Burning Out of Burnout

A little while ago I wrote about feeling burnt out like I was running on a treadmill that was moving too fast. Since then I have gone through a few distinct stages before hitting my current one. After quarantine began I took a good week to just sleep and breathe and relax. Let my body and mind recharge so that I could face what was next. Once I felt ready, I jumped into a “new me”, I was running every day, cooking every meal, being productive. I felt like I had my life together, or more so was emulating someone who did, because as all good things come to an end my driven and motivated self quickly devolved into a tired mess who could only muster enough energy to walk to the bathroom, and even then barely.

I’ve noticed a pattern within myself, I get a moment to relax and reset myself, but once I’ve reset I forget why I needed to in the first place. So then I rush into everything and just dive headfirst into life again, not taking any moments to relax or breathe. This just leads me right back to burn out, and the cycle repeats, again and again, and again. This time was no different, except I had no real motivation to start again, to jump back into the phase of productivity. So instead I wallowed in my own emotions, my own mind. I let the feelings of depression and sadness and apathy take over and I turned a little numb if I’m being completely honest.

But now, now I’m starting to feel something again. That charge has ignited and is burning up inside of me, ready to propel me back into a perpetual circle of nowhere and nothingness. Do I dare allow myself to break the cycle? Or am I geared up to face the same road again?

Burnout

I’ve always loved coffee, anything caffeinated really. Not even for the purpose of the caffeine but simply because I enjoyed drinking it. However, that innocent pleasure I got from a cup of coffee quickly turned into a never-ending dependence. Towards the end of my sophomore year I started to feel overwhelmed and strung out. I told myself I was just tired so I would drink one, or two or five, cups of coffee and then face the day, only to drink a RedBull for lunch and dinner. That, to me, is when my burnout began.

Between the end of sophomore year and the middle of junior year I started to devolve. I would oscillate between autopilot and manual control. Whenever I felt overpowered by anxiety and stress, I would just switch on autopilot and go about my day on my own “default setting”, meanwhile, in my head, I was focusing on not completely falling apart. Eventually I stopped going back in forth. I would stay in autopilot for days, then weeks, then months at a time. I figured that if I just told myself I was fine and kept pushing forward then it would manifest itself into reality. But it never did.

The week before spring break is when I really started crashing down. I was late to school three days that week and I didn’t even care that I was missing class. All I wanted was for life to just slow down so I could stop to take a breath. Life was draining me and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. About a week later, I found out that school was canceled due to COVID-19. My initial reaction wasn't shock, joy, sadness, it was relief.

I was relieved that I didn't have to compromise my own sanity anymore. I didn’t have to drink a fatal amount of caffeine to feel alive. I could finally recharge. Autopilot switched off and I felt like I had just woken up from a bad dream. It blows my mind that it took the entirety of the world to stop for me to realize I was allowed to hit the brakes.

Regrets

I have come to a horrifying realization.

For the past 17 years, I have spent an appalling amount of time caring about other people’s opinions of me. To the point where I have curated an unrealistic expectation of who I am. I’m sure I’m not alone in this epiphany, but that doesn’t diminish the utter disappointment I have in myself for needing to come to this conclusion. Again. In the past five or so years I have reached the same point where I look in the mirror and see a face that isn’t mine. Maybe it’s just growing up, or maybe it’s my uncontrollable need to people please, that causes me to make up a personality that “everybody likes”. Either way, this moment leads me back into a cycle of reinventing myself just to fall prey to another faux persona.

I hate this stupid obligation that I have given to myself to uphold these facades, these versions of myself that are what I assume other people perceive me as. I think that’s why I’ve liked quarantine, this period of time where I am isolated and am able to fully undress my inner self and be unapologetic about who I am, which is ironic since I’ve never had to apologize for just being myself. Because of this time where I can really see myself for who I am, I have had a complete paradigm shift and can now see many missed opportunities that I ignored.

Now with all that being said, I have two options. I can forget about it and move on or I can continue to waste time and mourn the loss of who I could’ve been. Writing it out makes the decision black and white, but when actually faced with this unspoken choice, I bet that most of us choose to grieve over our regrets. I am no stranger to attaching myself to who I once was and weeping every time I remember when past me took the “wrong” path. The reality is that there really isn’t a “wrong” path, just different ones, and I am starting to see that now. There isn’t necessarily right and wrong decisions when it comes to how you live your life (disclaimer this is not in reference to crime or things that are morally wrong).

