burnout is coming; burnout is here
I've been in a weird mental state the last 2, maybe 3 weeks. I was wired every day, but also exhausted every day.
Some of the exhaustion has lifted, some of the wired has lifted ... or it's morphed, I don't know.
I can't stop coding.
Like 4 or 5 days in a row now, I've coded for about 2 hours in the afternoon. This is the third night that I've coded for an hour or so.
It's a problem.
Granted, I love it, coding. But I literally can't help myself, and what's been going on lately is bad for my health.
I'm chillin, trying to relax, and there's just this ITCH, this CRAVING, this ACTIVITY IN MY BRAIN that I CAN'T TURN OFF.
It's kind of like when you're nervous for a big meeting, and you've just got this excited pit in your stomach. Except its in my brain.
I can skip coding and just sit there, stressed, unhappy, distracted. Or I can go code, and spend all my energy, deplete myself.
My healthy eating has slipped. My activity level is down. I don't want to do things I normally enjoy (mainly play video games, watch shows), and I think I'm withdrawing socially just a little bit.
The coding isn't the problem. The craving is. It's this force that controls what I do. I have some capacity to resist it - I manage to clean the litter boxes most days - but it is fucking draining.
I hope I go to the gym tomorrow. If I don't make it, I'll go Wednesday. I did go on a walk tonight.
I need soy milk, so that might convince me to leave the house tomorrow.
In the past, when I have this obsession, I go WAY TOO HARD all the time, and I have an intense burnout crash and I'm miserable for 2-3 days. Years ago, it the crash was 1-2 (sometimes 3) weeks long. But it shortened.
I'm definitely overdoing it. I feel out of whack. But I'm not going as overboard as I did in the past. And I haven't quite burnt out and crashed like I'm used to.
SO WHEN WILL THIS FUCKING END!?
Part of me wants to crash and burnout already. But what I really want is to manage it, to get through this period of obsession (mania?) and kind of level out.
I'm okay. I'm not doing anything horribly detrimental. But I'm taking about 20% worse care of myself and my house recently, and I'm ... well I'm not feeling great in the evenings, and I'm not feeling much in control in the afternoons.
But hey, I like all the coding I'm getting done. If you're curious, I've been rewriting documentation for Liaison v0.7 (my web framework) and adding some improvements, improving the project viewer which displays docs on my site (using Liaison v0.6), adding some small features and fixes to Code Scrawl, which generates my documentation, and creating a polished version of my User Login Library (which runs on Liaison v0.7).
That last sentence makes me sound a little crazy. Holy shit. I'm supposed to just be polishing the user lib, but I needed some info from Liaison so I had to go update the docs, and I ruminated at night about what I wanted from the Lia docs, so then I moved my main energy over to rewriting the Liaison Docs ... It was a long time coming, it needed to happen, I'm really excited about it, THE NEW DOCS ARE SO GOOD, but I did get a little off track.
I do this kinda thing, a lot. Get off track, use all my energy on the side quest, burn out.
Well, I used to anyway. I haven't been doing that the last year, because I took time to care for myself. Am I done caring for myself? no. Idk wtf is going on. Was the craving/obsession just gone for all that time? I don't fucking know.
It's 12:35 in the morning. I'm gonna go watch TV, drink hot tea, eat some pb crackers, play chess, go to bed.
oh yeah. I'm playing chess again, too. I like it. But ... idk. Seems like it is somehow related to this overactive brain obsession stuff.
If I weren't disabled, then the last 4 days of coding would have been one 8 hour day of work. Maybe 1.5 days. And I'd be able to take care of myself at the same time and maintain relationships. But instead it's taking 4 days, it's fucking up my sleep, disrupting my routines, disrupting my healthy eating, and disrupting relationships.
The relationship disruptions are manageable. I'm not doing anything crazy or mean or awful. Just withdrawing a bit. I'll come back around. My people understand. They do it too, some of them. I understand. OKAY FUCKING STOP TYPING BYE LOVE YOU