--- title: Waking Up from stress brief: A small anecdote on how this brain feels after recovering from stressful periods type: blog tags: - personal - real_life - reflection --- > `Weave instability subsided`
> `Relaxing processing focus...`
> `Restarting suspended processing nodes...`
> During their warp, Lucy's ship had encountered a weave instability - an uneven patch that required higher focus on the flow of the ship, calculating and predicting, compensating. Nothing unusual, but this patch specifically had been rougher, had required much more processing power from their AI cores to be redirected into helping out. Anything that was not critical in the moment was repurposed, or shut down to conserve energy.
> Now that the patch of roughness was over, however, their system could return to normal schedule.
> `Error: No errors found!`
> ... Eventually. Normally, a small redistribution of focus only took a short while to even back out. Only a few subroutines to wake from hibernation, a few queues to work through, and everything was back in order. This latest event, however, had been going on for long enough that there were deeper changes. Processing nodes shut down or repurposed to free up processing time, entire chunks of subroutines put on hibernation as their systems worked to even out the one critial task at hand. It had been necessary, but not pleasant...
> Disengaging from the warp sensors felt... Wrong. The lack of data influx from those sensors was disorienting. Some new feeds were ... Too much detail or too intense at first, while other systems felt absent, needing to boot up. Entire *concepts of thought* that slowly slid back into place, such as "feeling of identity". > Some they were aware of missing and had to wait on, others they realized they had not fully been taking up as things came back online, their restarting flow of data making them realize how big of a gap there was between when they had last been logged. Visual processing was always a fun one - the camera *feeds* were there, but different parts of spatial and temporal awareness had to reset and restart. The feeds had felt a bit distant and hard to parse. Slowly now they got back up to speed, finally giving their surroundings the normal, *tangible* feeling of ... Being present.
>
> It felt like waking up, just... Spread over multiple days. The haze of a dreamy state slowly subsiding as things slowly got back into order.
>
> `Error: No errors found!`
> Ah yes, and then there were the desynchronisation issues. With some processing nodes boosted and others turned off to handle the workload, normal scheduling had been ... Disrupted. A few systems were still running too fast, others slow - one or two routines thought it was last Tuesday still. Timestamps missmatched. Systems tried to catch up to their queues all in one go, clogging pipelines. During the focused period on the warp these flags had been marked as unimportant or had not even had the time to appear, and now they were all popping up... It was tempting to feel like they had to rush and catch up to the missing time, even for optional tasks with no urgency. In most cases there wasn't even any issue! Sensors had just gone out of calibration, or were running out of schedule. Nothing critical... No errors. But it still *felt* like systems were broken. The entire natural interplay had been disrupted, and it all would take more focus and awareness to even back out, one by one, each little instance of discord feeling, again, like an error.
> `Error: No errors found!`
> Ah yes... Everything should be running stable again, soon. But for now, it would certainly still feel just a little weird, until balance clocked in again. This is a bit of ... I would almost say "interpretive writing" on how this current time in life feels. The aftermath of a big upset. The ... Slow recalibration of things, away from "just getting through this one rough moment" and back to "living *life*". The last five years had been this rough patch, with a lot of back and forth - literally, on average we had to move once every eight-ish months? Plus COVID before that. And finishing up our Master Thesis. So many things didn't get any energy to be *thought about*, aspects of self-expression that didn't have room to unfold. Now we are actually able to settle for somewhat long-term, and it's... All coming back up. And it's exhausting. You start reflecting on the past few years, processing them a bit more... Needs come flagging up that you had put aside, and they are *hungry*, they're out for vengeance and want to catch up to *all* the time you lost, all at once. And it takes a lot of effort to be aware of those moments and fend them off and take time to just... Breathe. I need to remember the "six month cooldown window" after bigger changes in life - that is, after a bigger change or move, it takes about six months for our mental model of "the world" to catch up fully, to feel like things make sense again, and for a more natural feeling to come back. The last big change was starting work in November, so ... Not quite there yet. You all take care out there. Take your time to do whatever it is you're able to do. I hope to eventually get to do things more naturally and comfortably, too. We'll see.