I wrote this almost two months ago. I’m now fundraising to be able to extend this “sabbatical” and keep healing for another two months because I still haven’t found the bottom of this burnout’s depths. I’m making progress physically and in trauma therapy, but I’m still often sleeping 12 hours a night, still having to sit back and do very little most days. I HAVE gone to the beach, done a little painting, read some great books, but the closets, sewing, and job hunting remain too taxing to touch yet.
If I stop halfway I’m just going to end up right back where I was back on August 8th. If you could see your way to sharing this piece or this link on your socials, it would mean so much.
Written August 8th, 2022
I’m on day three of what one of my friends is calling my “sabbatical”. I’ve left my job, have no other job lined up, and am not looking for a job. The plan is to start looking after 30 days, or sooner if, and only if, it becomes something that sounds GOOD to do, rather than merely something I should do. I have an inflatable kayak, the entire city of Chicago, paint, crochet, sewing projects, fermenting projects, organization projects, books, and pets to fill my time.
So far I’ve slept a lot, mostly. Last night I slept nearly 15 hours, 12 the night before that, 14 the night before that. And that’s not counting the hours I’m spending in meditation or napping during the day. In between sleeping and meditating iIve done some cleaning, reading, watched a movie with my girlfriend, and crocheted.
I simultaneously feel so free and like an utter failure. I haven’t done any of the wonderful things I imagined myself doing. I haven’t gone to the beach, I haven’t sewed, I haven’t kon-marie’d my closets, and I haven’t touched the paint I was so excited to mess with.
My body is constantly telling me to slow down and keep resting. So I read more, crochet more, meditate more. I eat another meal, let it settle, think about going out for a walk, get exhausted at the thought, and sit down again.
It’s beginning to occur to me that what I’ve been dealing with, and what made me quit my job, wasn’t simply that I was headed in the wrong direction and needed time to figure out where to go. I think this must be burnout of a high degree. The kind that gets written up as a deeply personal exposé by some very rich white lady in the New York Times, except I’m neither rich nor a lady, I’m just your local queer guy who is extremely lucky to have a couple months’ living expenses in the bank… and is a little terrified of using them. I thought people like me don’t get to disappear from life for a while, and certainly don’t get burnout like this.
But here I am facing my own dysfunction. I knew I had an alphabet’s worth of mental health issues on top of chronic pain and migraines. I knew I’d spent the last year at my job feeling like every minute was a weight around my neck. I know what all those feel like, intimately. This isn’t any of those. This isn’t depression – I’m not hopeless or flat-lined emotionally. This isn’t PTSD – I still have PTSD but those symptoms feel different.
Whatever this is, though, I have indeed felt it before. The year or so after I came out and my life fell to shambles. I felt like this then. The need to sleep endlessly and not move around too much. The desire to enjoy things but… not too much or too many at a time.
So, burnout it is.
I definitely didn’t mean for this to be among the first entries in this blog. I have all sorts of ideas and interesting things I want to write about, things that I hope matter to others. But my desire to write is coming at this moment where all my body or soul will let me focus on is my own upkeep and rest. So here we go, exploring what Katherine May calls Wintering in her book by that name.
Exploring the rest that must be taken after 30-odd years of battling to stay alive.
My plan of 30 days’ rest sounds a bit puny when it’s put in those terms, but for the first time in my life I am actually learning to set down the pain, laying it to rest, healing. So, I’ll go another day resting, and see where it gets me.