Today, (the day I’m writing this, which is the 23rd of December), I had to run into the office for a little bit. There was a test I’d left running of the weekend that I needed to shut down, collect the data from, and then clear out of the test chamber. It’s a shared resource, you see, and while there’s a good chance that no one else is going to be using it in the next two weeks (no one has reserved it as of the last time I checked, a few days ago), it would not do for me to leave all that crap there in case someone else wanted to sneak a little testing in during a historically quiet time at our employer. So I went in the early afternoon, wrapped up my test and put everything away, and then left the building. Took all of half an hour, plus fifteen minutes for adjusting my time card to reflect the fact that I’d shown up and worked for forty-five minutes rather than spent a full day’s worth of vacation time. In, work, and out. Still, in that short amount of time, I still managed to run into every single one of my coworkers who was still working at that point, have a couple conversations about the project I’m working on, and get sidetracked for a few minutes as one of them tried to shove good intentions under my fingernails. It wasn’t that bad, but it was a bit annoying to be trying to quickly finish something and leave only to get bogged down in conversation. Typical, but annoying. Once I was done with it, though, I’d hoped to be able to finally relax only to still feel just as tense and keyed-up as I felt this morning while I procrastinated going to work.

You see, I’ve been burned out for a decade at this point, maybe longer, and it is only getting worse as I continue to be in a high-stress situation that never really finds any relief no matter how much time I take off of work. It’s difficult to unclench myself, mentally and physically, when I’m half-expecting my vacation curse to strike again at any moment–which I’ve mentioned before many times: my tendency to wind up dealing with some personal or professional misfortune or stress that strikes within a calendar week of me returning to work following any amount of vacation longer than a day. It has happened without fail for the past five years and I’m pretty confident that this winter break will be no exception. I already got a small glimpse of it while collecting the results from the test I was taking down today: our device sort of passed the tests, but the conditions got incredibly messed up for some unknown reason and we’ll likely need to repeat the test until we can get it to give us results under the proper controlled conditions. After all, we need to find out how it handles those specific conditions, not weirder and possibly worse ones. So, when I get back into the office, I know I’m going to need to immediately dive into that problem in order to figure out what happened and how, if at all possible, I can fix it for future tests. I’m already dreading that work since it will undoubtedly be tedious and boring, requiring a lot of watching to make sure the things I did worked and that the testing apparatus won’t suddenly skew the conditions again.

There’s not a lot else that can go wrong. At least not that directly involves me. I’ve already built delays into my timeline and while I’d love to avoid needing to wrap up the last two months of this project without those delays making my life more difficult, I can still handle everything likely to come my way without needing to resort to working on the weekends or working exorbitantly long days. There’s plenty that has the potential to go wrong, but we’re far enough into the project that most of it is in a really solid place. Which means that whatever will go wrong will likely not be related to this project. Maybe there’ll be another horrible field issue that my coworkers and I need to deal with that will take up a bunch of our time. Maybe something else that was thought to be stable will suddenly start teetering. Maybe it won’t even be work related and I’ll discover that all the aches and pains I’ve been dealing with lately AREN’T a result of the medication I stopped a couple weeks ago and they’re just a part of my life now rather than being something that will slowly go away as that medication is metabolized out of my system. Or maybe my apartment will burn down. I don’t know. All I know is that I really need to get myself to unclench and I can’t seem to make it happen because I’m exhausted and still somehow braced for the next blow to land.

There’s probably an element of this that is tied to the world at large. The next few years are going to be difficult and there’s no definite end-time associated with them since it’s not like the political system and attitudes that made a second Trump presidency a reality will just vanish once his second term ends. It’s not like laws or norms have stopped him before. Who know what the future will bring when those people in power who pretend they give a damn don’t bother fighting for it ever? It’ll be everything I can do to keep myself and the people I care about safe. I know it hasn’t started yet, but there’s a certain amount of “bracing for impact” running through me right now and I’m not sure I’ll be able to unclench until that moment has passed. I’m as ready as I can be for whatever is coming, whatever the future will bring, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot in the face of the massive unknown that is the entire future.

Also, I’m pretty sure I’m going to instantly and horrible sick the moment I manage to finally relax. I haven’t pushed myself for this long in years and I’m already feeling kind of bad even without unclenching enough to fall apart. I’m pretty sure it’s just mild dehydration and exhaustion given that I’ve been unable to get my usual weekend of sleep in (I have no regrets about that, though, since seeing my two friends was a much needed balm, even if my hands and elbows are still in rough shape and didn’t appreciate the driving). Soon though. Hopefully the night after writing this, even. If I can just get a solid eight hours of sleep, I think that would fix so much that’s wrong with me right now… Maybe I’d even be able to relax… Well, that’s not going to happen until all of that medication is out of my system (assuming that’s the source of all my muscle and joint problems) and that won’t happen for another two to six to eight weeks, depending on how physically active I can push myself to be. Which isn’t a huge amount of time, compared to the year and a month that it has been going on in some capacity, but it feels like such a distant idea–just as unknowable and unapproachable as the entire future is these days. There’s not a lot going on right now to feel good about, as the new year approaches, but if I can get some sleep and feel physically better for the first time in over a year, that would feel almost miraculous…