Needing to take a day to rest so soon after taking an entire week off has me thinking about my long-term plans. I typically try to space out my rest days and PTO usage a bit more, so I don’t burn through it too quickly. Plus, you get way more bang for your buck during weeks with holidays and it gives me a good reason not to work insanely long days in order to make up for not getting overtime on the day that I’m off work already (which is all part of the particulars for how my employer handles overtime and overtime eligibility). Spacing them out has been my way of maximizing my rest over the past couple years, by doing sprints instead of long marathons, but that has not stopped my burnout from slowly getting worse and worse. Taking a longer rest really hasn’t been an option at any point, though I’ve gotten close to it being an option a few times before something happened to return my financial situation to the edge of precarity. For these last few years of rising rent and cost of living, I have to carefully manage my time and energy so I can maximize the number of weeks in a year that I’m working as much as I can handle. I need the money, after all, and overtime is much more time-efficient than getting a second job. Ten hours of overtime each week gets me three quarters of a week’s pay per paycheck and none of the side jobs I can find would come even close to matching that level of income for the same amount of time. No matter what I do, no matter what numbers I crunch or how I try to rebalance my budget, there just isn’t more I can extract from myself without descending into misery. And yet, despite knowing all that, I’ve already hit a point where I can’t keep pushing myself to work and I haven’t even been back in the office working for three weeks.
Continue readingStress
The Burnout’s Back Already
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.
Continue readingI’m Tired But Not Sad So I’ll Just Ramble About Why That Is
As I slowly move back towards the kind of heavy labor I was doing at the beginning of this year (though at a slower pace, thankfully), it is nice to know that I am not only more physically capable than I was back then, but that a good night’s rest is more effective than it used to be. From just over a year ago until sometime in the spring, it would take me multiple days of rest to recover from a single day’s exertion and now a single night is enough to recover from feeling physically exhausted. Assuming I get enough sleep, anyway. But also, a year ago, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, three or four at most, without waking up with excruciating back pain! I was so tired and pained all the time that it was everything I could do just to keep getting through my days. I descended into a place of fog, exhaustion, misery, and constant trudging persistence while I slowly recovered from years with a worn-out bed, the physical toll of the medication I was taking, and the added weight of not sleeping enough for three months in a row. In fact, I only ever started to recover when I stopped taking that medication and my body was able to start properly repairing itself instead of… well, whatever was going on there. I tell you, there’s nothing like going from needing three to seven days for your muscles to recover from feeling tired to being able to get back up and do more with them after sitting down for a little bit, much less feeling almost all the way better by the next morning. I mean, today was a doozy and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow, but only enough that it’ll make me do my morning stretches for sure and not leave me in a miserable amount of pain like even half this much effort would have done a year ago.
Continue readingVisions Of The Past In The Reflection Of An Arcade Cabinet
After seven years, my coworkers finally fixed the arcade cabinet one of us designed back in 2017. The computer powering it got bricked in 2018 for reasons still unknown but one of our out-of-town coworkers was in town for a week and decided he’d spend his spare time fixing it up. Now it’s working again and my team has slowly begun to gravitate back towards it. It’s currently running a different version of Galaga than we all used to play, but the few interactions with it have quickly resurrected the ol’ competitive spirit of some of my coworkers in a way that I find mildly frustrating but ultimately not worth my emotional effort. I’ve got much better reasons to be frustrated with them these days and it’s not like I’ve got the time for Galaga anymore. Back when we were all playing it, there were four testers on my team. Now there’s only three and we’re doing more work than ever, so taking even half an hour out of my day to do something simple and fun like play a round or two of Galaga isn’t really something I can afford to do most days. I might have a bit more time on Fridays, given that I’m usually less productive then anyway, but I don’t think I can pursue my old records as much as I used to. I’m not even sure I want to, to be honest. Not just because of my difficulties with my coworkers, but because I’m doing a lot of learning things these days and am very aware that I have a limit. I can only learn so much on any given day–and that’s a lot less than I’d like thanks to how draining work often is–and I’ve got more important stuff to remember than enemy appearance and attack patterns in a game older than I am.
