This one is part lore drop, part "I really hate that my brain is like this".
To begin: As the title says, I feel like I just...can't enjoy leisurely things anymore. My brain just won't allow it. I can't convince myself that it's okay to just sit in front of a TV and let my brain fully shut off and disengage. I can't convince myself that it's okay to jump into a video game and let myself get absorbed into it like I used to. Even Expedition 33, a game that I love dearly and has become one of my favorite games of all time required me to dip in every so often over the course of several months. Not because it's a bad game, but because I just felt bad for sitting down and not doing something productive.
This feeling has always kinda been there, just dormant. It's a holdover from the final years of high school, when my mom met someone knew and that person was an absolute hardass + we lived with my grandfather who was a military-flavored hardass. This resulted in an environment where I was simply not allowed to be idle nor really have fun or do anything for myself. My time was taken up by:
- School
- Homework
- Taking care of my grandfather (because somehow this duty fell to me, of all things)
- Chores
- More homework (there was mountains of it in my senior year)
- Bed by 11pm, if I was lucky
If I even had a hint of free time between those, my mom's boyfriend or my grandfather would find something for me to do.
This was kind of a culture shock to me because prior to all this? I lived with just my mom and sister, and the only thing I really ever had to "worry" about is my sister multitasking so hard that she ties up both the TV and internet connection. Otherwise? Things were hands off. If I wanted to go see friends? No big deal. Spend some time playing games? No big deal there, either. And overnight it went from this to having my time micromanaged and not being allowed to really idle or even sit down without someone breathing down my neck. Worse, to enforce this, this is when things started just...disappearing, because the punishments and groundings were constant.
(Worse yet, I got punished simply because when we moved into my grandfather's, I was expected to very suddenly raise my standards of living after a whole life of living in apartments. When I didn't, I was punished there, too. "You didn't clean your room good enough", among other things. For a while it got so bad they actually took my bedroom door. Yeah. Fun.)
It really felt like I was living in a foster home, at least the ones I had been through where it really felt like we were prisoners not allowed to have much of anything of our own besides the clothes on our backs.
I was kicked out not long after turning 18 and while that sucked at the time it also meant that hey, I was the master of my own destiny now, and no one could really tell me what I wasn't allowed to do with my free time. I got better at ignoring that voice in my head that was planted there by the way my parents made the last leg of my high school years a living hell.
Unfortunately, that wouldn't last forever. I eventually lost my job, and while I had all intent to go back to work, this never happened because my health suddenly leaped into the hot seat and I had to take care of that. I worked my ass off during the worst of The Great Recession, and my bosses made it loud and clear that if I did so much as wavered there are people out there who would gladly do the work I do for cheaper than they're paying me, so grit your teeth and tank this shit, dude.
Thing is, I'm T1 diabetic and that does not take kindly to being ignored so I spent the rest of my 20s trying to keep my body from falling apart from all the checks I wrote against myself in my early 20s.
Even now, I couldn't hold down a normal job. My condition is too much of a wildcard. I have random days where my blood sugar just refuses to be tamed and I pretty much have to take a zero day to get it back in line. Seeing my partner struggle to get leave for even significant doctor's appointments, yeah, no employer is going to want me in this state.
Even as that voice grew louder over the years following me losing my job, I still remained fairly okay at ignoring it. That voice that tells me that I'm guilty for not always being productive. Even as I got some side eyes from my partner's friends (and even our roommate) for not having a job and not pulling my own weight financially. (I get disability, but let's be honest, it isn't enough with the high prices of everything these days.)
Where the switch really got flipped was in 2024, when a big 'ol chain of events happened that resulted in our roommate leaving us without not even so much as a two week notice, and we had to turn on a dime to be able to afford losing that roommate. We managed, barely, but the pressure I feel from my own brain only got that much worse. It didn't help that the roommate finally dropped all the pleasantries at the end of all this and directly confronted me saying "so why don't you just get a job?"
I really do wish I could. I really wish my body wasn't the broken husk that it is.
But this made that voice loud and hard to ignore. The one that says hey, you should feel guilty for even stopping to take time for yourself. Except now it's paired with another one that says that I can't pull my own weight, and you're burdening those around because of that. Made worse by the fact that my partner had to take a second job just to keep us afloat now that we're in 2025-2026 and the cost of living is going through the fucking roof.
That guilt just makes it immensely hard to sit down and play games. Or watch TV. Or do anything else like that, really. Because every time I sit in front of my TV I kinda just poke through the menus for a second before thinking "I need to be productive, there are things that need doing" and just shutting everything off and letting my brain ping back to executive dysfunction for a few hours.
There have been a few times where I have convinced myself that it's okay, but it never, ever lasts, or something happens that pulls me out of that moment and makes me feel even worse for having even given myself the permission to just...chill for a bit.
It's why for my retrocomputing projects I get systems repaired and running, but then just...kinda sit there and look at them and put them away. The only time I run games is to benchmark them and that's really it. It's the same thing. I can't just sit in front of these systems and play a game for the fun of it anymore. It's like my brain is taking the "no zero days" approach too far and I can't tell it to stop. And it isn't helped by all that abuse/trauma/what have you from my teens catching up to me.
This is probably where I should seek either medication or a therapist but due to the absolute shitshow that is mental health in this country + the administration playing around with the idea of going after The Autistics, I also feel better off keeping my head down and suffering.
This is also where I could use a 2013-esque trip to Oregon to see my parents and just get out of my own head for a bit, but seeing as that bridge has been set ablaze in multiple ways (southern Oregon has become...quite scary in recent years + my mom has decided she's going to walk the dark path to the right), can't really do that anymore. Not like I could afford it, anyway.
Sigh.
This timeline sucks, man.
