For
anyone distressed by anything in this post, or for any other reason considering
seeking support, resources are available in Australia here, here, and here. In other nations, you will have to do an Internet search using terms such as “mental health support - <your nation>” (which, for instance, may lead to this, this, and this, in the USA, or this, this, and this, in France [biased towards English-language - my apologies]), or perhaps try https://www.befrienders.org/.
Posts in this series are now listed at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/p/recovering-from-corporate-life.html.
So ... a little over six months ago, I finished my day job - in the old terminology, “retired”. Of course, given decades of, at the behest of the rich, stinginess towards anyone who is not rich, “retired” nowadays means: “change in form of economic cog servitude”, as very few can afford to stop working - and I know I am going to have to resume working in a year or so, albeit at a hopefully less intense pace.
Be that as it may, I thought I’d do a six month review, focusing on my energy levels.
Now, when I initially ended my day job, the relief from the easing of work-related stress caused a bit of a high - and, during that initial period, I, in effect, celebrated by doing more exercise, and some low intensity work on my writing projects.
However, ever since the tragedy of 7th October and the even more tragic response, my activism has had to fire up - along with my news posting and doing the work of this blog, and life has been intense, albeit in a non-economic cog sense.
There were family health issues as well.
For some time I had less physical energy, and exercise took a back seat.
However, I have improved my diet, and I am rebuilding my physical health, in effect, “from the ground up” - and similarly for my psychic strength. (Tai Chi helped me get back into exercise.)
My writing never ceased, and that is probably what has, as with so many other times in my life, “saved me”, in a non-melodramatic sense.
What I have been writing about has given my life a sense of purpose.
I don’t have much sense of “hope”: I’m too old for that - I am, after all, in the end stages of my life, and have arrived here with too little energy, time, or even money to pursue any of the nice dreams - side quests, I would term them, now - that I had earlier in my life.
But, in light of the tragedies in Ukraine, Sudan, and West Asia, and the biggest threat to democracy and peace since h*tl*r (from the USA’s h*tl*r-admiring and Putin-worshipping rapist, thief, and self-professed dictator Trump), such matters would always have had to wait, because of the weight of history that is currently happening.
Retirement does not happen in a vacuum - in fact, on a minor scale, one of the issues I have is trying to feel able to slow down in a household where everyone else is younger and still working and/or studying (of course, I am studying as well, using online courses).
The other point is that recovery from deep, life-destroying burnout takes time.
In the weight loss world there is a guide that healthy weight loss should be thought of as taking the same time as it took to put the weight on.
I don’t think recovery from burnout is the same - partly because of the accommodations made to survive during that working period, partly because not the entirety of my working life caused burnout (the first few years were reasonably OK, and there were short periods of a few months or a year or so later on), but also because I think the emotional damage is probably more usefully compared to recovery from grief - in particular, two points:
- grief is never totally gone, and I think the trauma of severe forms of work/overwork is never entirely gone (especially for emergency service and military work);
- but also, recovery from grief is cyclic - as one person put it (although worded more prosaically), the waves of grief have a different depth each day.
Recovery from a lifetime of overwork is cyclic, varies each day, and is unlikely to be complete ...I need to accept that, go with it, and remember to be more human being than human doing ...
PS - as a side note: ever since my mid to late 50s, I have wanted to have a two day cycle for activities, rather than, for instance, trying to do all my forms of exercise every day. In my 40s, when training for the Gay Games, I had a weekly schedule of activities, and I will probably go back towards that - but, if I can work out a two day cycle that works, I suspect that would help me.
Blessed be.
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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).
Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024 NO AI I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product. Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
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