a fried brain (pt. 1)

another stream of consciousness post

It feels impossible to do anything sometimes.

It feels impossible to get out of bed, to eat food, to turn on my computer.

It feels impossible to even think in complete ideas.

I’m not sure when this started. Maybe it was post-2019 when I parted ways with my previous job and entered this constant limbo of unemployment. I think something in my head snapped back then, or maybe it was just the years of overwork and burn-out finally catching up to me.

Whatever it was, or is, it’s been incredibly difficult to focus and work on just about everything. I’m writing all of this to document to myself — and maybe to the world — what I’m going through. There are so many days when I feel in my gut that I want to do something, but when it comes to actually doing anything, I can never figure out what. Is this supposed to be common?

I think everyone deals with things like word block or exhaustion. The difference is that after some time and/or rest, I’ve been able to start working on things again, in the past. Even if things are hard, I used to be able to persevere and sit myself down and work through them. But now? Now it just feels like I’m hitting a wall every time I stare at a screen — if I even ever get that far. Now it’s a struggle to even try to focus on the idea of work without being overwhelmed.

I do think this is a result of an extreme form of burnout. But it’s been one and a half years since I was last employed. And it hasn’t gotten better. I’d say that burnout felt different, too. When I was working 80 hours a week and flying across the country for work and losing sleep and working until I literally passed out at my desk, I’d say I was adequately burned out. It was hard to focus sometimes, I was tired all the time, and it felt like I wasn’t recovering at all with rest periods. But at the very least, I was able to grit my teeth and keep going. Keep pushing, keep persevering. I think what’s happened now is something deeper, when you’re already burned out, and you still keep going. I think it takes something from you, something that you can’t just rest to gain back. It’s like in video games when you’re out of health, burnout is when you hit 0 HP, but this is like, going beyond that and chipping away at your max HP every second you keep trying to push yourself beyond your limits. I think there’s some kind of physics corollary, like a rubber band that’s stretched too far. When you stretch it just a little bit, it deforms, but it’s able to regain its original form once you let go. If you stretch it too thin, it might not be able to go back to exactly how it was before you started to stretch it. That’s burnout. But there’s actually a third situation — there’s a point that you can stretch it past which it will never be able to stretch back. If you’ve ever played with rubber bands, you’ll know what I’m talking about. At some point, it’s just unable to go back. It’s stuck, in this stretched out form. And if you pull a bit after that, it just completely snaps.

That’s kind of how my brain feels. It’s not just feeling like I’m stuck in a fog (though it has felt that way on some days), it feels like an active sort of exhaustion from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. To be fair, I’m dreaming so much when I sleep that I don’t think I’m rested even then. It feels like my brain is actively antagonistic to the idea of progress, to the idea of work. It’s not able to stretch back to how it once was. Or so it feels at the moment. Going to therapy has helped, since my therapist reminds me that this isn’t necessarily permanent and that I shouldn’t think so much in absolutes and extremes. Progress is also non-linear, and maybe some days it will feel like I can work a little bit more, and others it might feel like I’m back at square one. I think that’s been true, but I don’t know if that has helped as much as I wished it did.

I’ve been trying to start working on things again, interviewing for jobs, practicing old skills that can help me get hired. But every time I try to start, I hit that wall again. I can barely read a book past a page at a time. I lose focus, my mind starts to wander. Worse yet, the words no longer make any sense to my brain. Sure, I’ve had experiences before where I’d read something, not process any of it, and have to read it again, but this isn’t that. This is a complete inability to register any of that information in my brain at all. And I’ve never experienced that before. It’s like when someone starts speaking at you rapidly in a foreign language — you can’t even hope to process any of it, much less make sense of it. My brain is just overwhelmed, it feels like it’s totally fried.

And that’s just reading too. When it comes to trying to code or do interviews? Forget it. The amount of effort it takes to get to the computer is gargantuan enough. That’s where the doubt and the fear and anxiety lie. But say I’m actually able to overcome those and build up my confidence long enough to open up a text editor. At that point it changes from a refusal to work to an inability to work, it feels like. Nothing makes sense anymore. Nothing is processing. Even if somehow I want to do something, it feels like I can’t. And that’s frustrating as hell. And I lose hope, and we’re back to step one. All of this, of course, is just the energy spent on trying to start. Never mind trying to keep it up.

I feel like it’s a shitty comparison, but I liken it to going to physical therapy after a horrible accident. Like if someone breaks their legs and needs to re-learn how to walk, this could take months and years. It’s not just thinking about walking that allows them to walk again, they actually have to go do it, and it’s hard. Or more descriptively, it’s tiring, it’s painful, it requires so much actual work and effort that you have to put in to do something that in your head you already should know how to do. How my brain feels right now is like that. It’s like this muscle has atrophied, and I no longer have access to it. I no longer can seem to use it, even though I’ve used it all my life prior. And whenever I try to work with it again, it gives out. Over and over and over. Or it won’t even start. Or it just takes too much energy that I simply don’t have. First, I have to tell myself that I can do it and get over all the fears and the traumas I’ve developed over the years. And then I have to figure out what to do. And then I have to start putting weight on it (like putting weight on your legs) to start actually working on something. And it just feels so impossible when I might be able to get through one step, only to lose my momentum and balance by the time I get to the next.

I don’t really know why I wrote this. I don’t think it’s necessarily therapeutic, I don’t have some great moral to the story or any advice to give. I can warn people about what happens when you keep pushing yourself after burnout, but I don’t think this post is exactly that. I think I’d talk more about the actual experiences of my burnout and work that led me to where I am now for that post. This one, I guess, is more just descriptive in nature. I’ve always liked just saying whatever was on my mind and stating however I felt with no deeper prerogative. That angers so many people, you know? People feel like if you’re bringing something up, there has to be a reason for you to bring it up. You must have some sort of ulterior motive. Or else, why bring it up? But sometimes, I guess I just want to say something just to say it. Just to acknowledge that it exists, that it’s real, and capture it in words. Maybe it’s a way to validate how I’m feeling — in this moment — when I’m feeling so helpless and invalid. When it feels like so much of this is just “in my head,” which is a terrible euphemism for “made up,” when it’s so much of the opposite. These invisible traumas and wounds and fractures are too much to bear. I just want to put words to what I’m feeling!! I just want to be able to explain or communicate what this feels like!! I want people to understand. Or maybe I just want an excuse for people to know how hard it is so I don’t have to try anymore…

I have no idea what the future will be like. I have no idea how my brain will be to me tomorrow. Even if I had a great night, the next day I can wake up feeling like a completely different person, depressed. It feels like there’s no consistency to my mental states anymore. It feels like I can’t focus on things or trust that my brain will be able to maintain any sort of consistency anymore. It’s like I’ll be working on one thing and then suddenly my brain will say, “No, this thing is over now.” And a door will close and lock in front of me. People have talked about various mental illnesses, like ADHD and all that, but I’ve never really been diagnosed with those and those don’t feel quite right either. I feel like it would be easier or nicer to put a name to what I’m feeling, but to be honest, I can’t. And that’s frustrating. And I write all of this to try to understand this better and figure out exactly what’s happening. Maybe someone out there will say this sounds familiar. Maybe a few of you have gone through this before. I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything anymore.