Last week ended with me feeling incredibly overwhelmed and struggling to deal with what had mostly been a week full of good things [and I am once again reminded of the downsides that come with writing these things a week ahead of when they post since the week before this got posted went VERY DIFFERENTLY than the week before I wrote this]. A four-day work week, a week totaling only forty hours of work instead of my usual fifty, getting to leave work while it was still light out, some major changes at the company I work for, and even a new work computer and related peripherals. The whole week had a lot going for it, even if the exchange I’d negotiated with myself was that I could take it easy for a week in exchange for doing my taxes and taking care of the final receipt submissions for my 2023 Flexible Spending Account, and I got to end the whole thing by spending my weekend buried in video games with my friends, prep work for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and then a successful (and incredibly delightful) first session of that Dungeon and Dragons campaign. Unfortunately for me, this did not fix my burnout. It did lessen my mental load by a huge amount [to be honest, I probably would have had a mental breakdown if I hadn’t had this weekend before everything went to shit], since I was able to take care of a bunch of tasks that where weighing on me (like activating my new FSA card, dealing with some junk mail, sorting through the records I needed to keep to close out my pile of 2023 documents, and ordering some replacement items for stuff that had worn out and I’d been meaning to replace for almost a year), but it was definitely not restful.

Which has not left me in a great place to tackle this week, considering how absolutely monumentally busy today has been. Work-wise, I’ve spent most of today struggling to get my office situated with my new monitors and laptop, on top of trying to restore all the programs I had installed and find the location of all the lost shortcuts that disappeared from my File Explorer program. It’s been a battle, trying to get anything done while also working to get myself resituated, and one I’ve had no experience fighting before. I got a new computer once at my old job, moving from a normal PC tower to one of those tiny little computer squares that was about the size of a decent sandwich, but I was two months from leaving that job and had started moving away from big projects to focus on smaller, one-off bits of testing so it made no impact on my work. When I’ve changed computers at home, I could take all the time I needed and just play video games on a console or use my laptop if I really wanted to do anything on the computer, so I felt no pressure to be up and running again. Plus, I had my data backups and just swapped my hard drives from my old PC to my new PC, so all the stuff that mattered was still there. This time, I basically started fresh and while all my old data is somewhere on this new laptop, I don’t know where it is [I have found it since I wrote this post] and I still have a job to do which hasn’t gotten any less hectic or demanding that it has been at any point so far in 2024. There’s so much to do and I feel like I’m starting my job all over because I don’t know where anything is anymore.

Still, going into this week with so much less on my mind feels almost like I’m better rested than I’ve felt since the middle of January, maybe even in all of 2024. I might still be exhausted and tired and really looking forward to some time away from screens tomorrow (after work, anyway), but at least I feel less pressured to be productive and work quickly. I have less hanging over my head so I can better manage the stress and anxiety that are still here. Some of which will hopefully clear out in the next few days as some projects finally come to a close–or at least my part in them does–until the final release meeting happens and I have to do sign a paper saying its ready to release and maybe answer a question or two. Only time will tell, unfortunately, but I actually feel like this week might be less emotionally, mentally, and physically draining than the last few have been [I genuinely find it difficult to believe that I was overly optimistic for the week I had after writing this post given my rather pessimistic nature]. I don’t have an explanation for it other than being less mentally burdened, having a new laptop that will let me work outside briefly during the nice weather days that I have typing work to do, and the really nice weather we’ve been having the last few days. Which is a little stressful on its own because we’re going to be setting a lot of records for high temperatures this week, a week that marks the first time in my life that I’ve dug my shorts out in February because it was going to be too warm for me to wear pants.

It’s all a lot still, but its definitely less than it was last week and I’m taking what comfort I can in that. Maybe I can keep this ball rolling and just keep decreasing the number of things weighing on me over the next month. That would be amazing, considering how heavy my mental burden has been for the last few months, and then maybe I’d even have mental energy for other things like working ahead in Infrared Isolation chapters or working out some of the other, longer-term standing issues in my life like whether or not I should hire a cleaning service to make my life easier by lowering the demand on my day-to-day spoons. Or whether or not I really want to try anti-depressants or anti-anxiety meds again. It’s been a decade and a half since my last attempts and I’m pretty sure I could better direct things this time around, so maybe I’d actually get some benefit out of them rather than the weird grey malaise that characterized my attempts to find a decent medication in high school. It’ll probably also help if I go in seeking treatment for anxiety and depression (which is still hanging around and the reason that this isn’t a more positive post after everything I accomplished last weekend) rather than the OCD I was able to convince my parents was severe enough to warrant actual effort and therapy. Anything is possible and I’m not just saying that this time. I got so much done last weekend that had been on my mind for so long that I feel like I can accomplish anything, even if I’m going to be dour, unenergetic, and melancholic the whole time.