Tag: anxiety

And here we go

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics6 Comments

I have mentioned this already, I think, but it’s always worth repeating stories where I’m stupid: in June I bought a bunch of LED light ropes and took them to work and left them in my classroom. I then forgot that I had bought them and bought a different set of LED light ropes in July, and didn’t realize my mistake until emptying my closet in my old classroom last week.

Those are the first set of lights I bought. I have the second set up too; I like these a lot more. That design isn’t meant to be anything in particular but somehow ended up looking sort of like an anglerfish (look on the left) and I’m fully expecting my students to name it. One interesting thing: the lights are from different manufacturers and run on different apps, but it’s clearly based on the same underlying architecture, as the interface is nearly exactly the same. Those lights have thousands of different “special effects” and light patterns– enough that it’s almost too many– and the other set has, like, twelve. I need to see if there’s a way I can get the good app talking to the other lights, or maybe a generic one that can run both. Failing that, I bet I can swap out the controllers; the lights themselves should work exactly the same way.

In other news, I have 200 postcards in front of me, and over the next couple of months I need to handwrite a message to a voter on each of them encouraging them to vote and then mail them all out on the same day. Handwrite a message. This is … insanely intimidating. I haven’t heard anything about being a poll worker yet; I tried a different way to sign up yesterday, so maybe someone will get back to me soon. If not, I’m calling it good and taking Election Day and the day after off anyway.

(Election Day because my students do not remotely deserve the ball of stress and anxiety that I’m going to be on that day, and the one following because no matter how the evening goes, I know good and Goddamned well I’m not getting any sleep on the night of the 5th. I need to figure out exactly how far in advance I can take a personal day so that I can sign up for that shit the second it becomes available. Under normal circumstances the district isn’t allowed to say no to a personal day request if it’s filed on time (and most of the time administrators don’t care if it’s filed on time) but I’m anticipating I might not be the only person wanting to be gone those days, so I gotta get a jump on it.

If they had any sense it would be an e-learning day anyway.

In which I must be sick

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, video games2 Comments

I haven’t ordered the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC yet.

I … what?

I put something like 130 hours into Elden Ring. My Let’s Play series is a hundred and ten episodes long. I completed every mission I could find, got the Platinum trophy, all of the endings, everything. Played the absolute ever-loving shit out of that game and enjoyed Goddamn near every second of it.

And they’re releasing a lengthy DLC on the 21st, which by all indications is amazing. And I haven’t bought it, I don’t think I’m going to buy it, and I’m not excited about it. Right now I should be planning on staying up late on Thursday night so that I can get started immediately, just like I did with the actual game. I stayed up late to record the demo, for God’s sake.

What the hell is wrong with me?

There’s been a consistent theme in my life over the last several years of this creeping anhedonia, where I just … stop doing things I used to really love doing, or stop enjoying things I used to enjoy. I effectively don’t watch anything any longer. No movies, no TV, nothing streaming. There’s a new season of The Boys, which I’ve enjoyed. Not gonna watch it. The Acolyte? Not gonna watch it. I’m done with Star Wars. I’m done with Marvel. I’m only still buying comic books because my weekly trip to the comic shop is my only reliable in-person interaction with human beings I’m not related to or work with; I can’t stop shopping there unless I move or die. I could literally just come home and put them in a box and never read them and I wouldn’t miss a thing.

You’re never going to catch me complaining about reading, but it’s literally the only thing I do for fun. That’s weird, right? I read books and I write here. Dassit. Those are my hobbies. The honest truth is I think I could sell my PS5 and my Xbox and I wouldn’t miss them. And I’ve been a gamer my entire life.

I don’t fucking get it, and I don’t like it.

(And, to forestall this: Yes, I recognize that I’m basically describing a textbook case of clinical depression here. And while I’m on Effexor, that’s an anti-anxiety med, not an antidepressant, and I don’t think the two overlap much. But I have no other symptoms of depression, including the not exactly minor detail that I’m rarely actually feeling depressed. This is a mental health issue, don’t misunderstand me, but I feel like the most obvious answer is not the right one.)

