On Burnout

TW: s. thoughts and other content which might be potentially upsetting and triggering

Somewhere between late June and early July I realised that my life doesn't spark joy anymore, no matter what activity it was, either playing video games, reading books, playing on guitar or even if it was talking to friends. At first glance it seemed that I needed to declutter my space, throw away things that I don't use anymore and just take space in my head and on my desk.

I did it. At least I tried. I threw away most of my things until I ended up with a bare room without much character and personality. But it wasn't the matter of clothes I didn't wear anymore or all of the trinkets and plushies occupying my drawers. It was something rooted way deeper than I thought. It wasn't the matter of activities or even cluttered space occupied by things that I thought don't spark joy anymore; in fact, my life itself wasn't sparkling joy anymore. It was sparkling dread.

Before vacations started, I had my whole life attached to school; it was the place where all my friends were, where I spent the majority of my time and energy just to come back late evening to home, eat a pack of cheese and fall asleep on the floor. It was disturbing, yet soothing at the same time because all my mental capacity was focused on the school and everything related to it. It provided me some sense of stability and security, similar to the one experienced by a person being a victim of domestic violence, being attached to their predator by feeling that it's their home, despite the fact that the home was the main reason for her problems. They were just used to it and couldn't even imagine living a different life.

I had a love-hate relationship with school, I often found myself crying at 2am or wanting to kill myself because of the overload of homework, tests, assignments and all this school thing. In addition, constant gender dysphoria and rising anxiety of experiencing transphobia made it even worse. Gendered PE class was distressing to me. Like, why the heck would I have to change my clothes in one room with 20 guys? As if it was somehow less gay than making a single person exchange rooms like the ones at the swimming pool. If that wasn't enough, there was always alienation on top of that. It wasn't that I didn't have friends, I have plenty of them. But none of them seemed to really resonate with me. Every time I tried to establish a closer bond between us, it turned out that the person didn't understand me. In the best case, they tried to, but failed.

At the end of the semester, drained by sleep deprivation, hungry and dehydrated because of my silly brain forgetting to drink and eat, with a possible early stage of kidney stones due to the tremendous amount of energy drinks I consumed, I often found myself sitting and chewing caffeine pills while listening to brutal death metal. Just to feel something and overwrite the always present noise in my head while struggling to finish homework or assignment.

I spent the last days speedrunning the whole learning material from the year, just to not fail the class. I finally passed, but at what cost? When summer break started, I spent the first 2 weeks lying in my dark room, recovering from all the overstimulation, sleeping 15 hours a day and not knowing what to do at the same time. When you attach your whole life and personality to school, when it ends you feel lost like a child in the fog. This was also the case with me. I really didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't really have any friends to meet with outside the school because school was the only thing keeping us together. Also, I didn't have any hobby to cultivate. Well, because school took up all my free time. Heck, I often barely talked to my family in the school week, and only the Sunday dinner was an occasion to do it. Someone might say it's my laziness or poor time management, but it's not the case here. No matter how hard I tried, I always failed to manage my time.

I tried bullet journals, phone apps, the eating frog method, setting good habits, switching to a flip phone, listening to binaural beats and other Schumann frequencies, you name it. It just didn't work. If something started to work, it stopped after a week or so. What's more, I often heard from adult people, heck even peers who assumed that they knew me better than myself, often telling me that I just need more discipline, go to sleep earlier, or tell my silly brain to just focus and do something. It's that easy. No, it's not. When you are struggling with PTSD, depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, and/or neurodivergence in general, it's not easy to even brush your teeth or do laundry once a week. So, mercifully, please stop saying all this productivity bullshit. Heck, how are neurodivergent people supposed to act normally in the abnormal world, where eating, resting, and even sleeping is demonized by culture? You have to hustle, you have to think about your retirement when you are 16 and know exactly what you want to do in the future while still being in kindergarten. It's WILD that so many people fall into this, yet not so many decide to do something about it. We don't need workshops about managing burnout with tips like do yoga or find some silly work-life balance. We need a change at the core level about our approach to work and life in general.

Thanks for reading and see you next time