Tag: mental health

In which I’ve wasted the weekend

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Welp.

Friday night I took an Emergency Brain Pill. I wasn’t necessarily having a mental health emergency or anything really close to it, but I basically use these pills when I can’t get my brain to shut off and let me sleep, and what with the God-tier sleep apnea I apparently also have, and having survived my first week in the new building, I figured I was owed a decent night’s sleep. The pill kicked my ass, rendering me a useless, sluggish mess all day Saturday and requiring a three-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon. Then today my son had his Lego Robotics competition, which somehow went from 8:15 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and by the end of it the boy was so bored he was in tears.

I have … some issues with how this competition was organized. Nothing I can really yell at anybody about, because there’s only one competition, and they didn’t place high enough to advance to the state-level competition in December, but from what I can tell most of the people involved are okay with that. Regardless, we got home around five and all of us died. I had grading planned for tonight, and fuck that. They can wait a little longer, they’ll be okay.

Sometime in the next couple of days I need to do a book review– the short version is that Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is magnificent– and think out loud a bit about how grading needs to work in my new building. But this is all I’ve got for tonight, I think.

Woohoo, and advice to the Democrats

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today went exactly as I thought it would, as opposed to how I feared it would. Everybody, from the building principal to the security guards to the kids, seemed really nice, and there don’t seem to be any shouty people in my hallway yet, and other than some casual profanity in the hallway I didn’t even see any misbehavior. Learning the LMS system the new district uses is going to crack my skull open, and right now I kind of hate it, and I talked all day so my throat feels like somebody ran an electric mixer in it for a couple of minutes, but other than that? No complaints.

I had a whole bit here about the Speaker of the House but having written half of it, I’ve decided it’s dumb and I need to learn more before I put anything dumb where people can read it. So … yeah. My advice to the Democrats is to listen to people who are smarter than me.

Anxiety Dump 2

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

It’s absolutely wonderful, this feeling that your brain is betraying you. I know how tomorrow is going to go. It’s going to be fine. I might have a minor technical hiccup or two, possibly involving a photocopier or the ancient projector in my classroom or the fact that I haven’t touched a Windows device in, probably, literal decades. That’s the worst that’s going to happen. The kids are going to be fine. It’s going to be honeymoon time and beyond that I took some time today to go through my kids’ discipline records and something like 75% of them have no referrals at all, and my worst kids have maybe one a week, with a lot of those being something called “refusal to identify self,” which … well, I’m actually going to ask them tomorrow or Tuesday how it is that I have kids who have no referrals other than five or six refusals to identify themselves, because that doesn’t make any sense to me– if I’m mad at a kid for refusing to identify him- or herself, I feel like there’s probably something else going on that I could have put on that referral? Something that maybe trumps the refusal to identify?

I dunno. At the moment it’s a minor mystery.

And nonetheless, despite the fact that I have changed schools many times, despite the fact that I have had nineteen first days of school and this will be the twentieth and I can do these things in my sleep, I am crawling out of my skin with anxiety right now. Like, I’m getting physical manifestations of it. I’m sweatier than I ought to be and jumpy as fuck. I’d take a brain pill except that the newer emergency pills have a bad habit of turning me into a slug the day after I take them (they are listed for “up to four times a day” on the bottle, and I cannot imagine what the fuck would happen if I took four of them in a day) and I cannot be a slug tomorrow.

I’m also being deeply stupid about having to get to work earlier than normal. I generally got to my previous school at 8:30; I have to be at this one at 7:30. That’s an hour earlier, and I don’t have to drop my son off. So I get up an hour earlier. This isn’t complicated. I’ve already changed my alarm and everything. And yet, bullshit abounds regardless. It’s just before 8:00 right now and I’m genuinely concerned that I should be starting to get ready to bed.

Just shut up, brain, I’m tired of you. I know it’s been a stressful week and realistically it’s about to be another one, but Christ, enough. We know how to do this. It’s going to be fine.

Anxiety dump

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

My lovely little vacation is about to end— not the one that had me at my aunt’s house yesterday, where I somehow left during the summer and returned during the winter, because that happened— but my three weeks between jobs. Tomorrow afternoon we move my stuff into my classroom, and I officially start on Monday.

