This is going to be kind of stream of consciousness. I feel burned out. I don't know what else to define it as other than "burned out". Lately, my days have been consisting of fucking around with things I shouldn't be working on until mid-to-late afternoon, forcing myself to eat dinner, and then trying to sleep so I can have the same defeatist cycle the next day. A few days ago, I woke up around 9am and didn't do a whole lot of anything until 8pm. I worked on mixing the music I'm putting out this year for about an hour and then Reaper crashed a few times. That broke my entire source of energy. I was just done and this is not the first time something like this has happened. Probably even within the last year. Incomplete sentence. Oopsum.
This is not going to be a "woe is me" blog post. This is just a genuine thing in hopes to inspire someone to overcome this or realize that you don't have to go 200% every day. And people will say "there has to be a balance" to which I say "no, there fucking doesn't". I think if there is any point to this post, that's it.
Time was invented by humans as an organizational tool. Because we don't have a definition for what we perceive as the foregoing of existence, we just call that feeling time. I actually think there is a term in-between there but I don't feel like looking it up right now. You probably don't know that term. Most people don't know it. On the other hand, if I say "the old 9 to 5", you know exactly what the fuck I'm talking about. Time is something everyone fucking loves. Time is a thing the government, corporations, and the 1% of people sucking the dicks of those two fucking love. They love time because they don't need as much of it as you do. As I do. Don't worry, this isn't going to get political. Not that there would be anything wrong with this post if I were to go down that route, of course. I just need to set this up to prove my point that labor has been pegging time for centuries. Some people would deny that statement if I just said it outright. I had to preface it with all those other words to nullify that denial. Until time stops or humanity goes extinct, this is probably going to be true. That's just the way this goes now and I cannot do anything about it. Sorry.
So I write stories and blog posts. I write, record, and mix music. I used to make videos and want to make more. I stream on Twitch. These are things I enjoy doing but none of this can take me anywhere on its own. Where is a place I would want something that is not a vehicle to take me to? None of these things I do can take me to a physical place, so what state of being am I striving for? One with money? I suppose because again, the whole 1% thing. If "the 1% thing" wasn't an issue, I wouldn't have to put up such a fight to do things that people would benefit from.
When I'm not writing stories, writing blog posts, writing music, recording guitars, recording singing, mixing music, mastering music, editing some video, or streaming on Twitch, I'm grinding a job I do not want to do. I tolerate this job because it fits where I am at right now. It is as comforting as it is fucking sickening, tedious, obnoxious, and in my case, physically destructive. This has been a decent approximation of my state of being for the past four years.
"Take some risks". "Make a change". "Do that grind". "Go somewhere for a nice vacation." "Go on dates". "Buy a house". "Change your diet".
Shut the fuck up?
I do not think, for a goddamn minute of any given day, that I am the only person currently hitting this wall. Still, I think the fact that I cannot overcome it every minute of every given day is part of the reason why it takes me longer to put out things that I am genuinely passionate about. See "take some risks", "buy a house", "move to a new location", "see the world", "get laid", okay maybe not that last one; these are all things that would actively hinder me from what I want to do. Now, I think that these things would be good advice for someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Not in a quirky millennial "lol I have no idea what I'm doing with my life so I bought a gummy bear the size of my golden retriever" way. I know what I want to do and at this time, I know why I cannot do half of it. Outright. Cannot. I have a decent grasp on why a lot of it can be done but for the same reasons I cannot do these other things, this half of the aspirations will take so much more time. Unfortunately, a lot of this simply boils down to money.
