It has been a long time since I was last struck by inspiration. Most of the time, when an idea “comes to me,” it’s the result of me chewing something over in the back of my mind for a long time before coming up with whatever thought or idea will form the center of what thing I’m going to produce. Poetry, short stories, a novel draft, all these blog posts… None of them are the result of inspiration even if I’ve often claimed to have been “inspired” by something. Even those times, I came up with an idea after thinking about some media or idea for a while. Which might sound a lot like inspiration, but I would define inspiration as something external that plops a fully-formed idea into your head. All of my “inspired by” ideas are a result of my internal processing coming up with an idea based on thinking about something else. It feels like quite a thin hair to split, which is why I haven’t written about this before and am somewhat hesitant to write about it not (mostly because it doesn’t much matter to me which side of the split hair you’re on since it’s all a part of the writing process and the only person the precise definition of this stuff matters to is the person doing the defining as a part of their process). Still, this feeling of actual, true inspiration is rare enough that I feel compelled to say something about it now that I’ve been on the receiving end of it for the first time since I set up an online D&D campaign back in 2019.
Continue readingBurnout
Burnout By Any Other Name Would Ache As Much
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.
Continue readingThe Slow, Grinding Burnout Of Constantly Finding Problems
One day deeper into the week, one more day of fruitless work on a project I can’t talk about behind me. I’m not as upset about everything as I was yesterday, though I’m still a little upset and frustrated, but now I’m feeling extra worn down because we’re still unable to figure out why things aren’t working the way we want them to and how nothing we do that improves those results makes any kind of sense. It has everyone stumped and while we have been able to make slowly improving progress over the past two months, we haven’t really fixed things yet. It is exhausting to work on, mentally and emotionally, because we’re just beating out heads against a problem, and it is exhausting physically because any proposals about different methodology or improvements require a decent amount of heavy labor from me. This work has become every kind of exhausting and I can feel myself less and less able to spring back from it with every passing day. Sure, nothing I’m doing is wrong or a failure or anything like that, but it sure feels like a failure when I’ve been working on a problem this long and this consistently but haven’t been able to figure anything out. Sure, my job is to collect data and tell people that things are wrong, but I clearly understand the problems and how they play out better than everyone else (as my repeated explanations prove almost daily) so it feels like some part of the solution is my responsibility. Regardless of whether that is right or wrong, it is how I feel and these repeated days of zero progress despite my efforts have me feeling incredibly drained.
Continue readingOne Week Into Pursuing Stability Amidst The Chaos Via New Routines
I’m now one full week into my new stress management process and while I do not care for how much time I have to spend thinking about and planning things (despite loving to do both of those activities), I really love being done with dinner and evening chores by nine every night. Prior to this week, I’d sometimes not get home and through with dinner until ten or even eleven. It was rough, to feel like I needed to cram at least some amount of relaxing into my evenings after dinner when I’d still be finishing up at the time I should be starting to prepare for bed, but this past week has been free of that. Which isn’t to say that I’ve gone to bed at a good time every night this week. I’ve had two nights this week where I was just too stressed and anxious to relax enough to even think about going to bed at my normal time, but I think those have more to do with some emotional stuff going on in the background rather than anything to do with my new routine. What I have gotten every single night is the realization that I have enough time for at least two activities before I should start getting ready for bed, even after doing some extra chores around my apartment. It makes it a lot easier to sign off for the night when you don’t feel like you’re desperately trying to cram something into the tail end of your day so you didn’t spend the whole thing dreading work, going to work, working, and then being so exhausted from work that it took you an hour to make dinner. It’s really nice to be able to just walk into my kitchen, spend five to thirty minutes sorting out my dinner, eat it, and then get on with the rest of my evening, even on days when I had to work until eight.
Continue readingStress Management Via New Grocery Days And Ordering Things Online
Today, the day I am writing this, is the first Friday that is also a full grocery day since I sat down during my vacation to figure out how to better align my weeks to reduce the burnout effects of working the long hours I do at the pace I do. I, unfortunately, did not come up with any miracle solutions, but I did have a few ideas that would hopefully reduce the stress I was feeling from week to week before my vacation WITHOUT getting takeout or delivery multiple times a week. And, hopefully, without eating garbage frozen food all the time. Or, in some cases, eating a mix of garbage frozen food and well-prepared good food. For example, I’m making myself some delicious pasta sauce this weekend but, instead of doing all the work of making chicken parmesan, I’m just buying some frozen breaded chicken patties to toss in the oven with some sauce and cheese on top. And buying ravioli and tortellini so I can have some fun variety in my meals while still only really needing to do laborious cooking once (boiling water for noodles is only slightly more difficult than making a frozen pizza). This is the goal, after all: to produce a variety of tasty and at least moderately healthy meals for less money than it would take to eat out frequently but more money than my bare-bones frozen food, pizza, and boxed meals diet that I usually turn to when I need to avoid takeout. In a different living situation (aka, with one or more roommates or a partner), it would be less difficult to make sure I got enough variety in my diet to avoid getting takeout just for a change, but I live alone and modern life isn’t made for single people to maintain a household on their own, so I’m stuck trying to make do with the time and energy I’ve got during these increasingly busy months.
