Today’s the last day I’m on a rough medication folks, so you’re going to get only the lightest fraction of filter. August has been a harrowing month, and September doesn’t want to break the streak. Frankly, I had debated forgoing this post entirely and just scrubbing the whole thing, but we’ve managed to get a monthly post out for over almost a year now and I want to keep this as a triumph. I’m in a bad place but the thought of breaking that streak was threatening to put me into a worse one.
We’re here sitting on the precipice of a post that’ll sound like it came out of my early 2000’s brain and is getting ready to post up on my Live Journal. Well, not that bad. I have a better understanding of my mental health and a grasp on why I’m feeling the way I’m feeling. I have a greater understanding of the part of my life that depression, medicine, and overall healthcare plays in the way I respond to things and how I deal with the event and aftermaths. I also have a better understanding of how to use commas but have elected to not restrain myself in this post. So, that’s a thing.
Writing has been a hard thing this summer. The enthusiasm I possessed early in the year has eroded away for a number of reasons, not the least of which is my own mental health feeling like I’m wading through a pool full of marshmallow fluff. Add into the equation a migraine that has only gotten worse over the season, and you start to get a grasp of how I’m feeling. Before the sun goes down, I’m a hot mess that lumbers through the day. Afterwards, I’m a nocturnal goblin whose brain won’t stop pressing the “worry” button. This has culminated in a not exactly comfortable creative workspace.
It has permitted me enough to manage streaming to a certain degree. We played two new games last month, Owlboy and Shovel Knight, and two major patches in our regular titles, Warframe, and Final Fantasy XIV. I touched on Owlboy in the previous post, as we knocked it out early in August. Shovel Knight came nipping on its heels and that was a lovely experience. I’ll be working on getting the year’s game reviews caught up, so keep an eye on the usual space. The FFXIV patch was… well… problematic. 5.3’s release happened the same day I had the doubling down of health issues in the start of the month. Because of that I lost a lot of the steam I hoped for the stream. We caught back up with the Heart of Deimos update for Warframe, but since its release the game sits in my back burner until the next big patch drop. These days I find myself drawing solace in the calms of a lunar base, in Space Engineers. That game has been a staple of our “chill streams” and it’s been a welcome companion these past few cycles.
But even those were no match for the medication of this past week. If you watched last Saturday’s VOD, you might have noticed it ended a touch early. Day three of a six-day steroid treatment, and I found myself having an honest to goodness emotional breakdown. I survived it, but it was a shock. I needed to listen to what was going on within me. I took the cue and put down the streaming mic for the weekend, my first real break since we started last year in July.
And that leads us to today, where the biggest thing sitting on my plate is this. I’m glad to be writing this, to be honest about what’s going on and the word flow of my mind. This is what the writing looks like before the editing, the paring down, the flow set on super soaker instead of being properly managed. It’s not something I’ll do on a regular basis, but it’s an honest taste of the mental state I’m in. It feels good to be writing, even if it’s a non-fiction sarcastic essay on my state of mind. It’s something.
Tomorrow is the first day I’ll be post medication. I don’t pretend to think I’ll “snap back.” I won’t make that kind of promise. But I can promise to try, to do what I can with the spoons I can wield. This is the first writing I’ve managed in over two weeks, and the first thing I’ve finished since I made a post turning the Patreon off for a month. That’s heavy to think about, maybe too much for the time being, but that’s the truth of it. I’m hoping to do more. Little things, like those game reviews, are where we’re going to try to start. After that? Well, we’ll see.
Thanks for sticking with me. It means the world.