so it turns out

i don't like the old normal

Jul 31, 2021

As I prefaced last week, I actually have an idea for this week’s issue (I keep wanting to call them episodes), instead of just typing whatever comes into my brain and out of my fingertips on a Friday afternoon. I have been experiencing the famous emotion called exhaustion, in a profound capacity. If left untreated, exhaustion has the tendency to progress into burnout, which I decided I should probably avoid if possible. This week, I decided to do one thing every day to minimize the burning. I’ve been noticing lately that every weekend, I have no motivation to do the things I actually need to do (cleaning, grocery shopping, practicing basic hygiene) and just want to lay on my couch watching tv and looking at pretty houses online. I’ve become great at giving in and only doing the non-beneficial things that I want to do, but finding that they don’t leave me feeling relaxed or refreshed. Then I have to start a new week and a whole new cycle of fatigue.

Once I realized that the hours I spend at school and work each week total less than 40 hours combined, admitting exhaustion and impending burnout became infinitely more embarrassing. Obviously, I can’t do anything embarrassing without telling everyone about it, so I decided to make this entire newsletter about my experience of trying to un-exhaust myself from the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix. I constantly feel like a single pad of butter being spread across an entire loaf’s worth of toast, and every time I realize it, my first instinct is to add more to my already overwhelming plate. Searching for a solution, I hauled my skinny butt over to the internet, and began looking for new wellness practices to add my already overloaded days. In case you read this issue and are thinking “Serena, don’t you have a therapist now who can help you with these things?” it turns out therapists are a lot like houses — fun to shop for online, but far too expensive to actually acquire. As such, I shall continue to raw dog my mental health, and seek treatment via the internet, where I found this article. Equipped with a journal and a plan of attack, I decided to implement six of the prescribed steps over the span of one week, taking Friday off to actually write this newsletter. I chose one area of focus per day and set out to feel better about the things I can’t control. Each day, I took on a new task and documented how it affected my overall wellbeing.

Saturday - take an inventory of everything that stresses you, and come up with at least one way to fix it

Being an adult in the digital age means you have to establish your own limits and tell yourself no because literally every single thing is designed to slowly chip away at your boundaries, replacing them with instant gratification and a higher dopamine threshold. Everything I could possibly want is a phone lift away, and yet I find myself deeply unsatisfied. If I was my age 30 years ago, I doubt I would have any of the same interests. All of my hobbies are either on the internet or because of it, and I don’t feel like I have enough time to truly enjoy any of them. I’m starting (read: continuing) to feel the effects of having only one day off, and I can’t figure out if I really need two consecutive days off in order to feel like functioning human, or if I just think I do because that’s what my schedule has been for my entire life. I don’t know if I’m technically burnt out, but I do know I am chronically stressed and haven’t enjoyed being alive in approximately 100 years. Did the pandemic make my anxiety worse, or did isolation temporarily relieve my social anxiety, causing me to forget how bad it was and think that it’s worse now?

Today I made a list of every major stressor in my life, and ended up making my way to 14 things before getting too tired to think. I noticed that many of the stressors seem to relate to one another, forming a sort of chain of misery, wrapping itself around my neck like a snake. Surprisingly, I was able to think of three or more ways to reduce almost every single stressor I wrote down. Some of them have an easy answer that I was able to tackle immediately, like clearing the clutter off my kitchen island, while some of them had more convoluted answers that may take months or years to finally work through. The whole process left me with a sense of control over my own life that I haven’t felt since the Hoover dam was built.

Sunday - limit device usage

I felt incredibly unproductive today, despite checking off nearly everything on my to-do list before dinner, plus a few things I forgot to even add to my list. I found myself taking breaks between tasks, which ultimately led me to feel unproductive and guilty, despite being on the list of tactics that would help avoid burnout. I have this disease where I never want to be operating above 36% capacity, but I feel perpetually guilty for not putting at least 112% effort into every single thing I do, which, as anyone with common sense will tell you, is impossible for obvious reasons. For today, my top goal was to revisit the time limits I had previously set for specific apps, earlier in the year. In the spirit of giving 112%, I took it a step further by deleting the apps I never touch, freeing up space both on my phone and in my brain. Many of my apps moved as a result of having fewer placeholder apps, so everything I do use is now slightly harder to access, but my home screen is much less chaotic.

