I’m starting this blog as a capstone to a very long period spent recovering from burnout.

For the past five years I’ve been looking for a way to structure my life in a way that works for me and my nervous system instead of making me tired for three quarters of my waking hours and anxious for the other twenty five percent.

It’s been clear to me almost all my life that I wasn’t meant to live my life as a corporate career person. I knew I couldn’t survive sitting under mineral fiber ceiling panels and tube lights for half my waking hours, but I had no idea why. Why I was so sensitive to small sounds, why above a certain threshold of light and noise I would “go pale” as my mom would say, “go numb” as I would say, lose track of the information being exchanged, become immune to details, forget about my body and let the air conditioning freeze my fingers off.

I never understood, and to my own detriment never put much thought into, why I was so prone to dissociation. That was just the way I was.

Now, I’ve always known I was not normal. As much as I wanted to be able to keep up with quick fire conversations or to understand the nuance of human interactions, it always felt like I was missing something. Books, math, computers, cameras, pencils, paper, colors were my friends. Insects and animals were my friends.

When it came to people it’s been mostly difficult to relate most of the time. If you know me and are thinking, “well we got along pretty well,” you are entirely correct. On the other hand if you’ve met me and you thought I was weird, well, that’s because I am weird; at least some (if not most) of the time.

Which is not to say that I haven’t been very lucky in the people department, because I have had the pleasure of becoming close with many dear friends over the span of my life. You know who you are, I hope. I haven’t been very good at keeping in contact, I’m ashamed to say, but I’m thinking about you and I’ll try to message you soon.

Communication is difficult from within burnout. Words don’t come easily, and when they do they are usually stripped to the bare minimum. Though normally a fairly agile person, I start getting clumsy, putting too much pressure on my pens, having difficulty with exercise. It feels like a chore just keeping my skeleton together.

There’s a lot more to it but this is the tail end, this is my re-emergence slowly and surely into the land of the living again. While in the past I’ve used long periods of meditation or herbal/fungal medicine to deal with acute burnout, this time I needed to expand my toolbox. I needed to have the tools, not only to return to a comfortable yet productive lifestyle, but to sustain myself and to be proactive when it comes to draining my energy.

This time is different because I have the added wisdom gleaned from science and the neurodivergent community. I’ve expanded my toolbox to include more habits that keep me embodied (more often at least) and healthy. Day by day I am feeling more rested, more consistent. Though I definitely experience hiccups and speed bumps, it’s better than hitting a concrete wall1, and is certainly easier to recover from.

I don’t mean to be cryptic but sometimes the easiest way to say something straight is to say it sideways.

Essentially I’ve been through a five year process of rebirth and reinvention, because the old ways weren’t working, because I’ve come to understand more precisely what my own personal flavor of divergence is.

Lately I’ve been learning about how to regulate my nervous system (better late than never, am I right?). I’ve also been studying design, illustration and coding, becoming increasingly obsessed with all of them, because I love them, and I’ve rediscovered that engaging in my special interests can be at times more rejuvenating than sleep.

I need to work alone, because I like people.

I know that sounds weird, but in order to really have quality time with people, I need to spend most of my time alone, working on the things that I am most passionate about, so that I can share these things with people, and so I can eventually lose the saturation of socialization and actually crave an interaction again. I’d say I’m about 96.42% introverted and 3.58% extroverted, which amounts to about 4 waking hours each week. At least for now. I’d like to increase my threshold, but that’s how it is for the time being.

So I’m blogging, because I’ve been writing pretty heavily anyway, because it feels to get this out in the open, so that other people who are interested might benefit from my words, and so I can move forward with my life. Because I’m tired of feeling like a sloth.

That’s part of it, but its also because I have lots of ideas that I want to explore, and tools for living that I would like to share with anyone who is interested.

For a long time it feels like my head is a puzzle box full of jumbled up pieces. These days it feels like I am finally able to start putting the pieces together to eventually form the picture. This blog is one of the places where I will start placing the bits and pieces that make up the life that I have chosen to live.

More to come.

Footnotes

  1. I’ve done that in real life too, it wasn’t pretty. ↩