The last month has been even more fatigue-y than usual, and it was very challenging yesterday to realise that a bunch of things that would usually be super easy for me – in this case, helping the 13-yr-old with homework and literally just finalising a menu and turning it into a grocery list for an upcoming family event – were, in fact, Not Easy. Annoying, distressing… and humbling.
I feel like I have slowed down SO MUCH since peak freneticness back in the late 20-teens / early 2020s, so so much, and yet every time I think I’ve successfully slowed down to a sustainable level, life throws a new curveball at me that says no, slow down some more.
I’m sick of slowing down.
I miss the days where I could just, be productive, you know, for more than like an hour without crashing afterward. I miss powering through a to-do list and the dopamine hits it provides – and the way it shored up my identity as someone who Got Stuff Done.
I was good at Getting Stuff Done. I’m not very good, it turns out, at Being Patient With Doing Not Much.
Probably, this is a useful life lesson for me to learn; probably, it will help ensure that – assuming I recover and return to some semblance of a normal life – I don’t end up in burnout again. And in fact, in doing so it probably helps ensure my future writing career: as ever, you are welcome to interpret the religious/spiritual stuff through whatever lens best suits your worldview, but I know my own experience, and there was a very specific, definite promise that as soon as I definitively proved I wasn’t going to use a writing career as yet another way to burn myself out, I could have said writing career.
Aren’t I done trying to prove this yet? Aren’t I done slowing down?
I had a change of meds about a month ago now, not long after Easter, and as I knew it would, it came with a bunch of symptoms as my body settles into the new for now normal. And yet still, every time I caught myself spiralling about how this might be my capacity forever, I ALSO caught myself having the instinctive response: well, I’ll just have to get used to pushing if I’m going to get what I want to get done done.
Uh, no. That’s literally the opposite of what I’m supposed to be learning/practising here.
So I guess I’m not done learning how to go slowly. I’m not done rewiring my brain to avoid future burnout. I’m not yet resettled into new and healthier ways of being in the world, ways that place my value – no, ways that ANCHOR my value firmly in WHO I am – a human being and therefore someone with inherent worth – rather than in what I accomplish.
You think you’ve unpicked this in yourself, and then you realise the unpicking isn’t just a superficial seam, the unpicking goes thousands of layers and years of your life deep.
*sigh*
I guess it’s unreasonable to assume that habits formed over nearly 40 years can be unpicked in a single moment in time, but gosh darn it all, I was sure I was done with this – until life forced me, yet again, to slow down even further, and I recognised that instinctive response to push myself.
But hey. At least I’m recognising it now. I’m proud of that step, at least, because the first step towards changing a pattern is to interrupt it, and the first step toward interrupting a pattern is to notice is.
So here I am, noticing. Being frustrated, annoyed, irritated at my extremely limited capacity, but noticing. Observing. Desiring to change my instinctive response to this frustration.
And hey. At least my reduced capacity is mostly impacting my logic brain; I can still fiction, when I have the physical energy (and the concentration), and as evidence of this, let’s celebrate for a moment, because I finally finished Touchstone on the weekend – like, finished finished.
I’m really proud of that.
Touchstone, coming in September.
Patience with my slowed capacity, coming… hopefully sometime soon. <3
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