Recently, while talking to my boss about what I’ve been working on, he suggested something that I’d been considering for a long time. Something that I’ve been halfway working on and hoped to eventually convince him (and the rest of my team) that there was a need for me to work on it more than I was. Something I would love to be doing instead of my current job. It was a very rewarding moment, to not have to wade into what I expected to be a battle and instead sail smoothly over a calm sea of mutual inclination. It was an incredible turnaround from just the week before (that inspired the Self-Destructive Repetition poem from last week) and that made it feel like the work I’d been thanklessly doing for almost a year now was actually going to pay off for something. I did my best not to react in surprise or shock, and I don’t think he noticed how surprised I was that he had jumped straight to an idea I was slowly building towards, but it was amazing that we both agreed that this thing (which I’m going to avoid the specifics about because it is way too early to do more than prepare and think about, not to mention I still don’t want any of my blog posts to connect to my actual employer or job so my coworkers don’t find out I sometimes complain about them here) would be a cool thing for our team to have, especially if I was the one doing it. Since then, with his express approval, I’ve been able to go from slowly working on this project in my spare moments to actually putting real time towards it every day.

I do, of course, still have to keep up with the other parts of my job, but this approval means that this past week has been one of the best weeks I’ve had at work in years, even though I’ve been so busy that I am running myself ragged by the middle of the afternoon and then pushing myself to keep working until the early hours of the evening. All of the personal and emotional malaise that has occurred this week has been the result of me struggling to get enough sleep at night and the various rising and falling cycles of my depression rather than because something frustrating, defeating, and emotionally devastating happened at work (which was the source of my personal and emotional malaise for the three weeks prior to this one). I keep finding myself reaching the end of my 10-hour work day and considering the idea of staying even later because I have so much stuff I want to keep doing and never enough time to do it in. Adding to this glut of work to do and derth of time to do it is the fact that I’m still recovering from the eventful year I’ve had, doubly so because of how draining and exhausting the last few weeks have been. I barely have the spoons to do the bare minimum of my daily tasks, let alone work through my projects in anything resembling the quick, efficient manner I know I can work in when I’m not slowly circling the drain of constant daily exhaustion.

It has taken no small amount of effort and consideration, but I’ve managed to stick to the pace I set each morning and to not do more work than I’ve assigned myself (and to do less if possible, since I’m definitely still biting off more than I can chew most days). I’m trying to keep a working pace that avoids overburdening myself while I’m still trying to recover from this past year, but I definitely still hit a point every day when I just don’t have the energy to keep working at anything resembling an even pace. It is frustrating to, for the first time, feel like I’m actually limiting myself. Before this week, where I’ve got stuff I actually want to be doing with all energy and focus I can must, I would just feel relieved and simply tired when I’d hit the slowdown point. I hadn’t felt the desire or urge to work past the point of exhaustion like I used to in well over a year at this point, maybe even longer. Now I have to contend with the workaholic I used to be. Now I actually have the passion and drive to push myself past my limits and it is only my determination to not exhaust myself or return to my old cycles of burnout, recovery, and then returning to work the instant I don’t feel as burned out as I used to that is keeping this urge in check. I am forcing myself to take it easy and rest and it is incredibly difficult when I want to leap at the chance to finally make some kind of positive change in a way that I actually care about at the place I work at after six and a half years of failing to ever move the needle in a way that wasn’t immediately erased.

I’ve never been one to reign myself in before. I used to believe that I’d rather die charging down a metaphorical hill into battle than stuck defending the top of it. I fought every battle I considered worth my time and ignored everything I didn’t think was worth my attention. I put one hundred percent of my effort into each and everything I did. That is not sustainable right now. It was probably never sustainable, even before the last few years, but I was young enough and healthy enough that I could bounce back. Now, after the pandemic, after everything with my family, after everything that has slowly worn me down over the last year, I have to take a different approach. I must measure my steps carefully. I must be judicious with my energy because while I can do anything I like, I will be paying for it for days if I push myself too hard. It sucks, but I think I’m long overdue for learning some personal restraint. I’ve never been a terribly patient person, when it comes to myself and my progress, anyway. I want everything to be done immediately. I do not want to wait. I don’t want to delay. I want to make immediate progress since anything worth doing is worth doing immediately. No hesitation, no procrastination, no saving things for later. But these past few years have taught me that time is long and while I cannot predict it, I will be much better at rolling with the punches if I am not constantly burning myself to a dying ember every single day.

I don’t like it, but I have to respect it. I can’t bounce back like I used to. Overextending myself has gone from costing a day or two at most to costing up to a couple weeks, depending on how severe it is. I don’t know why, but between the stress, the disruptions to my sleep, and the looming spectre of Long Covid being just as likely to happen to assymptomatic Covid cases as symptomatic cases, I feel like it’s a reasonable place to be at this point in my life. I have had to learn to chill and while I still struggle with putting it into practice, I no longer doubt the need for it. I just hope that, eventually, with enough time and rest, I will recover at least a little bit of the energy and capability I used to have. One of my greatest fears was the idea that something might happen to me that would dimish me, that would make me less myself than I used to be. Now that it has happened, for whatever reason it was, I find that I still feel like myself and that, maybe, I’m just better defined that I used to be. It is a small consolation, to know myself better as a result, but I still hope that I will be able to grow back at least a little bit of the capacity I used to have. I think I’d be able to do so much more with it now than I did when I was younger. After all, despite my “dimishment” as I’ve put it, I’m still doing just as much, if not more, than I used to. Just a bit more consistently rather than in bright bursts of incredible activity followed by periods of exhausted collapse.