Whelp.
I’ve been working in-person for three weeks now, and it’s already breaking down much of the progress I had made towards healing my brain from my last burnout. I end up crying for a couple hours on Friday when I get home, or some unpredictable time during Saturday or Sunday. I’ve heard crying is a way of relieving stress, so I try not to stop myself. It does seem to make me feel better.
I go in earlier than most people and use a “grounding in” video to help acclimate myself to the space. It’s a visualization, breathing, and anchoring sort of exercise. It helps a little bit and it gets me through to lunch when I do it again to recollect myself, but I don’t want to do in-person work after this year. The hallways are so loud and echo-ey. The people are confusing and exclusionary. I’m one of a handful of people that aren’t actually “professionals” in the field there. I’m kind of an interloper in a few ways.
I like wearing a mask at work because a lot of my “strange” facial ticks are literally masked so I don’t feel like I need to consciously mask them. It also makes eye contact during a conversation a little easier because I’m not getting information from the rest of people’s faces. I hope the mandate on them stays in place for this entire contract. To be clear, I don’t want COVID to continue to kill people, I just don’t want to show my bare face at work ever again.
I have to use the company-issued device to do my work because some of it is “protected” information. It’s not really anything that anyone would care to steal, though. It’s pretty boring, low-value information.
The device is an older M@c Airbook. It’s been awhile since I’ve interacted with an @pple product. There are some quirks about it that irk me. Why do they need to have a special button that behaves like “control” for hotkeys, but also have a “control” key on their keyboard?? To be fancy or different? [Ctrl] + [whatever key] is such a natural thing for me to type since that’s how literally most other OS’s function. The fact that I have become accustomed to using whatever the key with the @pple logo on it instead has impacted how I interact with my home computer. I’m slower and I get frustrated with the muscle memory.
It’s not all bad though, as much as I’m complaining. I like that having a job like this gives my day structure and gives me a reason to stick to my morning and evening routines. I’ve standardized my lunches on workdays as well, which has helped my gut a lot (and my skin!). I stopped consuming caffeine to help keep my anxiety to a minimum as much as possible. I got a significant raise, also, which means I can make a few health appointments without worrying too much about being able to afford the bills. Preventative care is usually cheaper, but if you can’t afford it, what are you supposed to do besides wait until you can?
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Something about having a rhythm makes it easier for me to stomach the news and other current events, so I’ve started intentionally reading about what’s happening globally and locally again. (I would differentiate this from doomscrolling because I am reading articles in their entirety and then putting them down.) The news is a strange subject to me. I don’t think it’s necessarily possible to report things entirely objectively since we are all human and our views and values are always present in our statements one way or another, no matter how aware we try to be of them. I’m trying not to stay in an echo chamber, so I am consuming different outlets and outlets that are at least upfront about the perspective they are speaking from.
When I was little, my parents used to watch the news every Sunday morning and yell at the TV because they watched debates between people they agreed with and people they disagreed with. During presidential debates, they would get especially riled up. I can’t muster the fervor that I used to see from them. I’m tired and I feel like arguing for the sake of being right doesn’t solve much. I vote in various ways; with my ballot, with my dollars, with my time, with what I focus on. I used to be politically involved. The process gets disrupted by personalities, people lose sight of the purpose, people get burnt out, people cheat, people lie. I think divesting my time and energy from toxic, unproductive chatter and focusing on what I can practically do to support change that I want to see around me is how I want to live my life going forward.
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I’m working on knitting my first sweater (or “jumper”). I’m knitting it bottom-up instead of top-down. I’m not following a pattern; I’m just doing a drop-shoulder, which more or less means I’m knitting three tubes in the round—one large tube for the body, and two smaller tubes for the sleeves. I picked a pretty yellow-ish orange that looks like when the sun hits one of the colors the leaves turn here as the fall season turns colder. Hopefully I’ll have it done in time to wear it at the right time in the season. If not, it should be a good middle layer for winter.
Our CSA has started including cold weather crops like potatoes and cabbage which excites me because it’s almost stew and soup season. These are some of my favorite dishes to make. They’re simple, flavorful, nourishing, and comforting, and it’s easy to clean up after making them because they usually use only one pot or casserole dish. I’m going to make minestrone tonight because we have a bunch of parsley, squashes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and potatoes.
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I hope you’re finding time to engage in your hobbies and catch up with people however you’re able to. Thanks for reading, see you again sometime.