June 17, 2023The time is 9:12PM. It's a Saturday night in June and there is a week-long 100+ deg heat advisory in effect. The air quality index is in the red zone as Canada wildfire smoke makes its way south, deepening our gorgeous southern sunsets.
The cicadas are in full force this summer.
And I have COVID for the first time.
For 5 days I've been reflecting on the past year - the new job, the new house, the new people. I posted approx 1 infrastructure youtube video, 1 infrastructure post, and the only thing I’ve got to show for my time are the 1,500 miles I’ve cycled (running away from what?). I say this with a chuckle because from current me’s perspective, I’ve had a great year. A year I would not have appreciated back in 2019.
Like each passing year, I hardly recognize the me from the previous one. I see her in pictures and sometimes am glad I'm not her; but unlike tenille arts usually just curious, not jealous or sad. The photos we see are an illusion. A modern-day art piece we've curated and crafted to show the world our untrue nature. We would have called that our "brand" before we stopped spinning on their merry-go-round. Before lockdown. and quiet quitting. and manifesting. and all the other things we’ve (not) done in the past few years.
A search through my unposted blogs and I see exactly 2 fully formed articles on burnout. In one I suggest "some signs it might be time to leave" and then go on to be a fixer personality and find ways to make it work anyway.
The second I’ve posted almost in full below and…it’s a time capsule that illustrates the pattern of knowing burnout and yet sticking with it. I am sure it won't surprise you that I have been named as an anxious attachment before. It’s oddly emotional, and /no doubt/why it was never posted, brings me back to the time I wrote it - dealing with some bullshit or another from a difficult-to-work-with coworker.
It’s a thread that links 2019 me to a series of steps I made to get to 2023 me. A puzzle piece to be spoken in the missing chronology of my blog. Here you go.
February 6, 2019 (links from 2023)We're the burnout generation. We want to be valuable and changing the world and that takes hustle. In neuroscience, we know that our brains are split into two systems: the deliberate system and the automatic system. Too much over-use of the deliberate system leads to poor calculations. Lack of sleep is physiologically similar to drinking alcohol. It impairs your deliberate and automatic system, causing you to make bad decisions. We've also proven that overuse (aka burnout) of the deliberate system has the same effect.
There's no doubt that it takes a dedicated worker to be in STE(A)M. We are pros at taxing our deliberate systems: multi-tasking, working long hours, stretching up to brush our fingertips on that glass ceiling. It's too common to romanticize the lifestyle: pulling yourself up by your bootstraps! "I'll sleep when I'm dead!" We wear overworking and sleep deprivation as a badge of honor, disregarding the sentiments of selfcare. Me more than anyone. But if our generation agrees on anything it's that this is prone to failure. Our generational strength needs to be figuring out ways to optimize how we perform.
In February I took a couple of days off. I laid in bed and couldn't get one phrase out of my head: "dead end tasks". Or, a task that doesn’t actually get you close to achieving any goals. Not even necessary waste, just waste waste.
I couldn't sleep, couldn't run it off. I tried to work my way out of it, but found myself talking out loud, describing in explicit detail the definition of dead-end and how it applied to my situation. Self-talk confirmation bias. Frustratingly, I couldn't complete anything because my brain had devolved into thinking "This is burnout. This is burnout" over and over again.
Then something minor happens. The stuff that gets in the way of the stuff, as my mentor likes to say. Or a failed crucial conversation. The short email my brain can't comprehend in good judgement. I've got amazingly supportive gal pals who…can egg on my confirmation bias.
"I'm so sorry that happened."
"You shouldn't have to deal with that."
I find I am adapt at analyzing people's motives and thought processes to manage risk. It's a skill that fits my project manager personality well, being able to mentalize social dynamics, and course correct when necessary. Truthfully, my amygdala doesn't excel around extroverts, but engineers are my people. I know their rhythm. I know their responses. However… on burnout fumes I might as well be a cicada in a colony full of bumblebees.
