It took about two full weeks of my normal work schedule, but my burnout and related exhaustion have come roaring back. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve been struggling to sleep due to stress about things going on in the world and the mounting anxiety that there’s something I could be doing that I’m not doing (which, by it’s very nature, is an impossible anxiety to resolve given that I’m already doing as much as I reasonably can and don’t know of anything else I could actually do that’s also useful). There’s just no escaping any of the mounting pressure I’m feeling, at work or at large in the world, and it has left me more brittle than even I expected. I had thought that, between my antidepressants and a week off of work, I’d recovered some of my resilience–my ability to endure–but that does not seem to be the case. Maybe if I was sleeping more, that would still be true. Maybe if I could get away from the stress of it all for more than a few moments here or there, it would still be true. I don’t know. Maybe if I actually got out of bed on time, maybe if I could force myself back into a proper workout routine, maybe if I wasn’t feeling sweaty almost constantly due to the one annoying side effect of my antidepressants… So many maybes and I have no certain answers. I don’t even know if I can get any more certainty than I’ve got, even, since it’s not like there’s much left for me to try in terms of my day-to-day life that won’t definitely make things worse for me.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this. I know what I need to do in order to recover, but I’m so far away from the financial stability required to take a couple months off of work that giving the idea more than a single fleeting thought begins to fill me with despair. Plus, even if I could afford it right now, I have no idea what state the economy is going to be in a month from now, so taking that time off might leave me in a position where the economy shifts beneath me, either forcing me to go back to work early or turning my period of rest into financial precarity as my employer is forced to cut stuff (I imagined I’d be high up on the list of people to eliminate since I’d be taking either unpaid time off or medical leave). I have zero faith that things will remain stable long enough for me to rest even if I could afford to and I’m fairly certain that being this anxious while trying to rest will have the opposite of the desired effect. I mean, I can’t even go a single day in quiet peace or isolation from the world’s events without starting to feel anxious about what I might be missing. So much wild, awful shit happens from one day to the next that I feel like each successive week for the last eight months has been people repeating the phrase “this is a new low” over and over again, like it means anything. It’s really not good for my health and I’m one of the most insulated people from it all, so I can’t imagine how bad things feel for so many other people.

It doesn’t help that things are still weird with my coworkers, even after they asked me what they could do to rise to the occasion of the Disney boycott a couple weeks back. It’s not like I can suddenly trust them. Hell, I even had my mistrust validated given how many of them initally couldn’t be bothered to even forego Disney+ when it would barely inconvenience them or their media consumption habits. It was so weird that they asked me what they should do after spending a few minutes talking about how they couldn’t give up one of the many streaming services they subscribe to because one person was watching a single show, but at least they were receptive when I pointed that out to them (they weren’t ready for the BDS boycott list and how they should already have been boycotting Disney+ so I just stuck to the recent Jimmy Kimmel stuff). I don’t know. It’s just hard to take anything they say seriously when I can have multiple coworkers come by my office, futz with my door placard that includes a card for my pronouns (which are also linked in every digital profile at my employer), and still use the wrong ones without ever acknowledging the placard right in front of their eyes. I feel so immensely worn out by the fact that they expect me to do all this processing and emotional work for them in exchange for literally nothing. It’s not like that kind of labor is a part of my job description…

All of this is part of the burnout. I let my mind wander or lose focus on what I’m writing for a single moment and I’m immediately swamped in some kind of new problem, or at least a new consideration of an old problem. There can be no peace or rest for me since trying to let my mind spin down just means it runs off toward some new, exhausting frustration or horror in the world. The only peace I can find these days is in complete distraction with some other occupation since anything that leaves me space to think is just going to stress me out more and more. And this isn’t even my usual anxious-picking-at-things that I’m used to dealing with, this is just random thoughts about needing to go to the grocery store or pay my rent that immediately springboard into how precarious everything is or how much my rent has gone up since I moved into a place by myself or how isolated I am from people in my physical proximity these days. I can’t even try to turn toward discussion of burnout from a meta perspective, to comment on how exhausting it is to be constantly aware of this and how I’m feeding into it, without getting pulled back into it in a feedback loop from hell that requires the same amount of effort to break myself out of that I used to spend not being miserable constantly. It’s still not great, even if it used to be worse when I had to tackle my depression on top of everything going on the world. I was just capable of convincing myself that more of it could be chalked up to my depression than was actually true and I’m only learning how bad my burnout truly was/is now that my daily depression woes are off the table. It’s going to be a long few months, to be sure, while I try to figure something out to decrease my burden or until things completely break down past the point of being able to do anything at all.