mote of dust

Hey world, I’m back again today. The past week has been rough, I had a relapse into burnout. This one was a sneaky one… I knew I had low energy but truly how low is only becoming clear in retrospect. I’ve been journaling, uncovering bits of myself and making sense of it all. Here’s how my day went:

Floating like a mote of dust, my life feels suspended. I can’t say I know how to begin today. It’s ten in the morning, I have the ability to guide the day in any direction, but I’m emerging from a week long haze.

I opened that popular photo/video based social media app this morning (a mistake?) and have spent probably way too much time watching short videos. Some are inspiring, some are frustrating, some mindless, most are selling something.

I think most of my frustration with social media is due to my own relationship with it: I behave like an addict of information disguised as entertainment, slipping into pure consumption. There is a delicate balance between healthy engagement with media and passive consumption, a line that I’ve found myself crossing more often than I’d like to admit.

This might be due to overwhelm; at first my mind is getting tons of rewards, content is sparking thoughts and ideas, I’m inspired or frustrated, I want more, too soon I have more than enough enough information and I’m just flipping through content, hoping to find the next video that scratches my itch for novelty.

I’ve been through heavier periods of social media binging, this was less than an hour of my morning and I was able to get my mind out of it’s rut, but I’ve noticed this behavior happens a lot more often when I am in the state of burnout.

Now that I am getting my burnout more under control, I am taking more time to actually rest instead of grasping at things that will only distract me from what I really need.

Over the past week I have been in an almost invisible burnout. It’s only as I am recovering from it that I am seeing more clearly how severe it’s been. I was subconsciously fighting it by holding to my routines and the ideal of productivity. In reality I was only prolonging my own healing by refusing myself the care and rest that I really needed.

Had I recognized the depth of my burnout I might have gotten over it sooner. This is the danger of masking: often times I don’t even notice the ways I have been masking. That’s a topic for another day.

It’s a delicate balance, recovering from burnout. Societal norms tell us that the only way to achieve success is to do the work regardless of whether you feel like it or not, in the face of all adversity. I believe this to be true, but I cannot help but notice that there is an equally important counterpoint to hard work: if you aren’t going to give your body and mind the rest and care it needs, you won’t be capable of being productive, no matter how much you force it. It’s simple: insufficient rest leads to diminishing returns.

Rest needs vary from person to person, but it’s a universal necessity. This sounds so obvious, but it’s a nuanced thing, and only recently have I begun to recognize that nuance in my own needs, which is such a good thing.

Better every day, baby!!!