Snarl

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I am In a Mood tonight, and not especially fit for human company.

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

On last year and next year

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I went back and looked at the post I wrote at the end of 2022, and while I was willing to admit that 2022 had been a good year, I was clearly feeling pretty gun-shy about the idea. The notion that after the utter carnage that 2016 through 2021 had been, an actual good year had finally happened really seemed to beggar belief. I can’t justify any such hesitation about 2023; last year was a good year by nearly all personal metrics other than my own health, and even that wasn’t all that bad. In a lot of ways, I really don’t have anything to complain about, and I’m tantalizingly close to a major, major milestone in my life, one that ten years ago I didn’t think was ever going to happen: assuming no disasters occur (hah!), I am on track to be completely debt-free other than my house by the end of this school year. That’s entirely due to trends that started in 2022 and accelerated in 2023.

(I just took a few minutes to look, and I was officially diagnosed with sleep apnea in November of 2022, so that’s not 2023’s fault. I can’t even get mad at 2023 about that.)

Here’s the thing, though: 2024 fucking terrifies me. Like, bone-deep. Like, I don’t know how you diagnose someone with anxiety when the world is actually like this terrified. Why? Notice how I said “personal metric” up there? By that I mean, like, my life, my health, my family, my job, my finances. That sort of stuff. That’s all good right now, although I know how fast shit can change. Anything other than that? Fucked. Fucked. This was the hottest year in the history of humanity and nothing’s going to change. I have brought a child into this bullshit and he has to somehow survive for several decades after I’m gone while the world is busy being on fire. Israel is committing genocide in plain fucking sight of the entire world and no one is doing anything about it and there is literally nothing I can do to change anything about it. There’s a fucking presidential election this year. The state legislature is about to go back into session and who the fuck only knows what sort of bullshit they’re going to put on us this year.

(The pronoun bill? Sorta fizzled. Everybody just sort of mutually decided that we weren’t going to pay any attention to it, and nothing happened. I violate the pronoun law a hundred times a day and nothing is going to happen to me.).

I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to survive ten fucking months until the election. And the level of panic that sets in any time I try to seriously contemplate what I should do if things don’t go our way is indescribable. 

So. Yeah. Last year was the last good year. Even if we win 400 electoral votes this fall I still have to make it to November before that happens. I just don’t see anything coming this year that I can look forward to, other than that whole “no debt” thing, which isn’t going to work out for me all that well when I have to sell everything and move to Canada on no notice. Or, y’know, not, since the fascists taking over could pretty much result in anything. Who the fuck knows.

Also, so far it’s been 2024 for two days, and I was woozy and sickish all day yesterday– I have never been hung over even once in my entire life, but based on how people have described it to me, I may as well have been– and last night I managed to throw out my back in my sleep because I’m 47 and that shit can happen now. So, yeah, fuck this year.

Anybody have the number for a good therapist? Maybe that’s where all my money can go.

Whoops

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I swear to you that I woke up in a cold sweat at 3:17 in the morning last night, unable to remember whether I had written a blog post or not, and had to check my phone and confirm that yes, I had managed to deliberately skip a Saturday update and then accidentally miss a Sunday, and then fell back asleep and managed to have a nightmare about missing the meeting that I had to go to for work this morning. I did not miss the meeting, although I did manage to oversleep a little bit and then dragassed my way to work, making myself one of the last people to actually arrive for the thing.

Which … whatever, no one cares so long as you show up within the first 10 minutes or so.

Today was kind of a momentous anniversary; while it’s not literally a calendar year according to the date, I started at my new job on the Monday before Thanksgiving week last year, and this is the Monday before Thanksgiving week. I continue to believe that taking this job ranks among the smarter decisions I’ve made in my lifetime, and in all honesty the last year or so has finally been clearly trending upward after a whole lot of years in a row that I had described as the worst year of my life.