And if I’m being honest, I’ve not been this nervous about starting at a new school since I lived in Chicago. I don’t feel like I know nearly enough about the building to be starting on Monday, and while I don’t want to get into shit-talking before I even start, I feel unprepared in a way that is specifically alarming about the quality of leadership– admin and otherwise– in the building. To be specific, I’ve requested access to their teacher handbook at least half a dozen times and from multiple people, and not only have I not been given access to any such thing, no one has even acknowledged the request. In other words, I’ve asked three different people “Can you send me the teacher handbook?” and I haven’t gotten “not until you start here” or “we don’t have one” or “Yes, I’ll do that” from any of the three, it’s just been as if I haven’t asked the question at all. So right now I know not a single thing about how any procedures at all work in the building. I finally got access to attendance today, so I know my schedule, but I have never seen a bell schedule, so I don’t know when, say, fourth hour actually is. I don’t know if there’s any particular places I’m supposed to be in the morning or at dismissal.

It’s alarming. Like, this is information I need, and furthermore it’s information they want me to have. I’m supposed to see the principal tomorrow so I’ll be able to ask her in person, but I should’ve had this weeks ago.

The other thing? I’m letting my head get into this stupid place where maybe I’ve only allowed myself to think that I’m a good teacher for the last two decades because I’ve been teaching at mostly shitty schools for my entire career! Like, I don’t want to be the guy who spends the next three months saying “Oh, at my old district we said bleh, and now at this district you say blah,” but I have this weird and likely entirely inaccurate feeling that I have a whole lot of really bad habits— what are they? I dunno!– that I’m going to have to unlearn, and I’m worried that I’m going to have to start submitting 20 pages of lesson plans every week or some shit like that, which is … massively unlikely.

Oh, and I have to learn Canvas, which is vastly annoying, because right now I don’t know it at all.

It’ll be fine. It’ll all be fine. But I’m already stuck in a world where I left town for 24 hours and I feel like I was gone a month, and next week is going to be an enormously long week even in the best-case scenario. So maybe that nap I took this afternoon wasn’t a bad idea after all.

Anxiety disorder, or just stupid?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Mental health is so much fun. There is nothing like being midway through a three-day weekend and finding yourself paralyzed and indecisive about what you should be doing, not because you’re overwhelmed with work, but because you haven’t finished Sandman yet even though every second you’ve watched of it has been amazing, and She-Hulk is probably one of your favorite comic book characters of all time and she’s sitting on your desk staring at you and wondering why you don’t love her enough and haven’t watched even a single second of her show yet, and oh by the way you have a Lord of the Rings tattoo on your leg and there is no work of human literature up to and including the Bible that has had more of an impact on your life than LOTR did and oh that new show started this week and have you watched that yet no you have not. How the hell am I eighteen hours behind on TV?

It is just amazing to be freaking out because you are so behind on things and what you are “behind on” is fucking television. Also I haven’t showered yet today, I’m halfway through like fifteen genuinely minor tasks that would take probably two minutes each to accomplish, and I need to write a blog post and record an episode or two of Raji: An Ancient Epic because like an idiot I found a way to make video games into an unpaid job.

An example of those minor tasks: there is a box behind me, maybe five feet away. That box is full of action figures and crap that I took off of my desk because I decided it was starting to look super cluttered and I only wanted it to look a little cluttered. I took a bunch of stuff off, put it in the box, and then put the box behind me, intending to move it into the closet in this room. We are talking about opening a closet door and moving the box ten feet. It might not even be that far.

The box has been sitting there for at least a week and a half.

There are three credit cards sitting on my desk that have been here for months. They need to be moved into my safe. The safe is locked and on a shelf down the hall. Months.

I’m really psyched about tomorrow. Why? Because I plan to spend all day at my computer getting shit done for work that didn’t get done before school started, so now that we’re about to start Week Four I probably ought to, like, get some vocabulary words up on the wall. Tomorrow at this time I expect to be happy at the amount of stuff I got done during the day, including a truly impressive pile of grading.

But that box? It’s still gonna be there.

In which I am on druuuuuuuuugs

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I currently have prescriptions for two brain drugs. One, Effexor, is my daily anti-anxiety drug. I’m on 150 mg; I started at 75 and eventually decided that upping my dosage a bit was warranted. I used to have a secondary script for … shit I can never remember the name, but some secondary drug that I only took when I absolutely couldn’t get my brain to shut down, generally when I was trying to get to sleep. My new doctor didn’t love the secondary prescription because apparently long-term use of that type of drug can be Bad, and while I was only taking an occasional and small dose (12 pills would last me a couple of months, easy) I generally am not the type to continue taking medication that my doctor doesn’t recommend even if some other doctor did recommend it.

