I’ve spent the last few months carefully threading the needle on my work/life balance. Ever since I wrote about how busy I was back in November, things haven’t let up for more than a day or two. Even as things get less hectic, some other aspect of my job steps up. For example, while I don’t need to do as much emotional or intellectual work right now since all the big, difficult, and long-running tasks have finally been finished, I am now testing what might be the one project my company has ever done that requires significant physical labor to test. Sure, there are far worse jobs and there’s definitely jobs that require far heavier labor in the day-to-day course of their activities, but this is still a significant first for my company. For one thing, I’ve been doing “testing” even on days that I don’t have anything to test just to keep working out and growing my strength so I can be prepared for days like last Friday where I needed to not only do way more testing work than usual but also reassure my coworkers that they weren’t asking too much of me. Right now, we’re in a data-collection phase of this project and that means doing a lot of tests in a row. Frankly, it’s exhausting and I’m not really enjoying it outside of the “clear headed focus on a repetitive task” aspect of things, but someone needs to do the work and I’m probably the best suited to it due to my build, past experience, and relative youth (I’m over a decade younger than the next youngest tester).

Thankfully, even though there really isn’t any internal processes or tools to support this kind of laborious testing, no one gives me weird looks if I wind up spending half an hour sitting in my office, doing nothing but drinking water and watching a Let’s Game It Out video on my computer instead of doing anything more “productive.” I need those breaks to recover from the effort of testing and while data entry is not particularly labor intensive, doing so at a standing desk after doing what amounts to some cardio and weird weightlifting is way more demanding than I’d like to be of my tired core muscles. This stuff works out most of my upper body, albeit somewhat unevenly, which means my normally leg and core heavy morning workout combines with it into a heavy full-body workout every day of the week I can muster the strength required to do both. Which I add because I’ve already had days where I’ve skipped my morning workout because I didn’t have the strength to push myself out of bed in enough time to workout before work. Or because I knew I’d need my strength and energy for doing more of this testing at work. Or both. Both is probably the most common, actually, though all of them are becoming less common as time passes.

Prior to the start of this intense period of testing, I’d worked out an uneasy balance between work and my non-work life. I changed my “get out of bed and be a productive member of society” habit-building reward to better balance the effort it took to do that. I set new guidelines for when I was willing to work extra late and how late I’d let myself work on days like that, mostly to counter the later times I was showing up at work and balance the days when I’d occasionally need to leave work before I hit my usual 10-hour mark (usually for one of three tabletop games I’ve got on irregular weeknights). I had my number of daily spoons reduced as a side-effect of a new medication and found a new balance. I’ve rolled with the punches of everything that has come up since mid-October of last year and done my level best to keep myself on my feet. Now, though, as physical exhaustion gets added to the list and I find myself struggling to support myself with the hobbies and entertainments I once used to brighten up my days, I’m starting this process all over again. I’m seeking balance now as a new form of exhaustion becomes a daily occurrence.

I have not had the time or energy to play video games most days. I’ve been so worn out at the end of every week that I’ve had to spend all of Saturday resting even more than usual and it doesn’t even work all the time. I mean, this past weekend, I spent all of Saturday moving as little as possible for the second weekend in a row. I barely did more on Sunday because I was still mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted by the week I’d had. Hell, even today, as I’m writing this post a few days later than I’d like, I’m still just barely in shape to work. This has all taken a toll on me and while I’m doing better than I was at the end of last week, I’m not sure how I’m going to handle another week that’ll be just as busy, if not more so now that my coworkers know how much work I can actually do in a day when I push for it. Every day can’t be a pushing day, though. Some days need to be rest days and I feel like I’m so worn out by everything that I’m struggling to get any rest at all, even when I’m not doing anything, now that my hard-won balance has been disrupted again. I can’t wait to be done with these medications. I can’t wait to be done with these projects. I can’t wait for my enforced holiday at the end of the month or my vacation next month. I need rest and things are so busy I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get it with the way things are. I’m even less sure that there is a balance I can achieve with the way things are right now. Or that I even want to find balance within this current system. It’s kind of miserable and not something I want to make my peace with.

I mean, it feels pretty telling that I haven’t found an alternative for my blog yet. Or that I’m struggling to keep up with my currently reduced number of blog posts (down from six per week to five). I’m barely keeping myself together as an adult member of society and I don’t know that it is terribly healthy to try finding a way to live like this. And the answer isn’t fewer tabletop games since that’s pretty much all I can depend on for actual fun that doesn’t feel at least a little bit like I’m wasting my time. I don’t really have much else I can cut down on these days, though.