Burnout Brain Farts
Awareness and Acceptance
Part Two
This is a bit of an experiment for me! I am back in burnout I have finally come to accept that. I'm proud of myself for recognizing it, and for recognising it as it happened. I'm trying not to give myself a hard time for not having prevented it when soon as I saw it coming, because looking back it has felt largely like it was outside of my control. I’ll talk more about that some other time- I’ve started a few posts already and written quite a lot about it but as usual they go off on quite a few tangents and just escalates!
I imagined that when I recorded my first post, it would be something with purpose. Something that felt slick. I'm also aware that the reason I was drawn to the ability to record posts was the fact that I know that sometimes I get bogged down in the selection of the words, the precise meaning, the structure of the writing....
It's not because I want it to read like a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. It's more to do with writing being my way of processing. As I draft and redraft a piece of writing, it's basically my way of figuring things out, figuring my thoughts out. When I put it out into the world, it's when I think I've understood the situation as well as I’m able at that time, and because burned out, I’m very much in a place of not understanding very much… which is hard. I do process thing verbally too, which is why to many people I can be ‘too much’ and is also why my therapist and coaches are invaluable to me.
I have so many thoughts, jostling for space in my head all the time, many of which are things that I have wanted to share in this space since before I had it, and all the new ones that have come since. I feel like getting them out is going to go a long way towards helping me recover from this burnout. So, if getting them out as an audio post is what gets them out sooner- great. If writing them is what's going to help me more- great. I think at least for the next short while it's going to be a combination of both.
Photography is generally my go-to for getting difficult emotions out of me, but now I’m finding I’m occasionally flooded with emotions, which isn't conducive to my creative process, and is usually at night when I let my guard down. But mostly I have been numb to them, which I recognize as being a protective mechanism. Dissociation allows me to do what needs to be done, but it’s not sustainable long-term.
So again, it's just a matter of trying things out… figuring things out as I go along. I've got my AI transcription app 1running as I record this. It’s not brilliant with accuracy but hopefully with a few tweaks I’ll be able to share it as a written post as well (it worked well enough!).
But rather than just stay silent while I try and get all my thoughts into order, I’ll share this with you, and you can experience what it's like inside the garbled mess of my burned-out mind! I hope it doesn’t scare you off because I am learning important things as I go along and hopefully when normal service resumes, I’ll be able to be more succinct!
Part Two
I recorded the first audio of this post before I wrote last week’s ‘Burnout by Numbers’, which was the trimmed down version of several recordings I made in the transcription app, as I tried to pull out the threads of thought. When I named it and mentioned it in chat, I thought it could be the start of the rEvolutions podcast, but burnout is not the ideal state for learning how to do new things- which is also why the audio for this article is in two parts! Who knows what it will become now…
It was also before I made the decision to take some time away from work to recover. As far as last Monday evening (due in work on Tuesday) I was still naively thinking I could manage my burnout around work- take some odd days of annual leave until I could take a full week off when the kids go back to school after half term. Because of staffing levels in the office and, well let’s face it I love my kids but they’re not exactly burnout medicine!
But there was far more at play, and I was considerably further in, than I had realised.
It's not all doom and gloom though. Last Monday, whilst the kids were still in school and having taken the day as annual leave, I had a long overdue (and long- at 2 hours!) therapy session and finally dredged up a lot of what I have been pushing down to try and meet the work demands. It was every bit as uncomfortable as it sounds but it gave me the chance to see more clearly, why I had allowed myself to be pushed into a burnout that I have fought so hard to avoid for the past year. It showed me where and why I had stumbled onto an old familiar path and thus ended up in this increasingly familiar place of overwhelm.
Having called in sick on Tuesday and spent the day following my doctor’s previous burnout advice of ‘rest and do the things that bring you joy’, by Wednesday I was able to head out into the sunshine on a reverse of the previous day’s walk, with my camera, and shifted some of what was weighing me down into these pixels.
I’d gotten into my head that I still wanted to attend a scheduled Teams meeting for work, but was instructed by HR to stay away and get better, which was disappointing (because like a good servant of capitalism, I still want to be useful, but also because it is part of an initiative that I’m incredibly passionate about), but for the best because I needed a nap!
I am often tired, but I had somehow forgotten quite how intense burnout exhaustion is; how quickly it sets in, how heavily it lands, how intransigent it can be. How despite all this, it is still sometimes not adequate defence against the insomnia caused by intrusive thoughts. I did manage to nap and later, after cooking, I had a bath with a book, and finally given a crack of light in which to be witnessed, a personal project that has been fluttering in the periphery of my creative consciousness since before my diagnosis, showed me what I hope will be…
A path back home to myself…
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