Work Stress

Work Stress

 

Something I don’t know how to do is release work and just relax. It’s Friday night, the last night official night of training, and I’m already thinking of Monday and how that’s going to look different. All the cases I will see, all the steps I will take, my supervisor, my trainers, etc. This is what leads to burnout: not being able to shut your mind off from work and being able to switch to relaxing mode. It’s a skill I have yet to develop. I don’t even know where to begin.

Already my mind has run through the day, the possibilities of the weekend (as short as my mind can come up with), and is back to Monday morning and onto the work week. I was hoping that writing it out while listening to some calming music would help bring me into the present moment, and somehow it has. My mind is tugging towards Monday, and I don’t know how to stop the pull. It reminds me of the pull I felt for so long towards friendship and the feel to be needed. I craved and needed attention for so long that if I wasn’t distracted by talking to someone, helping someone mostly, that I felt useless, and would spiral into depression at feeling less value as a human.

I feel less value as a human when I am not working. When I was disabled and unable to work or find a job, it didn’t help matters. I couldn’t contribute to the household in any meaningful manner, and I felt less human. My worth as a human felt less because I could contribute less. My self-esteem has shot up since I got a job. I feel like I can contribute to society again, and I’m helping people again. But it comes at a cost, and a major one at that. Most days I can barely stay awake after work when I get home long enough to do something before I nap for several hours. Then I’m awake for a couple hours, sleep for several hours, and continue this cycle until morning. Even then, most of the time I feel exhausted, and on the weekends, I haven’t been doing much. I keep telling myself that I’m just adjusting to it, but there’s more to it than that.

Part of it has been that I have been working at 100% capacity forever. Part of it is that I am recovering from burnout. Even at 60% working capacity, I am at my limit. Today I crashed especially hard after a work event that went shorter than expected, but I had a meltdown on the bus ride home. It was very small and nobody saw. But it still reminded me of my limits and how I reached them without realizing it because I wasn’t careful. One thing that’s really probably the most difficult about limitations is knowing when to quit before you reach the point of no return. I would say I never had practice at that, but honestly I had plenty of chances… I just never took them. I just dove off the cliff into burnout without realizing that was what I was doing.

I think deep down I’m terrified of the damage I can do with the free time I have outside of work and sleep. My life has been religion, bullying other people, trauma, helping others to the point of burnout, very unhealthy things. I am leaning on one playlist for calming autism that starts in the beginning over and over again. I am slowly branching into one or two episodes of podcasts. But there are too many options of what to do to decide on any one thing. I am paralyzed by fear and indecisiveness. The child in me just wants someone to decide for them.

I guess that’s what happened with my life. My parents forced me to go to church. Missionaries came, and I saw travel and languages and people, and all of those things were amazing! And a chance to do something new! So I thought it was for me! So my life course of languages and cultures while being stuck in my own white, cisgender, straight, Protestant, male mindset never even occurred to me. I couldn’t separate what I produced from who I was, so I couldn’t interpret. There went my love of languages. So I turned to a career assessment. It said social work. So I went to social work classes. There I fell in love with social work, but still had issues with values different than my own and confronting my own biases and judgments of other people. I needed a place to stay, and a family opened up their hearts for me to stay with them! I was so blessed!!! And I got a job a couple blocks away, no decision necessary. A tough decision came after that when I lost that job due to medical reasons and had to find another job. A friend recommended me for a job in a part of town which was about an hour commute one way. I gladly took it because it was a back office entry level job, and I wouldn’t have to deal with the public. I still wasn’t ready after the trauma back in Missouri.

After that complete meltdown ruining the back office job at the end of 2024, you would think I would have learned my lesson about letting work ruin your life, especially work stress. Yet here I am at almost 9pm writing about work stress on a Friday night. Work has more than ruined my life. What is it about it that defines me so deeply?

What do you let define you so deeply?

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