With that being said, as I look back at all of those “missed opportunities” or moments when I undermined my own judgment to be liked, I am not filled with as much regret anymore because I am aware that I have the ability to avoid those same “regrets” again.

Wasted Wishes?

There are some things in life that we would give anything to do, to see, to have. They overrun our thoughts every day, every night. They completely consume us. We wish on every star, every eyelash, every 11:11 on the clock that maybe, just maybe, we will have a chance.

Tomorrow elections for student council go live at my school. For the past three years, I have given my all to student council and it’s been a major part of my life. It changed me completely. I went from someone who was scared and uncertain about what she had to offer to someone who now is proud of whatever she does no matter what happens. Yet I’m terrified right now. I’ve always gotten nervous before Election Day. The build-up of uncertainty and anxiety starts to overflow. But this time, it’s different. The anxiety is paralyzing, exhausting, uncontainable.

It seems silly to get so worked up over a high school election. I keep telling myself that. I know that at the end of the day I’ll be okay no matter what, I’ll still be who I am and I’ll still be proud of what I’ve done. But at the same time, I can’t help but think, what if I won’t. What if I can’t get up again, what if I lose all that I’ve worked to accomplish, what if I sink so low I drown?

Again, it seems silly, I know. I feel like I’m being overdramatic, placing more weight on this than there needs to be. You could say I’m wasting my wishes on something that won’t even seem to matter in 5 or 10 years. Maybe I am, but they are wishes that I want nonetheless.

Apathy

I’ve woken up every morning, made myself breakfast, gone on a run. Enjoying the solitude of the morning, I’ve meditated and relaxed my mind. I was actually getting the opportunity to get my life right, get it on track.

But then one morning I woke up and I laid on the couch in my living room for 22 hours straight. I didn’t move or get up, just laid there avoiding my thoughts watching Netflix. I feel almost like that couch sucked the life out of me, leaving me empty and apathetic. For the past two weeks, I guess, I have been overwhelmed with total apathy.

No stress, no sadness, no happiness, just nothing. I’ve tried to get myself to care, to be motivated but it’s all gone. My capacity for feeling has shrunk down to a small pinprick that a drop of serotonin sneaks through on occasion. I feel like I need to be concerned by the fact that I am void of reaction, of drive, of life, but I’m not. For all I know, this is how I will live the rest of my life.

It’s funny how that works. Our emotions and how we feel. I’ve always wished to be rid of stress and sadness and all of the ‘bad’ feelings, but I am begging for them now. I just want to feel something other than nothing. So badly. Even if it means crying inconsolably for hours, I just want to feel full. To feel something.

And the World Stopped

Today marks three weeks in quarantine, I think, maybe four? Either way it feels like a lifetime has passed since life was “normal”. Every morning I wake up in a completely different mood. Some days I feel motivated to accomplish something and be productive, some days I wake up and a flood of dread washes over me, sometimes I simply don’t wake up until a good chunk of the day has already passed. Being confined to my house has drastically increased the turnover rate of my moods. The intensity of them has also found its way up. The other day I was just sitting on my couch eating an apple and someone sneezed and my instant feeling was pure annoyance. I felt this overwhelming need to punch a wall to relieve this feeling of anger and resentment. All because of a sneeze. Twenty minutes later I was completely fine.

It’s interesting to me how that works. How our minds and our emotional stability change as our routines and our lives are uprooted. We might not think that our lives have much consistency or structure to them, in fact, I was convinced I was living in pure chaos prior to this. I couldn't take a breath, I was working through the burnout and trying to grasp at productivity. Now that I have what feels like endless time to relax and let myself calm down, I realize that the chaos was only chaos because I thought that was the only option. I think that when we are so caught up in life and are so focused on just finishing a to-do list, we forget that we can take a break and refocus ourselves. Find peace within the craziness. We believe that we have no control unless we are constantly working and moving and doing something. In reality, we have plenty of control, we have power in our lives that we forget about. We can’t control what happens, but we have total control over how we handle what happens. We can take a breath, we can take that break, we can say no.

It finally dawned on me that my life wasn't actually chaos. I just wasn’t giving myself the opportunity to see the whole picture. Now it may feel chaotic but life is always simpler than we think. The complexity only frightens us when we let it and the unfortunate reality is that we always will. But the important thing is that we take glimpses and moments to remember the simplicity of it all. Then we can remain sane.