I am happy to report that I made it through a whole weekend without discovering some new wild and unprecedented thing happening in the world. Perhaps because I avoided social media as much as possible and have avoided going to look for what I might have missed, but perhaps because nothing significant and unprecedented happened! Maybe it was a normal weekend! Like any other! Just a totally average weekend that included the start of the summer Olympics as France showed off what it brings to the world. Which I didn’t watch, but heard was absolutely wild. I plan to go watch it at some point (even though I don’t really care much about the Olympic sporting events themselves) since the pageantry of it all seems incredible, but I avoided at the time so I could spend the entire weekend trying to recover from how absolutely exhausting and draining last week was. Which, of course, means that I got into work today and all of that resting immediately flew out the window, leaving me more burned out and stressed than I was last week. It is difficult to be the source of truth and knowledge for a project that a lot of people have strong opinions on when said people decide to insert themselves into said project and voice their opinions without asking to be caught up on where the project is at. It is a particularly futile brand of frustrating to spend an entire day explaining to people that you did, in fact, think of all the obvious things they’re suggesting, that you have returned to the basics multiple times, that you’ve done all the easy troubleshooting they suggested, and that your data is actually as conclusive as you’re saying even if they don’t understand it. Literally spent five hours today on that kind of work and made it exactly one iota of a step further than I was last week because of how much stuff I had to do so my coworkers could “just see it happen” themselves.

I did try letting them do whatever they wanted without arguing with them. I tried to let them work without being challenged by me when I knew they were wasting their time, but I had to step in every time that they thought they had figured something out to remind them that this theory of theirs had been disproven months again by previous testing. Clearly, the only sensible conclusion I can draw from this experience is that I can’t work from home because I feel sick ever again, nor can I take any vacations or business days off until the project is done. Things went to hell in a handbasket in a single day and no one even thought to call me to ask questions or run anything by me. It’s absolutely boggling and discouraging.

Thanks to all of this, though, I’ve figured out how to describe what burnout feels like. I was struggling with a difficult sensation and emotional response all weekend that felt out of step with how physically exhausted I was and how much I wanted to just be silent and by myself (despite knowing that I didn’t really want to be by myself), and only managed to figure it out this morning as I was getting ready for work and thinking about the progress I’d finally be able to make at work after last week’s promising results from my final day in the office. It’s heartbreak. The constant, soul-eroding dismay of having your heart absolutely broken. The kind that reaches down into the pit of your stomach, hollows it out, and then creates a vacuum chamber in the open space. That leadens all your limbs, takes the spring out of your step, and makes the Gardetto’s snack mix you brought for lunch taste like a shadow of its usual flavor profile (the mustard on my ham sandwich was fine, though, so I know I’m not losing my sense of taste or smell due to COVID). The kind that makes you wonder if you can get away with wearing flipflops today because it is simply too much work to put on proper socks and shoes while losing yourself in the empty wall across the room from where you’re standing because that blank emptiness is easier to consider than the hollow ache within yourself. That, but constant, unending, and not tied to a specific person you’re pining for, is what burnout feels like to me.

Most the time, when I can finally put words to an emotion or a difficult experience, it helps me process it and move on. Having done that with burnout doesn’t seem to have done much for me, though. Probably because dealing with burnout isn’t a matter of processing things. You can’t work through burnout like that. You have to recover from it. You need to rest. You can mitigate it and stop or slow its worsening, but you can’t undo it without actually resting. You could maybe lessen it by shifting the balance of your days such that each week is slightly more restful than it is taxing, but I’ve had little success with that in the past due to how often outside stress upsets my life’s precarious balance. All that aside, putting the sensation of burnout to words will be helpful, if only in talking about it with others. No amount of describing it or accurately portraying the sensation of it will help me feel less burned out, though. In fact, it could make it worse if I put a bunch of effort into doing stuff but don’t get the relief I was hoping for, which is the number one anxiety I’ve got right now (about the parts of my life that I can control, anyway). That’s why I’m trying to carefully balance my stress levels, the work I’m doing, and my at-home habits so I can avoid making my burnout any worse.

No matter how I describe it, no matter what plans I lay, I will still be burned out. In writing this, I tried to think back to when this burnout began and while I can pinpoint the time it become pronounced (the late spring and early summer of 2016, due to enough factors that they’d require their own blog post to name, let alone discuss), I can’t say when it began. It’s possible I’ve never experienced life without some form of burnout. I mean, I had a pretty miserable childhood where much was demanded of me and even more was expected. Sure, I didn’t have to work in a family business, but I not only performed a huge amount of emotional labor for my family, I was also the sacrifice my parents offered up in exchange for appearing to be a perfect family. My teen years were consumed with further pain, suffering, expectations of labor, and the demands of growing up to be the person my parents required me to be rather than ever figuring myself out. College was my first taste of freedom, the first moment I thought I might recover, but it had its own trials and expectations that kept me from truly resting, not to mention that I needed to work to support myself year-round, to earn as much as possible so I could live away from my parents. Then there’s my first job leading to that horrible summer of 2016, my decision to change as much of my life as I needed to in order to survive, the election of Trump, some bad roommate situations, horrible treatment from a coworker at work, the death of the one extended family member I cared for, my separation from my biological family, the arrival of COVID, more job problems, and then it’s 2023, the MOST year of my life.

Maybe I never really had a chance to rest in my life. At least not in a way that I’ve always needed and denied myself or been denied by the necessities of life. Maybe I’d be able to work through some of this if I could actually rest without giving myself a laundry list of personal labors to attend to. If I could lay down my head for a while without needing to prepare myself for the demands I’ll face when I pick it back up again in too short a time. Maybe all of this burnout is just my trauma resurfacing and all the miserable feelings I’ve attributed to it is just trauma reactions displaced because I’ve convinced myself that I’ve processed a lot of the major chunks of my childhood but maybe didn’t process them all enough yet. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Regardless of what you call it, I’m certain that I need to rest without jolting awake on the weekends at the time my alarm normally goes off because my body is certain I’m forgetting something important. I need to have the time to rest and the time to work and to have those be different times rather than me trying to somehow get both of them simultaneously. Whatever it is, whatever I call it, I know that this past weekend of quiet and rest and a lack of events wasn’t enough because I can feel the disappearance of the little pebbles of rest I’m dropping into a vast emptiness I’m starting to think I’ve lived with my entire life, to the degree that I’m only now, almost thirty-three years into living, beginning to discover is not just a normal thing everyone feels.