This is gonna be a weird week; we have NWEA testing tomorrow and Thursday mornings, and Wednesday morning there is a big choir practice that will take a fairly large number of my kids away for the morning. The combination of both in the same week, especially knowing that next week is only two days, has made planning … tricky. We’re starting slope this week, a topic so complicated and fraught that talking about it in public caused a man to threaten my Canadian teaching license several years ago. Hopefully it goes better for me this time; I miss teaching in Canada.

Mental health note

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I alluded the other day to realizing that you’ve grown tired of a long-term hobby, and it’s floated through my head several times recently (and, I think, was also suggested by someone here, although I’m not about to go looking through comments) that if I described what I’ve been like lately to a third party and especially if I didn’t tell them I was talking about myself, they’d describe me as clinically depressed. My anhedonia is through the roof lately; I don’t enjoy much of anything that I used to enjoy, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

I’ve effectively stopped watching all things that can be watched. I have a probably month-high stack of comic books sitting next to me that I bought and actively don’t want to read. I’m ready to clear all of my superhero memorabilia out of the house, and that’s a lot of stuff. Even video games have been sources of more stress than stress relief yesterday; I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate III pretty consistently for a few weeks and I had a moment the other day where I realized I was getting tired of it. I’m … maybe a third of the way in? And my backlog is like six or seven games deep right now. If I hadn’t already shut down the YouTube channel (which is another thing I used to enjoy that I’ve stopped doing) I’d have to at this point, just because I can’t fucking finish anything.

I’m still reading, but nothing’s set the world on fire recently. I don’t know what the shit I’m going to do if I lose interest in reading. It’s unimaginable. And, well, y’all can bear witness to the amount of time I’ve spent writing recently. The weird thing is that I don’t feel like I’m unhappy; I just … feel like I don’t really enjoy anything lately. A bunch of perfectly cromulent geek hobbies have been tossed aside in favor of the fucking NYT crossword and Spelling Bee and I refuse to be that person.

I’ve been on brain meds long enough that I’m used to sort of monitoring my mental status from a distance. I’ll get in touch with my doctor if I start feeling like this is getting genuinely alarming, or if my wife comes to me after reading this and says she’s noticed something different. It may just be that I’m finally aging out of my juvenile bullshit; who knows. I just … really miss liking things, that’s all, and I don’t feel like that’s something I do any longer.

Blech.

Blech

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

Is boredom a symptom of depression? I mean, it can be, right? I don’t think I’m clinically depressed because I’m too functional for too much of the time, but these brief twelve-hour funks where I don’t want to do anything could stop anytime and I’d be fine with it.

Wait, what?

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Yesterday I said I was genuinely excited about school starting this week. Today I’ve mostly been a ball of anxiety, although I think I’ve been masking it pretty well, maybe? I don’t know. I did a better job keeping busy yesterday– for the most part I had no choice, being honest, as we went to a birthday party in Indianapolis, and driving back and forth to Indy in a single day is gonna keep you busy whether you want it to or not. Today … not so much. I have done a lot of sitting and staring. Finished the crossword and the Spelling Bee on the NYT app. I’ll probably finish the book I’m reading today. That’s about it.

I’m hoping to find out one of two things tomorrow– either that we hired a new math teacher and therefore the size of most of my classes are going to drop by about a third, or that they’ve agreed to split my Honors class into two classes, which will put me into an overload status (bad) but substantially increase my pay because of said overload (good). One of my current life goals, and it’s entirely reachable provided no major crises this year, is to be completely debt-free other than the house by the end of this school year. With the extra pay from an overage class it goes from “entirely reachable” to very close to easy. One way or another I should know by the end of the day. I’ll finish up the classroom tomorrow and then I can spend Tuesday and Wednesday worrying about curriculum. All good, right? Sure.