You might think that, given how much I’ve been struggling to sleep and how I’m still fairly recently returned to the land of full consciousness and awareness after more than a month of forgetfulness and grey fog, I would take it easier on myself at work or even make use of my ample time off to cut myself some slack at work rather than continue to push myself to do as many fifty-hour work weeks as I can physically handle. You would be wrong, unfortunately, since my whole fifty-hour schedule exists for a multitude of reasons, only some of which have to do with the demands of my job. Sure, there’s tons of work to do and I currently need a bit more time every day to do the same amount of work that I used to do in shorter weeks, but I also need to cover my rent, buy groceries, and pay my bills as a single adult living alone. It’s expensive to do that in my city and in this modern era. I can’t tell you how many times my coworkers have expressed shock at how my monthly rent payments are higher than their mortgages because I stopped counting years ago when it became spiritually exhausting to hear that common refrain. So, in order to have any kind of comfort and to live in a space that won’t make me feel trapped and miserable constantly, I work longer weeks and have to carefully ration the weeks when I don’t get my ten hours of overtime since they inevitably result in a significant drop in income. It’s usually better to take full weeks off than partial ones since I won’t be getting overtime anyway, unless the day(s) off in question is a holiday, so I can actually get an extended rest. After all, if I’m not going to be able to get overtime for the rest of my days (I’d merely avoid the need to spend paid time off for taking a day away from work), what does it matter to me, financially, if I’ve worked some or all of the days in that week?

Since the primary concern is my financial situation rather than work commitments or my health and well-being (to a degree), things have to be getting pretty dire for me to actually take a day off rather than just push through it. I got through almost two months of slowly lessening sleep deprivation without taking a day off until last week, two days before I wrote this, when I woke up and realized I couldn’t deal with going in to work. My German coworkers were in town, all the routines I relied on were in shambles, and a losing out on my usual weekend of extra sleep due to the plans I’d made meant that I hit a wall in the middle of the week and needed a day of quiet and rest. It took me a couple hours to make the decision, which meant that getting back to sleep wasn’t happening right then, but I decided to take half a day off (since I’d already worked four extra hours by then) and have a pair of light days afterwards. I definitely needed it, as my afternoon nap eventually showed me, but since I already planned to take part of next week off (to rest and to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard) as a fun little treat for myself, I had to spend at least a little bit of that time making some financial decisions about the next few months. With the holidays coming up, which bring with them a few weeks of lower earning due to vacation time and the extra expense of hosting or traveling for the holidays and buying people gifts, I need to monitor my spending a bit better than usual and keep my finances well in-hand, especially if I’m adding in an extra week of lower pay.

It also doesn’t help that literally every time I take a day off or go on any kind of vacation, I come back to some minor crisis, some strange development, or another source of the feeling that I can’t leave my work alone for more than five minutes without someone messing things up for me. This time, I came back to a mess made of my testing setup and had to figure out what was happening with it on the fly because my team’s marketer wanted to do a demo and needed my test setup in some semblance of working condition in order to do that. I never did figure out who had messed with it, nor did anyone take ownership of messing with my stuff and disrupting the test I’d left running without doing the incredibly easy work of messaging me to ask if they could (or even letting me know what they were doing). I don’t much care for being in contact with my workplace when I’m not working. That said, given the importance of the project I’m working on, I know I can’t go no-contact without preparing people and have accepted the need to occasionally answer messages if I’m taking a day off. Given that I don’t take many, it rarely comes up and now I can tell it’s because people would rather undo the work I’ve been doing than bother me despite the fact that I’ve frequently told my entire team that I’d rather spend five minutes on a day off answering questions than two to six hours on my first day back unfucking the mess they made (I did express it much more politely, though). I really wish I knew why this stuff only ever happens when I’m taking days off. I work from home more often than that and nothing like this ever happens when I’m on the clock but not physically present. I wish I were being hyperbolic about any part of this exhausting pattern, but it is unfortunately the literal and complete truth.

All of which means that, despite taking a day off, I’m more stressed than I probably would be if I’d just gone into work despite how awful I felt. I’m definitely more physically rested, sure, but not by very much considering how much of my work these days requires moderate to major physical effort. I really wish I could take a day off and actually come back to work feeling rested in a way that wasn’t immediately undone by whatever bullshit happened while I was gone. I don’t think that’s going to happen until I deal with whatever is messing up my back (I’m writing this after my third physical therapy appointment, which means I’ve been at this for two weeks and really wishing things would get better more quickly), since it’s difficult to destress or get rest when I struggle to sleep enough. I’m also not convinced that it will ever happen, considering that I’ve got coming up on eight years of evidence that, every time I use PTO for more than a day (and almost always when I use ANY PTO), something will happen within the calendar week of my return that will entirely undo whatever stress I’ve relieved and rest I’ve gotten while away.

With all that out there, it probably makes more sense why it is difficult for me to decide that taking an unplanned day off is worth it. I mean, sure, the results aren’t always this bad and there’s enough room in that variability to make it worth still taking days off (especially since I would only get paid out at fifty percent for any vacation time I’d accrued over the limit, a policy shift that came into effect the year I joined the company that changed how a significant portion of the company planned to use their vacation time), but I can never tell which way things will fall ahead of time. Every time I’ve tried to tip the scales one way or another, it’s always wound up being worse than I expected when I’ve gotten back. Turns out that stressing yourself out before a vacation in the vain hope of being able to better relax and return to a smoothly-running operation just piles on extra stress when you return to a heap of shattered plates that should have been able to keep spinning even if no one tended to them while you were gone. Nothing like broken expectations to really rub some salt in the wound. Still, I need to rest and, hopefully, when this project ends, I can take a solid month off and finally get some rest. I still need to run that idea by my boss at some point, but I’m most of the way there with vacation time accrued already and even my planned days off won’t eat up so much of my PTO that it won’t be entirely reasonable to have that much time to spend in March or April. Until it happens, though, it is nothing more than a dream and just as likely to come true as one given that I’m pretty sure the end of this project is going to immediately flow into the next one since we’re already planning a second edition. I love working in Research and Development.