I called in sick to work today. Not because I was actually sick but because I desperately needed a day off to retain my sanity. I’ve come home every day of the week with stress induced headaches and it looks like it won’t let up for a while yet. So I texted my boss that I wasn’t coming in today and that I would be back on Monday and went promptly back to sleep. I slept in untill around noon and then got out and sat down to play some games and think about why I picked today especially to have a small mental breakdown. In truth I’ve had a bit of a mental breakdown earlier but powered through it, going to work and just acting normal while trying not to fall apart. Today I couldn’t so I decided to stay home.
It has mostly resulted in a day where I was able to relax and create some headspace with cleaning up the house. I’ve gone through a lot of my clothes and prepared two big bags to be donated to goodwill. I rounded up all the paper and trash and took those out. I vacuumed and did laundry. As I was organizing the house I slowly felt the rest return to my mind aswell. I’m not done yet, there’s still some stuff I want to sort through and throw out and I still need to do some additional cleaning, I feel like it has helped me get back into a more stable mood. Plus having a three day weekend is extremely nice aswell in the middle of all the chaos that is going on at work.

Next to cleaning I also took the time to sit down and enjoy my gaming sessions today, instead of mechanically doing 2 hours of dailies. I did some leveling on my Warrior in WoW and ran around doing job quests in FFXIV aswell as taking the time to do Mainstory roulette among other things. Level 80 on the Monk is starting to get very close and I’m happy to have another job to max level, especially a DPS job that normally has to deal with very long queues for roulettes. The Moogle tome event seems to have made things slightly better though, my average wait time for a Mainstory roulette has gone from 30 minutes down to about 15 now. I have been wondering though, once I have all my battle classes at level 80 and all my crafters and gatherers at level 70 and above what I’m going to do in the game. I don’t actively raid. I don’t really feel like pugging Savage content although I’m fine with Extreme primals. Right now I have a reason to log on every day while leveling, but I’m a bit scared that once that goes away I won’t feel the pull to log on as much anymore. Of course there is a ton of content to do besides leveling, I just have a hard time imagining what I would like to do when I don’t have a steady “schedule” to adhere to anymore. I know these are worries that are premature, I’m still smack dab in the middle of levelling all the things, yet I can’t seem to keep this off my mind.

All in all taking the day “off” has really calmed me. I got some stuff done in real life aswell as in my games and I’m feeling extremely relaxed as I’m writing this blog post. Maybe this will be the trigger for me to recognize the signals of overwhelming stress earlier and some days off ahead of time instead of calling in sick last minute.