As a result of this past weekend’s tumult, I’ve noticed a habit in my life more starkly than ever before. I have, of course, been aware for years that I tend to deal with feeling poorly about myself or a loss of control in my life with some form of hard work. Either new projects to work on, an attempt to reassert control by just throwing myself at whatever is making me feel like I lack control, or just keeping myself working on a problem until it is solved rather than letting myself rest. This is not a new thing. What does seem new, at least to my eyes, is how pretty much everything I do comes down to this habit and how unhealthy that has gotten recently. I’ve always struggled with letting myself rest and with not taking on more work than I can handle, but I’d begun to work on doing less and punishing myself less for not doing everything I’d wanted to do in a day over the past two years, so I’d thought that I was making solid progress. Unfortunately, while I was making advancements in a few specific areas or with regards to a few specific cases (such as this blog and my personal projects), I’ve been losing ground elsewhere. The most easy examples are things I’ve written about recently. How stressed I made myself by doing what was, in retrospect, way too much work before I went on vacation. How I dropped all of my plans for two whole days to build my computer. Hell, I even spent my last week of my break pushing myself to get work done rather than letting myself actually continue to rest. Sure, all of this stuff is only as clearly over-the-top as it appears to be because I have the benefit of hindsight, but some time thinking and a therapy appointment have made it very clear that there were spots in all of those events where I should have stopped, all of which I recognized and then chose to ignore in the moment. Not only would I have been better off not doing as much work, but that nothing bad would have come of stopping to breathe or rest.

The first one is probably the least clear-cut, because it involves work responsibilities and effort that I get paid to put into my job. Sure, in retrospect I know exactly how much work I didn’t need to do, but I had no way of knowing how much wouldn’t get accomplished while I was gone. Sure, I anticipated some problems impeding progress based on where the project was on my last day, but I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it eventually was. I didn’t expect that only lateral progress would be made and that not only would my massive testing jig not get used, but be rendered unnecessary by the solutions to the newly discovered problems [I learned the day before this posted that my testing jig was actually used briefly but that use was instrumental in figuring out the problem everyone spent my vacation working on, which is pretty validating, even if we’re going to be dismantling it over the next few days since it is no longer needed]. I do feel a little frustrated that I did so much work for nothing, but that’s a common occurrence in my line of work and I still got paid to do that labor regardless of whether or not it winds up being useful. My boss won’t fault me for doing what I did, since I was working from the best knowledge I had at the time, but I can fault myself because my gut was telling me that I probably shouldn’t work that far ahead of the project and I should have trusted my gut [which is still true because that testing could have been done even without my jig, it just would have taken longer]. It has steered me well in this project and over the last couple years of trying to mitigate the frustrations I feel in my job, but I ignoring it this time just so I could check every box and allay my anxiety over leaving the project behind by putting it in as perfect a state as it could be in at the time.

More clear but still somewhat nebulous is all the effort that went into my week of staycation. I absolutely needed to do everything I did (emotionally, if not for my day-to-day survival), but I assigned it a level of urgency and need that it didn’t really have. I still have one outstanding project left to work on (a new home for my blog before my WordPress plan renews in November, now that I’ve already paid for my domain), but I did everything else. I had time to spare, in retrospect, that I would have known I had at the time if I’d just spent a little more time planning and thinking things through rather than throwing my to-do list items at the wall like darts, lining them up with broad strokes and few thoughts so that I could put off considering any of them until the last possible moment. Sure, assigning myself one of these major tasks to do each day worked out, but I could have had a much easier time of things if I’d done a little bit of them every day. I would have also been less disturbed by the leak in my apartment if I’d focused on broad progress rather than zeroing in on a series of focused tasks I’d assigned myself before I knew I had a leak and tromping maintenance men to deal with, all of which would have lowered my overall stress.

The most clear-cut, though, is my computer building experience. I don’t think that it is a problem that I drove to Chicago to get things worked out (even if it proved unnecessary since the problem was a simple oversight on my part), nor is it an issue that I wanted to get everything delivered quickly so I could build the computer ASAP. What was a problem was reaching the point Friday evening where I had the thought that the dinner snack I had at eight would only be enough to tide me over until the computer was finished and then choosing to continue working on the computer rather than stop and eat dinner. If I’d stopped and eaten a proper meal, spent some time thinking about literally anything else for the first time that day, and let my weary eyes and mind rest, I probably would have caught the problem myself. Or not even run into it in the first place. If I’d wound up knocking off for the night and finishing my work in the morning, I’d probably still have been better off in the end. It also probably would have taken much of my Saturday, too. I pushed myself way too hard and while things worked out in a way I find acceptable, I can’t help but acknowledge that things would have probably worked out better if I’d just stopped to rest rather than relentlessly driven myself forward.

All of which is to say that maybe I need to apply my attempts to live more moderately in a broader manner than I have been. I need to stop giving the entirety of my being over to everything I do. I need to spread myself out more. I need to let things go undone if the price of “done” is my peace of mind and ability to rest as much as I need to. I don’t much care for this solution, mind you, since I feel perpetually short on time and like all my goals are so unattainably distant that nothing short of Herculean effort will bring even one of them within my grasp within the decade. I don’t know that this thought is true, though. I don’t know it’s false, either. All I know is that I interrupted my own rest, delayed my own burnout recovery, by choosing to work harder than I needed to simply because it was easier to do that than grapple with my own limitations.