It has been a difficult week. Following my therapy appointment a couple days ago, I spent the rest of that day and all of the next at home, taking time off work. Today, the day I’m writing this a week before it goes up, I’m in the office for a normal 10+ hour shift and mentally prepared to not go in to work at all tomorrow since I’d only need to spend two days of PTO at that point. If I’m not going to get any overtime this week because of how acute my burnout is and how exhausted I feel from coming face-to-face with said burnout, its causes, and the things keeping it the same size at best or growing at worst with each passing day, I might as well give myself an extra day off so I can maybe get enough rest to tackle next week without needing to cut my days short. I also just don’t want to be here. I have described, in detail, how much things at my job have wrecked me over the past two years and I can’t pretend, even for a little bit, that I’m okay with this, comfortable with what’s going on, or happy about any of it in the slightest. I mean, it’s not like I’m being actively tortured or anything, or abused by any meaning of the word. I’m just being taken for granted and have Hard Work’d my way into an untenable position where my entire team not only expects me to do a great deal of organizational labor that isn’t at all a part of my job, but will actively make my life difficult if I’m not doing it by complaining to my boss that I don’t seem to be working much at all. It’s not a great position to be in, especially because my boss agrees with them, or at least he did six months ago when he brought it up during my yearly review, and I’m not entirely sure what to do.

I wrote a few days ago about the changes I’ve identified and am trying to make, the things I can do to maybe make a little more breathing room for myself amidst my busy overtime schedule, and all of that is still on the table. I’m just also not sure that, right decision or not, I can keep on working for my current employer. Part of me wants to try to take the easy way out and apply for another version of my current job on a different team within the company so I can maintain my pay, tenure, and benefits, but I’m really not sure that’s going to be any better since this whole company functions off the unrewarded labor of the people who care about doing things right enough to overwork themselves in order to meet a deadline. I really don’t think there’s any way I can stay here and not come out of this next year with worse burnout, growing debt, or a radically different living situation. I just can’t get the numbers to add up to a positive outcome no matter what I do, now that everything I once did to give myself a little breathing space is no longer on the table because, for one single month after at least nine of constant labor, effort, and attendance, I wound up working from home pretty frequently due to delayed doctor’s appointments, finally-replaced appliances, and finally being in a position where all of my work didn’t require being physically present at my employer’s building to do. That was apparently too much and it wiped out all acknowledgment of the herculean effort I put into making this project hit it’s deadlines, so that rather than anyone reflecting on my successes and hard work, they’re stuck with an impression of me being some kind of slacker.

It’s been almost nine months since this first started, in mid-to-late April, and I still can’t let it go. I mean, how could I? I can’t trust my coworkers anymore. I already couldn’t be myself in front of them, couldn’t trust them with my preferred pronouns or views about the world, so knowing they were going behind my back because of a few weeks of late starts and doctor’s appointments splitting my days into partial work-from-home days only cemented that I can’t trust them with anything. Once that’s gone… Well, now I have to maintain an even more rigid facade at work, while I try to build up the energy to figure out what I’m going to do next, to deal with this untennable situation. It feels like a really bad time to be changing jobs or moving, what with everything going on in the world, and I really don’t think things are going to just spontaneously get better if I stay here. I mean, I’m not even sure I could sell an internal interviewer on my vision for a new testing team and procedure–one of the possible internal transfer jobs available to me–given how tired and jaded I feel. I mean, I don’t know that my eyes have ever had much of a sparkle in them, given the course of my life, but the exhaustion I feel is more than enough to make them feel quite dead even without being able to look into them. I don’t need a mirror to know I’m looking out at the world with an empty stare.

I know things will look more manageable once I’ve had a chance to rest. I know I’m feeling extra tired because my weekends are the only thing keeping me together between work weeks and having my siblings over for a couple days, as nice as it was to see them, meant that I missed out on a lot of time I could have used to rest or unwind or, if I was really lucky, get some sleep. I know that I always feel much more dour and hopeless when I’ve been struggling to sleep as much as I have so far this year (how can I calm down in the face of the horrible things happening in the world around me, largely perpetrated by my own government?). Even so, I’m not sure that just getting adequate rest for a few nights in a row is going to fix this [it didn’t fix it, but it did help me feel less bad while I was ignoring the world outside my apartment). I don’t know that anything short of a sizable change in my life will produce any kind of positive results. I don’t even know that a sizable change would have positive results! I could very easily trade one set of problems for another! I don’t know what I’m going to do and every time I try to figure it out, a wave of lethargy threatens to capsize my lifeboat on the turbulent seas of my decade-long burnout which makes it incredible difficult to summon the energy to figure anything out, let alone take action. So, for now, I’m gonna try to rest and hopefully a few good nights’ sleep will make it all look at least a little better.