Continue readingGetting Back In The Saddle After A Decent Rest
I took a whole week off. It was only supposed to be a long weekend, but it turned into a whole week off of work. And writing. And most personal responsibilities. I didn’t even go grocery shopping and cobbled meals together out of stuff I had around my apartment, including a meal that was two bagels and the last of my jam. I did absolutely nothing that didn’t need doing and, honestly, it was kind of nice. Between actually getting some REAL rest, with proper seven-to-eight-hour nights and having an antidepressant that is (now unequivocally) working properly, that sure solved a lot of my active problems. Not all of them, mind you. It turns out that, by my approximation, eighty percent of my stress and exhaustion was actually burnout, not depression, so a single week of rest isn’t going to fix that by a long shot. It did still help a lot, though. Between having my first genuinely good birthday in at least a decade, maybe my entire life (can’t have a bad birthday if you don’t really celebrate it), taking time to sleep, allowing myself to just do whatever I wanted (which was only MOSTLY Final Fantasy 14), and reaching a point in my rest where I felt comfortable just sitting on my balcony and reading, I think I’ve gotten the most rest I’ve had in about two years. Turns out it’s difficult to rest if you have to spend a bunch of energy every day fighting your own mind in order to not be lethargic and miserable constantly and that removing that extra bit of effort can really help kickstart your other resting efforts.
Continue readingStaggering Over The Finish Line After Today Kicked My Ass
Some days just kick your ass and all you can do at the end of the day is stick to the list of chores you gave yourself and hope that tomorrow will suck less. Today’s one of those days for me. Got to work a bit late (but no big deal, I’ve got no obligations so I can just stay late) and immediately got plunged into the shit. Catching up coworkers who were out, starting on things that I’ve been waiting for people to get back into the office to do, having to chase people down to get my testing setups fixed, losing hours and hours to a problem no one can figure out, having my boss skip our one-on-one meeting when I’ve got stuff to talk about, and finding out that my coworker who has been out a bunch will be out even more (and I can’t even just feel angry at him because he’s getting surgery to fix his knee, so I’m also a little scared about what this will mean for him since he’s nearly sixty and this could have a huge impact on someone who is, sure, a frequent source of frustration for me, but also someone I care about since I’ve worked literally side-by-side with him for the last eight and a half years). It’s all been a bit much today and yet I’ve still got to go grocery shopping since I won’t have a chance to do that again until thursday, I’ve still got to do my chores because I’ve got other ones every single day between now and when my friends show up (which I’m very excited for), and I still have to find time to eat dinner and have at least a little fun somewhere in there so I don’t go to bed hating my existence as much as I do right now.
Continue readingPumping The Brakes On Optimision In The Name Of Due Caution
After a few months of trying slowly increasing dosages of an anti-depressant, I might have finally found one that works. “Might,” being the operative word. I’m only a week and a half into this new dosage as I’m writing this, but I actually have had bursts of adequate executive function in the past few days and while the biggest bursts of it could be attributed to the common early side-effect of “manic energy,” I find myself wanting to feel cautiously optimistic about it. Well, cautiously willing to consider that this might be the medication working. I’m not sure I can call myself optimistic if I’m essentially trying to prove to myself that something other than the medication might be responsible for my buoyed mood. I mean, there’s been all kinds of studies in recent years about how eating a reasonable amount of ice cream every day can have positive effects on your health, so maybe my recent little treats of just a little ice cream every couple of days is responsible. Maybe it’s my improved sleep. Maybe it’s the fact that absolutely nothing horrible happened last week and all I have to deal with was the normal stress of a very busy work week. There’s a lot of things it could be. But its still probably the medication taking effect, even if I’m nervous about whether this feeling will last, grow, disappear, or whatever else could happen. As a teen, I had a really bad experience with mental health focused medications and my experiences so far this year have done little to resolve the general trepidation I feel at the thought of altering my mental state with outside chemicals. A trepidation I’m willing to forcefully overcome since that effort is so much less than the effort it takes to not look and feel miserable constantly that I’m spending just about every single day.