The very first app to which I enforced a time limit was Instagram, set at the beginning of the year as part of my new year’s resolution to spend less time on my phone. Today, I lowered that limit by 5 minutes, and added a few additional limits to other time-sucking apps. Since I have only been allowing myself 30 minutes on Instagram for most of the year, I have noticed myself wasting more and more time on Pinterest, searching for nothing, and getting lost in pin wormholes about which I truly could not care less. Naturally, Pinterest was the next app to receive a time limit, set at 30 minutes. This might still seem like a lot of time to end up wasting in a day, but I figured the limit should be high enough to accommodate the few times a month I do actually look on Pinterest to gather inspiration for a specific project. After Pinterest, I decided to save both time and money by tackling my shopping apps, set at a collective 59 minutes for every shopping app combined. An hour seemed too long, but 59 minutes? That’ll hit capitalism where it hurts. Lastly, I got selective about who can and cannot contact me between my scheduled Do Not Disturb hours of 9 pm and 6 am. Basically only my parents and husband and, like, three friends can contact me while I sleep now. I don’t honestly know how big of a difference it will make, because I pretty much allow everyone who would normally contact me during those hours anyway. Plus, my phone has not had the ringer turned on since my public school days of sneaking it into class, so I sleep through most notifications anyway. The one change that has made a noticeable difference is switching the Do Not Disturb settings from only when phone is locked to always, because now I can look at my phone and not get bombarded with texts, which often happens when you are as popular and likable as I am.

Monday - say no

To be honest, my goal today was to say no, and I didn’t find myself in a single situation that would garner the word no as a response. In lieu of saying no, I actually did something just as important and just as difficult; I advocated for myself and asked for what I wanted. After my one-day weekend in which I did not accomplish as much as I felt like I should have, despite accomplishing everything on my to-do list and more, I was feeling quite run down for our first day of learning four-handed abhyanga and basti treatments in Ayurveda class. After learning that not everyone in the class would be able to receive a treatment today, I asked if my group minded if I was one of the two people that would receive a body treatment, instead of waiting for someone to offer me an opportunity, like I usually would. I did, of course, feel guilty for taking the opportunity from someone else, and it did end up detracting from my overall ability to relax during the service, but I do think it laid an important first stepping stone on the path to me asking for what I want instead of assuming I’m not worthy of it.

After class, I approached my teacher about a work-related legal issue I have been struggling with and didn’t know who else to talk to about. Circling back vibes, this particular issue was one of the first stressors I wrote on my Saturday list, and talking to my teacher was one of the ways I thought of to make it better. And make it better, she did. Not only did my teacher talk to someone higher up, but she also kindly left out my name and offered me her continued help as I try to sort out my current job and future career options. I obviously felt guilty when she offered to talk to someone else on my behalf, but I also felt extremely protected and cared for, which is honestly not something I have felt at work or school in a very long time. Funny how my day of saying no turned into a day of actually saying yes, to things that I would have otherwise been afraid of and avoided. I am proud of myself, but don’t know if I have what it takes to make this a regular thing. Advocating for oneself requires a lot more confidence than I currently have.

Tuesday - rediscover your passion or find a new one

I fully planned to read or paint or embroider today but found myself baking instead. After making almond/oat milk at home like a vegan pioneer woman, I was left with almond/oat pulp, which I turned into the best batch of almond/oat pulp cookies I have ever made. Ask me to make them again. Go on, ask me. I almost certainly cannot, because I added ingredients all willy nilly until the dough tasted decent, then I tossed in the rest of my chocolate chips and put them in the oven at whatever temperature the potatoes inside were already baking at until the tops of the cookies looked slightly brown. That is my favorite way to bake, even though Martha Stewart would be rolling over in her grave if she heard me say that and also was dead. But hey, the cookies turned out delish, so it’s fine actually.

I did feel guilty because all I did tonight was bake, and I feel like I should have accomplished more, even though that was completely not the point of today. Even as I’m writing this, I’m mentally scolding myself for taking more than 15 minutes for dinner, as if expecting to spend the entire evening rediscovering old passions was at all realistic. The hilarious catch-22 of it all is that even if I had spent literally every second of the evening rediscovering passions, I would be feeling the exact same way. Doing one thing is not enough, but doing more would have been too many to allow me to give any activity the attention it deserves. If I had written a poem, it would be too generic, too easy of a passion to rediscover, considering I never really lost it in the first place. The same thing would have happened if I had chosen to read - it wouldn’t have felt ‘authentic,’ as my new year’s reading goal would have provided an ulterior motive. To paint would have felt like a cop-out, and an inevitably unfinished painting would have undoubtedly led to more shame that would resurface every time I laid eyes on the incomplete canvas for months to come. Embroidering would elicit a similar feeling, as I have always considered embroidery a pleasant hobby, rather than an ardent passion. A passion should be something that you love doing and dread not being able to do. Passions are all-consuming, life-giving; they make you lose track of time and wish for more of it instead of less, for once. Though I guess by that definition, I don’t have a single passion, except for maybe sleeping. As a teenager, my mom always told me I was passionate about running on my middle school cross country team, but really that was just something I did because my fifth-grade teacher told me I would be good at it.