I receive both sincere and ambivalent emails. People who understand yet they're too wrapped in their own taxation. People who don't understand, yet try to help and are unknowingly destructive. I have that one work friend that tries to temper my reach for the stars with grounded realism, trying to delicately talk me out of my ambitions. I try to go go go but I am thinking, I am falling apart and you are holding onto my heels. I was ruminating on a thought of a new job unable to nudge it along. For me, that is a tell-tale sign of burnout. Which is the one time that you should not be looking to leap.
I have other burgundy flags too. Making silly mistakes; not being able to multi-task as easily; anxiety. It's micro-depression. I get so wrapped up in something that I can't think rationally, only emotionally. I'll get a one-sentence email and be so frustrated that I can't brush it off, even with little context clues as to their emotions. It sits uncomfortably in my prefrontal cortex until I dissect it.
My friends, "Do you see a path for yourself at your company?" And I don't answer. Not because I don't see one. But because it's become foggy in between thoughts of "is this a dead-end task if I don't want to do this forever?" I can't see the trails through the fog. I'm re-doing invoices as they get rejected multiple times. I'm delegating all the tasks I want to be doing myself, because I don't have time to do them.
I made it through 3 days and then needed two days off. Though honestly I still worked about 6 hours each of those days. "I'm sick" didn't seem to resonate with coworkers or clients when there are deadlines. I took the weekend off. And the next week I felt fine again. I went at it hard. After all, I had almost four days to make up. I have a hard-working reputation to maintain. I have expectations and projects that I've committed to that I need to meet. I told everyone I was on burnout. I put them on alert. But I was over it.
I slushed through it with the thought of an exit plan. I’d applied to a new position in my company. I regained a sense of control and predictability. I mind-maneuvered my way out of dead-end tasks.
And then it happened again. Because, of course it did. I worked more hours to make up for how unproductive my hours became. Every email I took the wrong way: Mood congruent attentional bias means that my brain sees negative things that might actually be neutral or non-emotional and that I perceive them as more negative than they are. I countered this by not reacting… only to then ward off bitterness at not standing up for myself.
I am googling tech jobs. Well what am I doing staying in the same company, not exploring new experiences? People change jobs on median every 18 months in Silicon Valley. Every 4.2 years in the U.S. on average. Career experience comes from new experiences. Yet, I don't trust myself to make any rash decisions. I'm standing on the edge wondering if I should jump before I start to fall uncontrollably, just to maintain the semblance of control when it's obviously nonexistent.
My ex-coworker friend reminds me that starting at a new place is like hitting the restart button on people's expectations. When you get categorized as an overachiever, people think that you don't need help when you're struggling. They trust that you'll do what it takes and you'll get it done. It's also not easy to ask for help especially when you know that the 'help' may be more time consuming and ineffective that just doing it yourself.
So here we are a few months later. The trees are full of vibrancy and life outside my window. I can hear construction trucks backing up on the city streets below. It's a Sunday but I'm happily drinking coffee and organizing a few regional-based workload staffing activities for my office. My projects are still tough but I have shaved off working on multiple projects for multiple clients (even though they were great projects I wanted to be a part of). My coworkers still have the unhelpful dichotomy of expecting more work than feasible in 40 hours meanwhile telling me not to work weekends. The contradiction in expectations. The cognitive dissonance. It's easier to brush off as a them-problem. It's my mindset that has changed. I have not gotten the opportunity that really pulled me through that depression. I'm okay with it. I have other initiatives that I am working on that feels like career progress. And I am looking forward to 7AM tomorrow when the emails start slinging back and forth across my inbox.
Reading: No Time To Spare by Ursula Le Guin has me thinking about time and how long life really is. This one is really great.
Listening: Alex Lahey - the concert I missed while having COVID.
Working: Dam solution all day every day. We’re connecting digital twin products to use for monitoring and inspection of dams.