Continue readingThree Separate Heatwaves So Far This Summer
I’m writing this post as the tail-end of the latest heatwave slowly dwindles. Along with the cooler air and chance for storms this shift in temperature is bringing, we’re also getting a nasty shift in air-quality. All the cold air coming from up north is still filled with wildfire smoke, after all. Which means we’re all basically stuck in a position of “horrible heat” or “smoke-filled air” as the old, stable, warm-but-not-too-hot weather of post summers gets blown to and fro by the more extreme conditions to the north and south. It is just over a month into Summer and we’ve had three heatwaves in that time alone. I’m sure we had more over the course of the year, but they didn’t really register the same way these ones did since all they brought were unseasonably warm temperatures (like that time we had temperatures in the 70s back in February) and not actual heat advisories like the summer ones always deliver. I wish I could reliably say that at least this is it for the next ten days based on the forecast, but even tomnorrow’s forecast is no longer an acurrate prediction I can rely on [turns out that even this morning’s prediction for today was off by almost ten degrees and it looks like this week’s heat is going already be more intense than predicted over the weekend]. Today was supposed to be cool and stormy, but instead we’ve just drawn out the dwindling temperatures from the past two days to create a humid swamp of an atmosphere that smells of smoke to my sensitive nose. Tomorrow’s supposed to be rainy now, but I’ll believe it when I see it since I sincerely doubt it will cool off as much as the forecast claims it will. I find it difficult to believe it’ll go from a heat index of over one hundred to dipping down into the fifties in less than forty-eight hours (and barely more than thirty-six), but the weather is strange and largely unpredict able at this point, so who knows. Maybe it’ll happen [it didn’t].
Continue readingBurned Out Beyond Storytelling
It has been almost a month since I ran a TTRPG session. I’ve been so exhausted that I just haven’t had the energy to plan sessions or do even a modicum of prep work, let alone actually spend the significant chunk of time and energy required to hold the session. I keep going into each new week feeling marginally better at most, so putting in the effort to run a game would leave me in even worse condition. Love of the game isn’t enough to make it happen, as much as I’d like to pretend it was, and thankfully my players have all been very understanding. I’m just coming out of my third skipped weekend in a row, still exhausted, and wondering when I’ll eventually have recovered from this burnout. In the past, when things would get this bad for me, I’d do a work from home day or two so I’d be able to sleep in later, rest more during the day, and spend a day working in comfort rather than having to exist in the constantly draining and uncomfortable environment of my office. I’m pretty good at masking so I doubt any of my coworkers know this, but the environment I work in can be very stressful and overstimulating in a way that saps me of all my energy pretty quickly, and the insistence by my boss that I spend less time in my office and more time being visible by working in the lab is only making it worse. I can’t escape the noise outside my office. I have to wear my mask (literal N95 and metaphorical over-emotive-pretense-of-neurotypicality) while I’m out there. I have to constantly watch where my coworkers are so they don’t sneak up on me and clap me on the shoulder heavily enough that I have to restrain my fight-response. It’s not great!
Continue readingThe Other Side Of My Burnout
There’s nothing quite like being stuck in what amounts to a burning bag of shit left on the world’s porch. At least, that’s what it feels like to be a resident of the US these days. I’m not proud of it, every reasonable person hates it and is right to do so, the US government seems intent only on malicious destruction that has the potential to spiral out of control, and no one is going to come out of this without also smelling like shit. Our goose isn’t cooked or anything like that. Things aren’t irrevocably broken yet. They are irrevocably changed, though. Whatever survives this period of awfulness is going to have to find a path forward where none has yet been made. Any attempts to “go back to how things used to be” will only cause things to get worse. The only way forward is through significant change. Exactly what that looks like or how that would work… I don’t know. The whole idea of things changing for the better feels so foreign to me at this point that I’m not sure I can actually imagine what that kind of future would look like. All my conceptions of things being better are just images of the past, glimpsed through a heady filter of nostalgia and a genuine lack of awareness of how the world worked before I knew how to see it working. Who’s to say what positive change would look like this days, following the destruction of so much of the good parts of the US–such that they were–and this process can’t even be described as breaking a bone again in order to set it properly. It feels very “conspiracy theorist” to say it, but it’s difficult not to be aware of how the US is finally breaking along lines that have been slowly chiseled deeper and deeper over the last fifty years.
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