Wednesday - tackle something from Saturday’s stress list

I initially set this as my Wednesday goal because I assumed I would need time to procrastinate after making the list on Saturday, but I was actually so eager to eliminate as much stress as possible, that I started early (see Monday’s conversation with my teacher), and felt almost instant relief. A second, much easier task that I addressed today was the pile of miscellaneous papers sitting on my kitchen island, almost all of which were addressed to my husband. I sorted through the few papers that were for me and asked for help with the rest. Together, we were able to get rid of most of the papers and find a place for the few that were important enough to keep. It’s amazing how much mental space an extra 8.5” x 11” area of counter space frees up. I felt like I was on a roll, so I mentioned our half-unfurnished apartment, so we could establish a budget and a furniture-buying timeline. Even if we aren’t purchasing any new furniture pieces right now, knowing that we will in the near future gives me more of a sense of control, which is a sense that I unfortunately start to spiral without. Finally, I delegated the job of scheduling my car’s emission test to my husband, since he’ll have to be the one to take the car in anyway, on account of the fact that we store it at his parents’ house. As unpleasant as actually dealing with responsibilities can be, I do feel remarkably better now that I’ve taken care of so many things I would have otherwise procrastinated or ignored completely.

Thursday - reinforce effort, not outcome

To be completely honest, I totally forgot about this goal today, though, to be fair, I think that I may already be too good at it. If I make a mistake because of something I didn’t know, I always immediately think that the mistake doesn't matter or count because I didn’t know any better, which is not a mindset that anyone in the professional world seems to share. Working as an adult is doing something wrong, then getting yelled at for not knowing something that nobody ever bothered to teach you and that you would have no other earthly way of knowing. That sentence alone just undid all the work I did this week to avoid burning myself out.

I honestly had really low expectations for this activity, but I do feel surprisingly adequate after it. I think if I continue to take some of these habits into my life, I should be able to avoid burnout for at least another 3-5 business days. Some of the tasks, like saying no, required a mindset shift and were difficult to confine to just one day, but I know that that skill, in particular, is something I need to work on. I am unfortunately a people pleaser, who has unfortunately been trained that if every single person is not absolutely elated at the thought of my existence every single second of every single day, then actually everyone hates me and wishes I was dead. I do want to continue making time to rediscover a passion (or even just a hobby) at least once a week, I will most likely continue to reinforce effort over outcome by not taking responsibility for things that I mess up because of something I don’t know, and will also continue to pass off all car-related stress to my husband. Maybe one day I’ll even be able to do all of these things and get to bed on time, unlike every night this week.

Was any of this interesting? I wrote some poems too, as a nice lil attention span refresher.

hashtag siri is a little bitch
i’m so beautiful and tired
of feeling this way i’m playing bisexual bingo
and pretending to listen while you talk to me
my whole life is just waiting for the phone to ring
and then not wanting to answer when it does
caladium pink symphony
i want to be your houseplant
give me water and compliments and
if i don’t grow you can blame yourself
instead i'm sentient and putting on mascara
with no one but myself to blame
$28 dollar mascara
so when i cry you know i mean it
secondhand world traveler
i have a stack of unread books
but that won’t stop me from buying another
i should have gotten a degree in
the only language i’ve ever known how to speak
who needs a passport when you have
a library card and a third grade reading level
free food and a coin collection
i went for a run and now my tricep is sore
yes, my tricep is sore
remember when weekends were for relaxing?
remember when you made me laugh
and i spit chocolate milk on you at lunch?
remember when i could digest milk?
i can’t stop being nostalgic for times
that turned out to be actually worse

I will leave you with a photo dump from my week. If you enjoyed this and have not already signed up to get these newsletters delivered to your inbox on a weekly basis (for free - I know my worth), there’s a button down below for just that purpose. Also, feel free to share with a friend or lover or enemy who maybe has nothing else going on in their life.