned (hoped?) to be writing this weekend, but Stuff Happened and here I am.
Beyond that large parts of this are not exactly what I had mentally outlined when I sat down (hours ago :o ) but getting these thoughts out where I can see them was the point of the exercise.

~~~

( work/life/money )

pushed myself past my limits
physically, mentally, emotionally
broken

Depressed over not being able to help fix the world's problems when I cant even get my own house (literal and metaphorical) sorted cleaned and in order. I am managing /something/ almost every day but just don't seem to be getting to the big tasks which are staring me in the face every day.

~~~
Thursday was a public holiday and I exhausted myself physically doing overdue cleaning - the shower, the toilet, the fridge - even without doing a complete job of any of them. I find myself exhausted myself today just from trimming a green-bin full of branches off the hedge.

(I was glad to see that at least one of the pansies I transplanted from the middle of the back wasteland to a garden bed appears to have survived and is putting up new growth. In my experience they are tough little plants.)

I have exhausted myself mentally at work. It looks like the pay rise I asked for isn't coming so I feel I have little choice but to to work more/better hours. But right now the extra time I am pushing myself to do is going on preparations for the final stage (going live) of a project I am no longer billing for because it went so far over estimate. It is one I am very emotionally involved in doing properly (and could cost the company a very valuable client if the final stage gets cocked up).

I have further exhausted myself mentally and emotionally dealing with the things which require these types of energy at home.

~~~
I am still receiving the alarms and updates of both what has most recently been looted from the Hall and the owner's continued inactivity to even meet their commitments to make the site safe after the fire. All I can say to questions about when we might go back - whether from members of our team or from our contact still there - is "not until it is safe". It is not going to be safe in the foreseeable future.

I had reason to go back to the photos from our first few visits looking for references for some of the stolen fittings, it's heartbreaking seeing even how beautiful the interior - and overgrowth free the exterior - it was then before 8ish years of dirt, damp and deliberate damage and neglect against our best attempts.

An overhaul of the website is one of the many things which need doing that I just haven't managed to get to. I will keep that history there as long as possible.

Meanwhile grief and anger pains rise in my chest with no outlet. While the Hall may be the obvious current source it's not like I'm unused to this state, it seems to have been part of me for most of my life. Keeping pain within so I don't lash out with it and hurt anyone else.

At our ceremony D. talked about how "nothing seems to rattle [me]"; it's just that I am very practiced at putting aside being pain as not being a productive thing right now and this skill is equally applicable to many other things which might get in the way of viewing a situation ... if not clearly at least practically.

But I also know that sometimes to deal with a pain or frustration and move on you have to take it off the shelf, feel it and accept it for what it is. Many, even most are trivial and easily discarded in retrospect. Some, not so much.

~~~
This story moved me greatly this morning,

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/09-02-2020/a-magic-like-no-other/

Sometimes death comes for the old, and sometimes for the young. And sadly, like life, it rarely makes much sense when it does come.

Not because of any recent deaths; actually I think I am quite lucky to have reached my age without losing too many of my peers. (But Alex, Kirsty, Kaye+Martyn, Geoff immediately come to mind ...) but because I am constantly failing to keep in touch beyond the occasional FB connection even with people I dearly want to. We don't get to sit down - over a meal or board game perhaps - and have conversations about each others lives - not that I ever feel there is much to say about my own which (at least at the moment) doesn't devolve into self pity but I still want to know what is going on with you, the good and the bad.

~~~
D. just opened the door and passed in a plate of hot quiche full of goodness, and I am so grateful to have her in my life even with all the complications and responsibilities that entails.

On Monday I cut my planned holidays short by a week and went back to work to deal with issues which had been unfinished last year and blown up over the Xmas/NY closure. This wasn't entirely unexpected so I was mentally prepared and even eager; so much so that I was at work uncommonly early on Monday and pushed through a 7-hour day in determination to complete what I was working on. (Which I didn't, but made satisfactory progress.) This may have been a mistake so I wasn't unduly concerned when I did not manage the same start on Tuesday, but by Wednesday I was lying in bed in the grip of a very familiar slough, one that held me even more as the week passed so that I didn't actually get out of bed these past two days until after 11am and to work until about 1pm. (Despite that quite a productive week. Quiet office.)

The stupid thing (well, one of many) is that on Wednesday I had been out of bed about 6am to put bread (left to rise overnight) in the oven and again about 7am to take it out. If I had just stayed out of bed I would have made it through the day just fine.

Excepting the really good start on Monday this is of course the pattern of my life which I have been trying to change for the past few years. And it really was absent over the break; or at least the feeling of weight that kept me in bed when I knew I ought to be elsewhere. Thinking back there were one or two times it resurged, when I was only partially enthused for some commitment or other.

I do not want to go through another year like this. As I sit here I don't actually know if I can face/deal with going through another year like this. It seems so unnecessary, and it should be such a simple thing for me simply to stay out of bed each morning.

Installing a standing desk has shaken up my routine and broken some of my bad computer habits, doubtless contributing to the amount of other things which have got done over the past couple of weeks; I am seriously considering reserving the bed for naps for a few months and at nights sleeping on the couch in the dining room to see if that does the trick.

~~~
In better news on Monday I gave a home to a box of old RPG books that a friend was disposing of before heading back overseas. Never mind that I haven't finished reading through the acquisitions from the last time I did that, a couple of years ago (longer)? There's some good stuff in there; collectibles and useful references.

