Remember to Stay Hydrated.

 

There was a stretch there from about December - February when I thought I was burned out. Like I had finally hit that “pandemic wall” that people talk about. However I see now that my period of burn out coincided directly with a long stretch of unreasonable work demands. Even though I built a whole new daily routine to try and deal with the burn out, I suspect that its early success directly correlates to a brief period of more reasonable work demands.

Well that period has ended.

Literally yesterday I was listening to yet another podcast on the topic of pandemic burnout and the person being interviewed was all like, “Well Americans use work as a way to form their identities,” and while I agree with that, her advice was all like, “So stop doing that.”

And while that is great and evergreen advice, some of us have very real deadlines and responsibilities over which we have no control. I’ve tried to explain this within my (very large) organization a few times: I do not need another mental health webinar, I need a reasonable workload.

Later today though there is another mental health webinar.

Who the fuck is making all of these webinars? I bet that person is stressed out as hell. This is the golden age of Zoom mental health webinars.

All of the podcasts and articles on pandemic burn out say basically the same thing: get enough sleep, drink water, spend time outside, find things that “nourish your soul” and so on. And of course, I try to do those things, but if I am working this much, I can’t fit a nice walk into my day without cutting back on the time I have to sleep, because like that expanding insulation foam they use now in houses, work finds a way to creep into all the spaces in life.

One article did say the only useful thing I have heard on the entire topic, “We are not working from home, we are living at work.”

That was the only thing I have read so far this whole pandemic that made any reasonable sense. 

And I shouldn’t complain, I have it easier than a whole lot of people out there, but (as therapy has taught me over the years) that is not the point; that lessening your own experiences by comparison is not actually a healthy thing to do, that it is essentially a way of not processing the way that you feel.

I don’t mind hard work, I actually quite like it, but I do mind Sisyphean tasks and I do mind that the wage-earning part of life can eclipse the “soul nourishing” parts of our lives and that there isn’t some sort of hotline that we can call about it. Imagine if there was something like 911, but for complaints about stress. I would watch a TV show about that, but only if all the characters were muppets.

We need more muppet-centered TV shows. I also want to see Kermit play George Clooney in a remake of Ocean’s 11, but that is a blog post for a different day. Maybe tomorrow. Right now I need to go drink some water and nourish my soul before my work day starts.

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