I am exhausted.

In the past two weeks, I have:

  • quit a volunteer position that I used to love, because they regulated away my ability to do the job, and when I complained about this, the only person I was allowed to deal with basically told me they didn't think it was important because clearly I wasn't doing anything anyway;
  • been shouted at for quitting the volunteer position;
  • attended the Circlet Press Writers Retreat, aka #porncamp, which involves spending most of three days alternately cramming things into my head and being in the same room with a lot of people who like me very much and all want to talk to me at once;
  • developed a migraine which started out optimistically bearable and progressed to the point where I spent most of a day with a piercing pain behind my right eye that would. not. go. away. no matter what I threw at it;
  • attended a rehearsal during the initial stages of the previous point, where I spent most of my time with a hat on wishing the environment didn't reflect so goddamn much light;
  • been yelled at by an internet stranger who evidently created an account solely to tell me I was a horrible pathetic person for thinking aloud (in print) about how other people work;
  • attended CatalyticConverter, aka #catcon, which involved two days of being well into Cambridge at a time when I am normally several hours away from even waking up, in a very large conference space with a lot of people who expected me to be intelligent and interact with them constantly;
  • gone to yet another rehearsal immediately after #catcon ended, which I stumbled mostly through without falling down;
  • brought home food and cooked a mess o' different dinners, because nobody has been home for like a week now, and somebody had to make things to eat.
Good things have also happened. A lot of other people have said very nice things, a few people have come to me offering work, and a couple of them just dropped money on me. I went to both gatherings because I like the people there, and I wanted to. This does not change the fact that dealing with all that takes a great deal of energy. 

I am now at the point where anyone trying to do anything that requires me to pay attention and muster some sort of response is going to make me cry, even if the thing they are doing is 'helping' and the reaction they're trying to get is 'Ari stops feeling so lousy'. If you have sent me a thing to read, I have not read it. If you have sent me a thing to watch, I have not watched it. If you have sent me praise, questions, or another piece of scathing criticism, I saw the first four words in Gmail and didn't open it. If you have pinged me in any way at all and I have not answered you, it is only because I curl up in the fetal position and shake every time I contemplate checking my messages.

I am only being mildly hyperbolic. I am running on about five hours of sleep a night. I don't think I have managed to finish a meal in about four days. I can get half of it down, and then stare at the rest for a while before I throw it away/into the rat cage. I spent half an hour unable to get up and do the damn dishes the other day, because I deadlocked on whether to catch up with podcasts or listen to music while I shuffled around the house. That is aggravatingly nonsensical, and it means I need to lay off before worse things happen.

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