Continue readingBack To Barely Treading Water At Work
Well, we’re back in the shit again at work. Thankfully, that’s a collective “we” that actually has little to do with me and my current day-to-day, though there remains the chance that it will expand to include me as well [which has happened in the week since I wrote this, though mostly in a “you’re on your own for a bit, so don’t let any plates stop spinning” kind of way]. The crisis, such that it is, is technically another department’s crisis that has become ours as a result of what seems to be–from my moderately informed viewpoint–incredible mismanagement. I’ve been gone for two weeks and am swamped just trying to pick up from where I left off, so this new crisis that has overflowed into my department is not making it easy to figure out what the hell was going on with my project during the week anyone had attention to give it, all of which is made more difficult because the one tester who was covering this aspect of the project for me took a week off as well. By the time he gets back to work, I’ll have muddled through an entire work week without his information and whatever he knew before he left will likely be irrelevant thanks to the continued progress of this project [which is exactly how this has played out]. My only saving grace right now is that I know the project and my related testing equipment well enough that I don’t need to understand what has been going on to test the solutions for it. It’s not great, of course, but it’s all I’ve got right now and everyone else has been too busy to take the time I need to fill me in.
Continue readingLighting The Fires Of My Own Burnout
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.
Continue readingLeaving For Vacation Is The Most Stressful Thing I’ve Done At Work
When I initially imagined myself going on vacation at this time in the calendar year and the lifecycle of the big project I’m working on, I imagined myself gracefully exiting the scene that is my workplace with things either finished enough that there was time for a breather or with my coworkers prepared to attend to whatever trickle of work came in while I was away. Unfortunately, over the last two weeks (as I’m writing this as I sit in an exhausted sweaty heap in my home office far too late at night on the day before I leave on my vacation, this is actually four weeks prior to the day this post goes up) I’ve been absolutely swamped by work. I’ve been leaving work at increasingly late times as I’ve struggled to balance the work that’s been pouring in against trying to finish the items on my to-do list that have fallen by the wayside over the last month and a half of increasing business, all while trying to get my coworkers up to speed so that the work can continue while I’m gone since all of the different pieces of my project are at a crucial stage where they can’t just wait a couple weeks for me to return from my vacation. I finally managed to get the last things done tonight, at about a quarter to ten in the evening after an almost fourteen hour day. I’ll be able to rest easily, as a result, since I won’t have anything left dangling over my head, but I am so absolutely exhausted that I don’t even feel tired anymore. I’m found some state beyond even exhaustion where nothing matters and my numb sense of self can continue to push my body until I run out of things to do or I collapsed because my body refuses to listen.
Continue readingWorn Out By Workplace Whack-A-Mole
I was talking to a friend about how busy work has been, describing it as playing whack-a-mole with problems that keep popping up because the core issue causing all of them is the one mole that just won’t stay whacked. It was a bit of a humorous moment, given the odd phrasing, but the expression has stuck with me since then. I genuinely don’t think any other way of putting it would really capture the entirety of the situation. After all, it isn’t just that we keep finding new problems, dealing with them, and then immediately finding more problems, sometimes at a pace that we can’t keep up with, but that there’s an absurdly farcical quality to a lot of this work since we know that none of these problems will stay fixed until we figure out the issue at the core of them. It feels like playing whack-a-mole and then getting frustrated because the moles won’t stay whacked. We just don’t know how to fix the core problem, so all we can do is endlessly work through symptoms of it and hope that we eventually figure enough of them out that the game can end and we can move on to a different part of the project. It is a daunting and exhausting prospect to be working on, physically and mentally.
Continue readingPreparing To Rest On A Long Weekend
It always feels a little paradoxical to me that I have to put so much effort into my attempts to rest and recover. This weekend, as I prepare for four days away from work, I’ve planned out the cleaning I will do, the groceries I will need, what activities I’ll have each day of my break, what errands I’ll run and when, and what treats I will allow myself as I invariably don’t want the food that’s in my apartment. I have pretty much everything planned out other than what time I’ll go to bed. Frankly, it was way more work to prepare for this weekend than I expected and I’m genuinely a little worried that I’m not going to get as much out of this weekend as I’d like. After all, I’m more burned out than ever, I’ve started getting bad lower back pains every time I sleep for more four or five hours at a time, and my entire body hurts despite doing what I’m supposed to do to counteract the two medications I’m taking that cause body and, somehow additionally, joint pain. It’s exhausting and I’m not sure taking a weekend to rest will actually do anything but leave me feeling like I’ve wasted a bunch of time doing nothing or like I’ve somehow gained nothing for the time I’ve spent. The latter of which might happen regardless, given my record for disasters striking post-vacation [here I am, editing this post on my second post-vacation day at work during what was supposed to be a chill week and disaster has already struck twice…], so it’s difficult to relax.
Continue reading