Last week, to visit friends and family (chosen family) for the US Thanksgiving holiday, I drove just a shade under two thousand miles. It was broken up into two drives of five hundred miles each and one drive of a thousand miles–which came a day earlier than planned. I committed numerous caffeine crimes, ate a lot of junky travel food (and a whole lot of pretzels), gave myself sinus problems due to the elevation changes, and still started my first week back at work before the holidays feeling way more prepared for the long weeks ahead than I’ve felt in a long time. Even that week off for my birthday didn’t have this kind of effect on me and I got WAY more sleep during that week than I did while traveling. Hell, I might have gotten more sleep in half of that week than I did during the entire week of traveling and visiting people that just ended. And yet I feel so much better. Part of that has to do with getting to spend time with two people I don’t get to see and be around nearly enough, and part of it was that, despite the snowy struggles of part of my sixteen-hour drive home last Friday (two Fridays ago as this gets posted), it’s so much more relaxing to do that than to do my job. Which feels like quite a statement. Driving two thousand miles over the course of six days was less taxing than even a quiet week at my job. It stands to reason, though. That took only about thirty-five hours, which is fifteen hours less than a normal work week takes, and I only had to worry about myself and accomplishing my goals rather than a whole bunch of delicate personalities and people who only think you’re working if they see you outside your office (despite all of them having jobs that happen almost exclusively in their office).

I don’t know if it’s going to be feasible, but this trip and how much better I feel even after the stress and strain I put myself through for this drive (which I’d do again in a heartbeat, no hesitation) has made it abundantly clear to me that I need a new job. Maybe a different role with my current employer or a new employer entirely, but I don’t think I can keep this going forever. It’s certainly possible things would be different it I didn’t need to work fifty-hour-weeks to make ends meet comfortably, but I don’t know if a mere reduction in hours would be enough to solve what has rather slowly become a pretty toxic work environment. It also helps that I genuinely enjoy driving and got to spend thirty-five-ish hours listening to a bunch of podcasts I’d stockpiled for the occasion, and that I somehow managed to largely avoid any drivers that made me fear to share the road with them, but it still feels like the disparity between my normal work weeks and the long-haul driving I did (that has gotten a lot of comments from people about how intense that sounds) is trying to teach me a lesson I would be dumb to ignore. I mean, it’s really just backing up a lesson the rest of my life has been trying to teach me, but I don’t think any other lessons have been as stark and obvious as this one…

Still, it is nice to feel this… recovered as I’m going in to three very busy weeks before the winter holidays arrive [too bad this feeling didn’t last since I got sick literally the day after writing this]. Normally these weeks are dull and it’s difficult to get anything done, but we’ve got our work cut out for us on my team. There’s a lot that needs to get done before next March and that means we need to leap on work as it becomes available to us. I’m of course still taking my customary time off of work, but I’m also opening myself to the possibility of working more than fifty hours in a week to get all of in done so I don’t come back from vacation to a slammed work schedule that will demand more than I’ve got to give right after I’ve finished resting. I don’t want to wind up pushing myself through another laborious, awful three-month period like I did last year since I still haven’t fully recovered from that, even with how much better I feel from my trip. I don’t think I COULD push myself that hard again…

I really need to remember this in the future, though. Actually getting out and going places is good for me. And not just leaving my apartment, but entirely removing myself from my usual contexts. I try to get at least one trip like that in a year, but last year’s started me down a slide toward back problems and my current inability to sleep for more than a handful of hours at time unless I stay up until two in the morning, so it didn’t really do that much to help me (plus I came back from vacation into a months-long mess at work that definitely didn’t help matters). This past trip, though, has not dropped me into a mire of problems upon my return to the office (but there’s still a whole week for problems to show up, so I’m not letting my guard down yet[nothing work-wise happened, thankfully, but I did get super sick]), and I not only left my city but left the entire region of the country I was in. I really need to do that more than I have been. I’ll need a better vehicle for that, and some kind of travel companion or companions, if I’m going to make a habit of it, but I don’t want to lose this feeling of comfort and belonging that I’ve got. I don’t know if it was the purely-for-fun nature of the trip, but it really did more for me than the last two times I did an almost identical drive for a bridal party trip to Spain and the subsequent wedding.

Right now, I’m going to do my best to enjoy this feeling, try to avoid pushing myself too hard right off the bat, and maybe do what I can to alter my sleep schedule in a more healthy direction. It really would be nice to go INTO the holidays feeling better and with an improved sleep schedule rather than relying on them to provide me with both of those things. I’d love to use the time to build some better habits and the first step to that is getting enough sleep that I can get out of bed in the morning and avoiding things that are going to make me feel mentally and emotionally drained. Which means finding ways to stay light-hearted is the name of the game right now and hopefully I can find enough of them to counteract how draining holiday shopping and my usual intense work schedule can be.