Last night / this morning I had what I guess was an actual nightmare, considerably ... more icky than my standard nightly fare of angry-making or struggling-to-control dreams. Additionally for the past 2-3 weeks although my mood is OK several other markers have been in the red:
( snip )

When I first started intending to write this post it was as good news. That was a couple of weeks ago when I had leveraged cat-sitting for a friend into sufficient motivation to get out of bed at a good time in the morning several days in a row. I had also taken the week off gaming at SAGA to be home with cats which actually freed up 8-10 hours of time; some of which I spent working from home (light stuff) but much of which was just pressure-free. It is notable how much lighter I felt just not feeling that I "needed" / was expected to be at gaming those nights.

( it's all downhill from here )

This morning I reached one of the rare points where I felt I was letting myself down more than others, and that still wasn't enough to overcome the executive dysfunction and get me out of bed.

Every day this happens I feel myself falling further behind on the things I am trying to do.

I toyed with the idea of taking the rest of the day off work too as a mental health day but I have checked my inbox and it is full of error notifications from debugging code I put in last week and a late-Friday request from the client for help, so it looks like I have to go in, only to once again be prevented from finishing the work I was aiming to complete almost every day last week.

For all that the weekend contained a lot of good it also contained a number of loneliness triggers and pain and not eating regularly and all in all appears to have taken a lot more out of me that I had thought.

"Earthquake brain" is a term coined to describe certain mental symptoms of stress which rear their ugly heads in many people as and after the earth moves. They can range from irritability and trouble focussing to emotional breakdowns. Here in Canterbury the earth has been very active for the past month or so; compounded by this period coinciding with the 5th anniversary of the February 2011 quake and a deliberate neglect of the regions' post-disaster mental-health needs by central government.

I don't suffer directly from earthquake brain (fortunate) but have nevertheless noticed my mental health take a sharp downtick as I worry for the state of my (less-fortunate) friends; which is always top-of-mind after I feel a jolt or a wobble come through.

There are other factors to my mood drop - there always are certain circumstances in Feb/Mar and this year there is a new one.

So I've been feeling run-down, worn out, unenthusiastic about and not focused on work, procrastinating way too much and overwhelmed by my to-do list outside work, and helpless in the face of it all. To get some stuff done and close some loops I took (tried to take) a mental health day last week in conjunction with my monthly psych appointment but that didn't go well overall.

I need my brain to be active; it's like treading water. If I stop I start to sink into the dark depths of loneliness and self-pity.

Then there are times like now when I am too exhausted on one or more levels to seek out or initiate or maintain self-distraction. These times are like being sucked down and slowly drowned in a morass of unrequited want. The physical exhaustion adds a particularly visceral quality to the experience.

I know that I am just tired and drained after last night: poor sleep, dubious food, forgetting to take my meds, unfortunate party drama, the weight of years of baggage which always seems to fall out of the wardrobe at New Years. I know (hope) that in a day or two I will have recovered the energy to stay afloat. I have marshalled myself enough to take a walk around the block to somewhat disrupt the loop my brain was repeating and a healthy dinner is cooking.

I know that other people have it worse but this is about me, and right now I feel pretty shit.

"A friend in need's a friend indeed
A friend with weed is better
A friend with breasts and all the rest
A friend who's dressed in leather

A friend in need's a friend indeed
A friend who'll tease is better
Our thoughts compress which makes us blessed
And makes for stormy weather."

Damn earworm in not helping.

Last night was not well restful. I had (woke from) three very emotively charged dreams (plus lesser-charged segues) and had one of those instances where you hop out of bed to go to the toilet and discover one side of your body has forgotten what balance is.

Dream the first: Anger/Rage
The first of two dreams featuring the Hall; this one followed the now familiar course of people going in uninvited and then giving me the run-around while my phone refused to dial 111 (in one instance it actually dialled only to drip the call in favour of answering one from M about something less than helpful which resulting in me shouting down the phone at him for a bit.

I don't think anything in that dream ever got resolved but the frontage did somehow get pruned, although this involved a tree (conifer, of which there are none there - but neither is the steep hillside it was on) falling onto Riccarton Road and endangering traffic.

Dream the second: Sadness / helplessness
The first dream mostly took place around the motel wing (with several extra floors) and the garden; after an awake period it sort of picked up again with going into the managers residence and finding it had been quietly overrun with homeless people. Packed 20-40 to a room, Chch earthquake insurance/nobuild* refugees mostly. There was filth, there were flies, there hopelessness, helplessness and illness. Somehow I managed to get media attention drawn to the situation (I don't know how, the dream skipped to finishing showing a reporter around and the worse cases were in the process of being moved out to ambulances.
This dream left me with a feeling of deep sadness.

* nobuild - the rebuild which hasn't eventuated

Dream the third: Attachment
My last for the night and coming after a few other, shorter but still emotionally turbulent episodes segued out of an animated fish swimming olympics (where the winner "won" by being almost lapped then swallowed by his larger competitor only to bust back out of his gullet at the finish line to win by a nose) through
a desperate run through a post-apocalyptic trail / unused subway / mine / partly working forge and factory trying to avoid or fighting off the brutal / murderous / cannibalistic survivors and gangs which had claimed various areas. At some point a cyborg was introduced to the dream who later went crazy and full-on war-machine bloody slaughter - the dream shifted to the future where she had calmed down a bit;gained control of the factory and used her knowledge and it's facilities to create impressive war-machine bodies for a number of other serious wounded women (men only got basic cybernetic replacements) .
[No I haven't seen Fury Road yet except for the trailers, I've even managed to avoid spoilers, I'm hoping to go on Thursday]
Anyway she and I had become a thing and I would much rather have stayed in that future wasteland with her; mostly metal body serious psychological issues and all; than have to wake up again here.

I wish I had time to go deeper into why all these things are so important to me, but I have little time and still have to do that for the one from night before last (next post). For those who know me well the connections are probably all clear anyway.