So I should work more hours. Welllllll fuck it is physically hurting me. I'm weirdly physically resilient for a human stick bug. That said, I have started noticing pain that I haven't noticed before and it doesn't go away after one day. A lot of the time, it takes two or three days. I only get three days off at this. The other four days of the week are spent getting ready to spend my entire fucking day at this place and then spending the entire fucking day at this place. So my three days off must require some form of work on Lexi Karma or anything else I might want to get done. In between, I also have to do basic stuff we all do like basic hygiene and cleaning up my living space. I have been slacking on the latter. I'm still weirdly hygienic for being this fucking depressed. 2020 didn't even keep me from that. Laundry kind of sits between those two doesn't it? I drive to a laundromat to escape my awful neighbors. Other than the trek, it would cost about the same anyway. When I wait for the washing and drying cycles, I'm on my iPad, often working on something. Not thinking about breathing in fresh air. I am not thinking about mindfulness or how in love I am or where my "career" is heading. I am just thinking "I have to do these things I want to do because they will not be fucking done if I don't do them and nobody can help me because I can not afford to compensate these people fairly". This isn't an invitation for free work, by the way, fucking respect yourself.
I am dropping down from full-time to part-time at my job because I got a raise. I will now be able to afford basic living expenses while breaking my body less. Note: "less". I have a degree now but it's like, what am I even supposed to do with that? Get a job that will fire me in three weeks anyway? This is my mindset. The real thing holding me back from job-hunting is that even with a Bachelor's, I'm still underqualified for shit I know I could do. The tasks needed to perform these jobs with flying colors are tasks I could knock out of the park but I am "underqualified". So I stick to physical labor.
The other day, there was a guy there I had seen around. They had him in a wheelchair for a bit. He was on a walker that day and it looked like he could barely keep it together. The guy had to have been no younger than 70 years old. I don't think I'll be that guy but I also don't have any solid proof that I won't be at this point in my life and that kind of scares me. I'm not trying to be a tough guy here, it doesn't keep me up at night. It really just scares me at the "kind of" level.
All this to say, what the hell do we do with this wall then? You sat through all these words and it can't just lead to nowhere. It can't just lead to nihilism. Well, it can but it won't. Most of the time, like right now, I'm really stuck on something that I really want to show the world. But there's that wall. I guess I pick out pieces of that wall that I put there myself. That's my best advice. It might not sound like enough but you would be surprised. I can't do anything about the US having a fucking inhumane health care system. I can't do anything about the pompous fortress that is trying to make a big production out of something with other people. I can't help that I don't have the money to hire people to help me do these things. I don't have that ability because of the problems I pointed out right before this issue. So you see, it trickles down. You break down more and more of this wall or at least outline how to. Then you start to see "fuck, this brick is made out of tofu". That tofu brick might be sexual trauma or just a basic fear of failure. Tofu's a bad analogy because those two examples can be absolutely paralyzing.
And here's another important point: sometimes making a blueprint of what to do with that wall is okay. Some days, that is what you had to do and you can bulldoze tomorrow because the weather today isn't good for it.
The main inspiration for writing this is that I feel lately, it is getting harder and harder to start that bulldozer up. I guess if you're reading this, you are also having ignition issues. Especially after 2020, I think a lot of us feel like we need a blueprint day every fucking day. For this, I don't have an answer and even if I did, it wouldn't work for every person. No way in Hell. For me, and hopefully, this works for a lot of people if not for everyone... For me, I have a day like this and realize I didn't do the dishes, I didn't vacuum the carpet, I didn't record voice-over, I didn't record that one guitar track, I didn't write a single fucking word of this glorious web-comic that will probably never fucking come out at this rate but when that day hits I remember that person who will berate me for this. I remember the cloaked man with a hook for a hand and a pistol in the other and he's just waiting outside my bedroom window waiting for me to fuck up. When I finally have mold growing in the sink while I'm watching the 80th let's play video I watched that day, that dude is going to come in here and wear my face on his abdomen. If you haven't caught on yet, this guy doesn't exist and you probably don't know him either. So any version of that is all in your head. Fuck that guy. He doesn't get to exist but you do so you're not the biggest waste of flesh in the universe. You just want to watch that kid's cartoon you've already seen five times all the way through. That's fine.
As an end note, I don't like telling people how to live their lives. If you want to amputate one of your hands and replace it with a fucking hook, buy a gun, and hang outside my apartment with a clean shot for when you can see the dishes from the next building over, fucking go for it.
