The past few weeks of banging my head against the same problem at work (on top of everything else going on the last few months) has burned me out worse than ever. I really wish I could say this and, with ANY degree of confidence, tack on that this was as bad as it could get, but I keep finding new depths. For instance, I spent the whole weekend resting and don’t feel any better going into work today than I did leaving work at the end of last week. Well, I mean, I feel a little better, but only because I’ve yet to work the full day since I’m writing this in the morning instead of the evening. That hardly counts in the face of how utterly exhausted I feel every moment of every day [how right I was… Evening came around and left me feeling worse than I did before the weekend]. Whatever rest I’d gotten this past spring was largely undone by how things have been going at work, between a lack of project clarity, the loss of trust in my coworkers, and my boss being so weird and evasive about things. There’s no way any amount of feeling well-rested could have survived that particular gauntlet, much less the gauntlet the last three weeks have been as my coworker dumped a problem on my lap and then dipped out of the office for several days, so it is hardly surprising that I’m feeling worse than ever. I just didn’t expect it to go from being a largely mental and emotional problem to a physical one as well. I thought I could just stay quietly miserable in my head and suffer through things until I managed to get a new job or pay off enough of my loans that I didn’t need to work as much anymore. Turns out that I was wrong.

Burnout’s a pretty awful experience, I’m not going to lie. I don’t think you would say otherwise, Person Reading This Post, but I am constantly surprised by how much things keep getting worse as my burnout continues to grow despite my attempts to rest (all of which have been abandoned now as a result of Living Under Capitalism and the way my coworkers and boss have decided to treat me since I literally can’t afford to not work a ton and my days of occasionally working from home in order to take it easy are over). I’ve officially hit the point where I’ve begun to feel concerned that I might be doing damage to myself that will not be undone by adequate rest at some unknown time in the future. It might just be the rather constant discomfort, pain, and general misery that have been a part of my daily life for a over a year speaking here, but I’m really struggling to imagine a life where I don’t feel some kind of awful. I hope that’s not true. I hope I can get some rest and heal somehow, but it’s really difficult to even imagine what that might look like given how much I’ve struggled to actually rest and recover in any kind of meaningful way for years now. Vacations, fewer hours, special treats, active self-care, and even focused control of every aspect of my life haven’t been enough to tip the scales in any kind of meaningful or lasting way.

Worse than all that is not knowing what I could even try to do about it all. I can’t afford to work less than I already am (and the last few months of not working a solid fifty hours every single week have really put an end to the comfortable padding I used to have in my bank account), I can’t afford to take medical leave, I can’t afford to not be working…. I have no real options here other than trying to emotionally disengage and that’s just so frustrating and exhausting to maintain that it won’t really be helpful. I mean, I could try to feel less invested in my job, but it’s difficult to have a healthy “normal” emotional relationship with the thing you do for ten hours a day, five days a week, in order to sustain your existence, such that it is. I once tried to be less emotionally invested in my job and wound up completely checking out such that my boss noticed. Which really showed me just what kind of expectations I’d shouldered by working the way I am naturally inclined to. I’ll never forget that I got a (mildly) negative review that year because I was only performing adequately and my boss knew I could perform at a much higher level than that. Turns out I can’t just do my job as it is defined and work at a normal pace without my boss thinking that I’m slacking off or that I need a stern talking-to. Gotta be a constant high performer or else shit starts falling apart and that somehow reflects on me rather than the person who won’t hire a fourth tester for a team that used to have four and has been barely hobbling along with three (and only staying ahead because two of those three do the work of three testers and while that used to mean we’d get breathing room in the past, now it just means we’re always just one missed step from falling behind no matter how much we work).

I hope my exhaustion is coming through the text. I’m not even sleepy. I’m completely and utterly drained. I am constantly fighting the urge to lay down and cry and that turns into a real battle when I finally get to leave work and don’t need to keep up a neutral mask anymore. I’ve been “fight back the urge to weep in the grocery store” levels of absolutely wiped out since sometime last week and it’s becoming such a familiar sensation that I’m starting to lose track of when it shows up and departs. I kinda wish I could just have a breakdown so I’d be forced to rest, but I know that’s not how I work. I’m not going to just collapse in a heap, I’m going to stay in enough of a solid shape to keep on going from day to day and just be miserable and withdrawn all the while. Which, you know, is a pretty good way to describe how I’ve felt the last two weeks. I don’t think I’ve had a breakdown yet, since I can still get up on time and get to work at my desired hour on top of maintaining all my personal responsibilities as an adult who lives alone, but who knows? It took me a few weeks to realize that the three consecutive days of not sleeping in 2021 was an anxiety attack, so maybe I’ll be looking back on this moment in a few weeks time and shaking my head at my insistence that I obviously can’t be having a slow mental breakdown because surely I’d know it if it was happening.

Dark humor aside, I don’t think I’m there yet. I’ve still got good moments. I can still focus. I only had to lay on my bed, unmoving, for forty-five minutes after work once in this period of extreme stress and exhaustion, so clearly I’m still limping along. I’m just burned out, low on spoons, and stuck in a general life circumstance where I can’t take the time to rest and recover, so I hit my limit while I’m at work every day rather than only hitting it on rare occasions. I can keep this going for a while yet. I can’t deny that this isn’t a long-term viable path, though. I need to somehow find the time and energy to do something about this situation I’m in. It’s not like anyone else is going to do something about it for me. I have to be the one driving the vehicle, even if people stop by to help with a part of this metaphorical road trip. No one else is going to fix it for me, so I’ll have to figure something out. I always do. Figure something out, I mean. I’ve got a pretty good track record of that. Almost thirty-four years and counting…