Been on medical leave for the past week for burnout. I managed to talk my GP into addressing it as I had a really bad case of dermatitis in my face after months of dealing with a fungal infection that has been flaring here and there due to stress. In my family skin issues are always a symptom of stress.
I say burnout but honestly I’m not always fully convinced of my own mental state. Perhaps I have this underlying belief that it should mean that I’m completely catatonic, and that my ability to continue to drag myself forward is somehow an argument against it. But I keep telling myself, it didn’t use to be like this. Everything I do nowadays, even if I’m travelling, cuddling with my husband, painting… it all feels slightly distant, like there’s a blanket of sadness over it that I can’t shake off. I’m never fully happy - just not anxious. And when things go wrong, my mood instantly worsens, and what should be a minor annoyance I should shake off becomes something that completely ruins my day. And I hate it. And in turn, I hate myself for feeling that way.
Last year I had the stress of organising my wedding. Of ensuring my family was there after flying halfway across the world from Argentina to Poland. Then passing my driving test, which for anyone outside the UK should know it’s a massive undertaking at the moment as there are 3 month waiting lists and a fail rate of 50%, and costs in the thousands of pounds. Then the added anxiety of being a new driver - and not having any family with me to ease me through the transition, just me trying to figure out cars on my own, in a foreign country. Then having to go through the visa process so that I can live with my husband in the UK and all the anger I had to bite down at how unfair the process is. Then adjusting to living with someone else, and a cat. A bathroom renovation. My husband also dealing with his own mental health issues.
None of these things are in themselves hugely disruptive, but they’re sort of like weights that I keep putting on my shoulders, and although I can shake off most of it, there’s always something left, and so it becomes more and more difficult to take on any more things.
My brain itself feels sluggish, I find it harder to concentrate, harder to get out of bed, harder to get out of my house to meet people. Yesterday we ended up at a local food festival and I had to spend 3 hours on the couch yesterday to recover from it. It’s not physical - I work out 4 times a week, go training on Sundays. I’ve been doing my best to stay off social media and doomscrolling and although I am detoxing by watching movies on DVD or listening to my CDs, or reading books, it doesn’t feel like an instant fix (although I do think it’s helping me not feel worse)
In a week I will go back to work. Another source of anxiety and stress is the fundamental disruption of AI and the existential crisis for a lot of us that have grown up in a different world where computers where fun and exciting. I’m going through the mourning of feeling like all that excitement for the future I used to have is gone in an age where technology is truly costing us the planet, and where technofeudalism is making truly evil people more powerful than ever.
I’m sort of like a prisoner in a golden cage - I have savings, a house paid off. I’m merely staying to take as many paychecks from these dickheads as I can, because I know nothing I work on is of any real value. But I’m not made of stone; part of me still wants to do “her best” and suffers because this is completely impossible where no one can agree what good looks like, and you’re meant to define it but if you do it wrong you get fired.
Perhaps the only true balm for my thoughts right now is the hope that this, like all things, will end one day. I think of William Blake seeing the evil machinery behind Georgian progress in the UK - wealth acquired through not just slavery and colonialism but child labour and the blood of the poor, and knowing the core of what we’re experiencing has been experienced before - and we got such great works of art from it. And by this I mean purely that it feels fantastic to see humanity triumph in the face of bleak, inhuman technocracies.
