Howdy. I'm tired. How are you?

Sometimes when the Darkness comes, it comes in the form of stifling exhaustion. Just a mental weariness that drains all your energy and creativeness. Life, of course, goes on, and responsibilities don't wait for you to get over it. So you press on, ill-equipped to do anything, the exhaustion warping your perspective so you can't trust what you see and feel. Everything is skewed just enough to cause you to question your reactions to everything. As a result, you treat a request as an attack, then you're too tentative to respond to an attack that's real.

At the end of the day, the process, and your missteps along the way, leave you more drained than when you started. I'm convinced that dreams play a part in this. I think that when you enter this frame of mind, whatever you dream at night carries forward and amplifies the thought process, so the downward spiral is more pronounced at the beginning of the day than it was the night before. I've no proof of this, just a gut feeling based on my own experiences. I don't remember my dreams, but when the darkness is here, I often wake with feelings of dread.

In this case, the news isn't all bad. I need a vacation to shake things up and I think that will reset me. All I need to do is make it until about noon on Friday, then I'm good. I get a week off and the time will allow the regeneration that's required. But right now, the 54 hours between now and then seems like 54 years. I'm not certain I can do it, and the doubts feed the cycle.

Finally, this is awfully close to whining. Life is hard. It's part of the rules. You're going to have periods that aren't good and they will pass, like everything else. You just need to tough it out until that happens, and usually, it happens without you realizing. But when you get stuck in a rut and you start pressing just to make it through without messing it up any worse, everything seems huge.