Anyway, long story short, she switched me to something else the last time I went in, and I gave up and went and took one when I found myself, at 1:00 in the morning, having to research larger outdoor pools on my phone because I needed to know right now how much they cost and what sizes they were available in. That was after ordering a new pillow on Amazon at midnight, apparently, which I didn’t even remember I’d done until seeing the email in the morning. But yeah: random panic about pool prices in the middle of the fucking night is very much a “take a brain pill” moment, so I did, and I think the next time I talk to her I’m going to suggest going back to the old stuff, because I have been a pile of sludge all day today. I took my son to camp at 12:30, came home intending to hop in the shower and get some stuff done, and instead I sat in a chair and stared for over an hour. I’m significantly more human now but the first six or seven hours of being technically awake were a mess today, and not in a good way. Like, I wasn’t high, I just … didn’t want to move. I managed to get to sleep, at least, so the pill did what it was supposed to, but as it stands this isn’t something I can take during the week, which cuts its usefulness to me by a pretty significant degree.

Meanwhile, Day 3 of live-streaming Stray happens in … oh, about half an hour, over at lutherplaysgames.com, so come hang out with us:

Oh, okay, this again

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I have said this so many times that even I am bored with it, so feel free to ignore this post as you see fit: my inability to “relax” amazes me, and the surest way to guarantee that I’m going to be in a shitty mood is to put me in a situation where I’m not “getting anything done.” I did basically nothing over the last couple of days other than marinate in front of Twitter and fall into bleak fucking despair at the fact that literally everything gets worse every single day.

Today, I have done the following:

  • Successfully sold the 3D printer
  • Deposited a bunch of change at the bank
  • Contested the $100 bill I got from a lab for a Covid test; those motherfuckers had better go talk to my fucking insurance because there’s no universe where they’re getting $100 from me for a test that I had no choice in taking
  • Paid my car registration and remembered to put the receipt in my car, and did it early enough that I probably won’t even get pulled over and need the receipt
  • Mowed the fucking lawn
  • Murdered weeds
  • Went swimming (this counts!)
  • Went to the comic shop and engaged in capitalism
  • Bought my wife a present
  • Some light cleaning and organization

And I am in a much better mood than I have been for several days now, simply by virtue of having kept busy today. I mean, if I get stupid and start paying attention to the news again I’m sure I’ll go right back to being fucked, but at least I feel like I did something today. And my wife is about to leave town for a week, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be busy for the next several days. Maybe I’ll even write a compelling blog post sometime between now and then! The possibilities are endless.

In which I’m almost there

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, video gamesLeave a comment

I have been an utter wreck for the last few days. Monday was spent in a nameless bad mood, to the point where I actually took a brain pill in the middle of the day, which is something that I generally don’t do; I almost always use the emergency pills for nights when I can’t shut my brain off and need to sleep. I was out of work yesterday and today, yesterday with something vile and digestive, with shooting pains in my stomach, and today with a massive headache. I’m out of sick days for the year, so the next three months are gonna be interesting. I’ve gotten roughly an extra day and a half worth of sleep in the last 48 hours and feel fine right now, so I’m going in tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.

(I’ve missed a ton of work in 2022. This is the first two days I’ve had to take off because something was wrong with me, however.)

Anyway, Elden Ring comes out on Friday, and while I don’t know it’ll help my mental health any it’ll certainly fill the hours. Next week will be that horror of horrors, a five-day work week, something that sounds nearly insurmountable the way the last two months have gone. The following week ends the quarter and features a teacher record day, and then the two weeks following are full weeks, but then we have Spring Break. I want to try to make it that far without missing any days, or at least without missing any days under circumstances I can control.

Meanwhile, the world is slowly catching on fire again, in any number of ways and any number of places, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about any of it, so I might as well burn my hours on video games. I said on Twitter earlier today that I can’t remember the last time I was looking forward to anything as much as I was looking forward to getting home from work on Friday and getting to play this game, and that remains true; the closest I can think of is Avengers: Endgame, and while we don’t all know how that ended up, enough of you do that you’ll understand why I don’t care to repeat the experience.

Tomorrow, though, I’m gonna teach somebody math for a while. I’m going to get through tomorrow, and I’m going to get through Friday. One day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time; three months from now, I may be done teaching. We’ll see what happens. One way or another, the time is going to pass.

(You really really ought to follow me on YouTube. Even if you’re not a video game person, my current project, What Remains of Edith Finch, has been … really interesting so far in a way that sidesteps a lot of what people who don’t play video games don’t like about them. If that makes any sense. Anyway, go subscribe.)