After taking a week away from life to rest up and try to recover from the soul-numbing burnout I was trapped in prior to my vacation, the main impression I’ve got is that it wasn’t nearly enough time. I was so exhausted and burned out that I couldn’t even feel tired and exhausted until the middle of the week. It took four days of rest to even begin to feel just how wrecked I was, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Now, another four days on from that, I’m still battling a deep and pervasive sense of exhaustion even as I’m forced to begin getting back to work. I mean, I could still take some time off to continue resting, but that would mean leaving things undone. I don’t think that’s in my best interest, especially given that I’m going to be walking into the second half of my project-based work-marathon the day this post actually goes up on my blog. After all, the stuff I’m doing this week is supposed to help with making that marathon easier on me, on top of finally doing a bunch of stuff that I’ve been putting off due to a lack of energy (like researching what the actual cost of a new computer will be, where to host my blog that won’t be more mentally taxing than I can afford in my daily spoon budget, and how to introduce more opportunities for in-person socializing). It’s all stuff that I will benefit from having done, but it’s difficult to convince myself to actually do it when I’m still so damn tired.

It doesn’t help that my vacation curse has struck again. Not quite as severely as before, yet, but I’m technically still on vacation so there’s time yet for the rest of the stress I’ve released to come home to roost. After all, as I’ve learned while writing this, it will be another week or two of having YET ANOTHER LEAK before the part arrives that the maintenance men say they need to stop the leak. Who knows how much else will go wrong in the days between now and then, or how insufferable the drip will become or how frustrated I’ll be with having to keep that closet empty to avoid yet more of my stuff from getting soaked by the steadily dripping water from a leak that was supposedly fixed a year ago and has yet somehow returned during the week I was on vacation. Or maybe it’ll be fixed in a day or two. I’m getting a lot of conflicting reports which are some mixture of “not great” and “kinda bad, actually” [eventually the maintenance guys revealed that they were wrong the first three times they thought they figured out the problem but then definitely figured it out in the end and while the lack of a continued leak seems to indicate that they were correct, I’ve learned that a fixed leak is often a temporary thing and I should expect it to return in about six months]. All I want is to get my stuff back in my closet, get my apartment back in order, and not have to worry about when/if the maintenance staff will show up unannounced. It feels like that shouldn’t be too much to ask, especially since I’ve given up on “not having water leak into my apartment” since it has been officially been four years since I’ve gone six months without having some kind of leak into my apartment. You’d think that wouldn’t be too much to ask for, but apparently that’s more than you can expect from a bunch of cheaply made buildings put up in the mid-to-late eighties.

Even if this leak somehow got magically fixed today despite the fact that I was just told the maintenance guys are hoping to come back tomorrow to actually fix it, it would merely remove an on-going source of stress, not actually undo the damage this stress has done. Nor will it properly patch up all the new holes in my apartment walls that are covered in panels with removable hatches that kinda ruin the look of the walls just so they don’t have to put in proper drywall patches or replace segments of drywall. It definitely hasn’t impacted my comfort in my own apartment by chewing up a bit of the nice paint job I did when I moved in. Nope. All I can really hope for as all this plays out is that it will be finished soon and that I’ll be able to stop worrying about future water damage.

None of this is a great foundation to build a week of relaxation intermingled with stressful but important Adult Responsibility tasks. I still plan to do my best to get everything I’ve got planned done, but I’m not sure if I’ll feel any better on Friday than I do today. Normally, getting things done makes me feel better about myself, on top of removing a source of stress or worry that I’ve been ignoring, but I’m just not sure how the balance of rest, stress, and effort is going to make me feel through this week. I’m only on day one and I definitely feel more stressed than I have since the day two and a half weeks ago when I worked until a quarter to ten in the evening just so I wouldn’t have any work tasks hanging over my head when I left for my trip the following day. That’ll hopefully go down a bit as I start to actually get things done throughout the rest of the week, but I’m not sure that it’ll be enough given the compounding addition of having a leak in my closet and two complete strangers (who replaced the familiar maintenance guy who took care of stuff like this previously) tromping around my apartment while they make wildly different assertions from one hour to the next about when I can expect to have the leak fixed.

At least none of it is unmanageable. It’s just a lot that’s hitting me when I hoped to be coming off a relaxing week away and returning to a mixture of more relaxation and only mild, pre-planned stress. Most of it isn’t the leak itself so much as my history with leaks in the now two different apartments I’ve occupied in this apartment complex and the fact that I can’t seem to escape this kind of bullshit cropping up in my life. It’s a real punch in the gut to come home, start doing laundry on your first full day back, and discover that all your sheets and towels are soaked with disgusting ceiling water, and that the only reason the damage wasn’t worse is because it hit the towel and bedsheet shelves first, which absorbed a huge amount of water over the course of however many days. Just absolutely knackering. Hopefully, this will be the only surprise I find this week and next [it was not]. Hopefully this is the start and the end of my usual post-vacation “all the relaxation you did has been undone within in a week of returning by some new source of stress” curse [it was not, sorta]. It’d be really nice if that broke, just like I finally managed to (mostly) break my “all the TTRPG groups you join will fall apart or stop meeting before the session count reaches the double-digits” curse. I don’t know if I really expect that to happen, but it would be a pretty nice addition to my year if it did.