I was born early in the morning on the last day of August and I’ve had mixed feelings about it ever since. I mean, I’ve had mixed feelings about being born on and off throughout my life, but I’ve had mixed feelings about August and being born at its end pretty much constantly for my entire life. Most of that is due to the unfortunate coincidence that a lot of the most traumatic events of my childhood were concentrated towards the end of the summer every year, but a much more immediate and relevant part of that is due to my birthday frequently being overshadowed by people’s Labor Day plans. Sure, the trauma stuff hangs around and occasionally rears its head, but I can go to therapy about that and grow more capable of dealing with it. Being overshadowed by everyone’s favorite end-of-summer holiday is a yearly struggle that I’ve been unable to work around despite my thirty-three years of life. Hell, even on the years when my birthday isn’t connected to the weekend that includes Labor Day, I still struggle because that means I have to celebrate before my birthday rather than after it. I almost never manage to make plans in the years when it’s actually on Labor Day weekend because, no matter how far ahead I try to make my plans, everyone else winds up being busy. It’s a popular weekend! People are camping, grilling out, visiting relatives, or otherwise trying to enjoy the last gasps of summer before fall arrives in the Midwest. Even when I try to settle for having ANY kind of plans that weekend, for my birthday or otherwise, it rarely works out for any number of reasons. At this point in my life, after a decade and a half of trying, I’m mostly given up. There’s only so many time you can put up with people canceling on you or being unavailable despite your attempts to plan things super early. My bar has lowered enough that all I can really hope for is that people will remember to wish me a happy birthday.
Continue readingStress
An Ignoble End To August As My Eye Irritates Itself Once More
You ever have one of those days where you want to lay your head down on your desk and just let the world spin unremarked for a day or two? I’m having one of those days today, which is frustrating because I had a decent weekend. I got to play video games with some friends, hang out online with those same friends while I cleared most of Dragon Age: Origins (which you’ll have read about by the time you read this since I was too busy last Friday to write a blog post and will just be pitching a post about that into the empty Friday slot from last week), and had a great and intense D&D session session to close it out. I can’t really feel positive about that, though, because the eye problems that are not even two weeks past clearing up have flared up again which means that even my previous maintenance care is no longer working and I’m not sure why. I could make some guesses if I had to, but I’d be shooting in the dark and firing at random rather than at any kind of target. The best of these possibilities is “something has changed for the worse” and that sucks because it is probably the case. The next-most plausible is “the bottle of eye drops I’ve been using isn’t as effective as the one I was using the recovery period of the last flare up” which sucks because they’re supposed to be the exact same stuff and this would mean that I got incredibly unlucky and was given a bad bottle of eye drops prior to my latest refill.
Continue readingBurnout 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 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 readingLessons Learned While Building My New Computer
Last Friday, (two Fridays ago, as you’re reading this), the last of my computer parts (save the monitors) arrived and I began the laborious process of reading manuals, looking things up on the internet, and doing my best to put things together. I was confident that things would go better this time around (compared to my first computer build) since I’ve spent seven and a half years working at a job that involved a bunch of mechanical and electrical testing, so I’m much more familiar with how to put computers together than before. That, of course, overlooked the fact that I’m generally putting together devices that have a set list of parts that we already know work perfectly together and that my familiarity with the products my company makes gives me a very particular idea of what a computer’s interior should look like. An idea that doesn’t reflect a gaming computer much at all. Sure, I could easily find the ports on the motherboard I needed and I felt much more confident plugging in cables during this build compared to my first back in 2015, but I was still largely operating without being entirely certain that I was doing the right thing. All of which meant that I wound up missing something pretty important that meant my computer wouldn’t properly turn on once assembled and my incredible exhaustion (beyond the ability to make choices easily due to the anxiety of waiting for everything to arrive coupled with the fact that I only finished putting it all together almost six hours after I started, just before midnight) prevented me from seeing what I’d done wrong until I’d driven down to Chicago and paid a professional to take a look at it (ostensibly so I could just solve whatever the problem was an move on with my life, which is exactly what I wound up doing even if the problem was incredibly simple and kind of dumb).
Continue readingI Bought Myself A New Computer
I did not know spending a ton of money could be exhausting. I probably would have guessed as much if I’d really thought it through, but I didn’t and so the amount of sheer exhaustion I felt upon completing the last of my orders for new computer parts caught me by surprise. Mostly. I did set an entire day aside for planning out, researching, and then buying my new computer, so I clearly expected it to be a mentally arduous task. I just didn’t think that I’d have to fight my anxiety twice as I did it–first as I tried to figure out what parts I should buy and if they’d all work together properly and then second as I had to actually click the “place order” button in four different places. Once I was done, I wanted nothing more than to lay down on the floor in my apartment and do nothing for a couple hours. After all, between dealing with my apartment complex’s maintenance staff as they finished working on the leak in my closet and spending a bunch of money (that I’d set aside over the past year for explicitly this purpose), I’d done a lot of mental and emotional labor. I earned a rest. I earned some time laying down on the floor in an exhausted and unthinking heap. Instead of doing that, though, I ran some errands and did some laundry. Which is a lot like resting except for the parts where I was still doing stuff. Honestly, it was just nice to leave my apartment for a bit, before the next round of storms rolled through.
Continue readingPost-Vacation Stress Management
After taking a week away from life to rest up and try to recover from the soul-numbing burnout I was trapped in prior to my vacation, the main impression I’ve got is that it wasn’t nearly enough time. I was so exhausted and burned out that I couldn’t even feel tired and exhausted until the middle of the week. It took four days of rest to even begin to feel just how wrecked I was, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Now, another four days on from that, I’m still battling a deep and pervasive sense of exhaustion even as I’m forced to begin getting back to work. I mean, I could still take some time off to continue resting, but that would mean leaving things undone. I don’t think that’s in my best interest, especially given that I’m going to be walking into the second half of my project-based work-marathon the day this post actually goes up on my blog. After all, the stuff I’m doing this week is supposed to help with making that marathon easier on me, on top of finally doing a bunch of stuff that I’ve been putting off due to a lack of energy (like researching what the actual cost of a new computer will be, where to host my blog that won’t be more mentally taxing than I can afford in my daily spoon budget, and how to introduce more opportunities for in-person socializing). It’s all stuff that I will benefit from having done, but it’s difficult to convince myself to actually do it when I’m still so damn tired.
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