The Patreon Letter - 28 September, 2020 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, Em here with another patreon letter, sneaking in right under the slamming door of the month. I really try not to do these this late because I have Abnormal Mapping breathing down my neck right now, but ... I also have Abnormal Mapping to do, and I don't want to edit that, so now's the perfect time to get this done. 

Part of the reason that this is late is that I really just have a lack of things to talk about, not in any meaty way like I try to do for these letters. It's not like I'm not busy, between my day job and the podcast work I'm as busy as ever really, but it's just, y'know, everything else. 

We try not to get too doom and gloom about the world in our podcasts and in our public social media presence, but I have to admit when I started working from home in late March I joked 'it'll be fall when we go back to the office' and thought I was whistling past a graveyard. It's almost October. I still feel low key fear about going to get groceries. Who knows when, being in the United States, that feeling will go away. I don't even have an office to go back to, our company sold our building realizing that it was much cheaper to let people work from home forever. 

I've been relatively lucky through COVID this year, at least. I am still employed, I don't have to go out to a grocery store, we can produce our podcasts the same as we always have. But it's also been hard, even for my stay at home ass, to be pressed into this way of life whether I like it or not. I might be an intense introvert, but I didn't do it for siege against the world reasons, and the stress of that hits even if like me you're inclined to just stay home most weeks. It's easy to stay on top of work, including podcast work, but my extra time just tends to slip away in bad mental health holes more than it used to. I'm not even like wallow watching anime a series every two weeks like I used to, there just isn't any joy in it. 

I'm not saying this to worry anyone, just to explain my state these days. I have a therapist, and while I wish we weren't doing telehealth sessions, she is very good at reminding me that this is a perfectly normal situation to get into survival mode about, since that's literally what has been asked of us. Sometimes the world is on fire, and you just make do. You don't expect to make do for half a year, maybe a year, maybe more???? but you do what you can and try to let that be enough.

Of course at some point you realize you've nearly depleted your gundam model kit backlog and are staring at your full shelves wondering what else you can spend your time on. We might live in the world of near infinite entertainment and media, but if you're anything like me tackling a book or a show or a game is something that requires actual work. I can sit and think hard about even the slightest show, that's literally part of my job here at Abnormal Mapping, so it means when I'm really tapped out I'm just refreshing youtube hoping that the recs show me something I didn't see before to watch over dinner. There's an oppressive melancholy to just looking for the barest amount of connection and engagement, because you're too fried for anything more complicated. 

I don't mind spending my time on trivial stuff, but when it's the third week of not really being able to do much else you start to worry about how you've ended up in such a passively desperate state and whether you could get out of it even if you knew what to do to start that.

Which is to say that I'm struggling, as everyone's struggling, and I don't really know what the solution is. I try to take walks, I try to enforce a healthy sleeping schedule when it inevitably slips, I try to cook as much as I'm able and not beat myself up when at the end of the day sometimes I'm too tired and can't like I'd want to. I try to be there for my friends, who are equally going through it with their own individual struggles. But on most days? It feels nearly intolerable to simply carry on as we had been expected to six months ago, and by the time I clock out of my job every day I've spent ever shred of mental energy I have just pretending that the world isn't on fire in multiple directions enough to do menial office work. 

It's much easier, I'll admit, to make the podcasts for people. I know they are appreciated. I know our work reaches out to people and entertains them and gets them through their own bad days. That's a very good motivator, but we already limit the amount of podcasts we do for our own health (and I've gone over that balance line at cost to myself before). And it's hard, to stay on top of playing games and watching things, when all you really want to do is stare at the wall and let time pass. The active engagement is good, necessary, and startlingly stressful all at once. But also it means that after four anime for GGP and a movie for Repertory Screenings I'm spent. I've never been so tired as I have been on weekends during COVID, like I had moved furniture all day by making some audio files. 

It's so strange to be stuck in this situation, where nothing can be normal because nothing is normal. There's coping, good and bad, and there's enduring, and that seems to be about it. Which is not a very comfortable conclusion to all of this meandering but I try to remind myself on the really hard days that all I can do is survive the really hard days in hopes that better ones will come, and that people will be there to help me as much as I help them get through this. Communities and connections are ephemeral, but it's all we've got in the face of isolation and survival, and on most days reminding myself of that is enough to pull through. I hope, maybe, the same came be true for you. 

Much love to everyone going through it. Until next time,

Em