Two weeks ago on a Monday, I found myself in a position of calling my boss and telling her I’m unable to cope with everything and that I wouldn’t be working that day. When she asked if she should use my one leftover personal day, I told her, sure, whatever you think is best, but this will be more than a day. I don’t know how long because I can’t see farther than tomorrow.
She understood that I was having an unraveling. I’ve been going through a difficult personal situation for four years, and through a particularly difficult phase in these last few months. I had booked a vacation to Cuba because I needed the sun and rest so badly. I went and the first day there I got some distressing news about a situation that escalated for a few days. I did what I could from afar, but finally had to disconnect from it, knowing that people will do what they will do, and I’ll just deal with the fallout when I return. I didn’t check email or messages for the two days remaining, but of course that brought on heavy anxiety on the return trip. I think that refusing to come back from Cuba would have been a perfectly reasonable decision under the circumstances. But I have children who were waiting for me, so I made the bargain I needed with myself to get myself on that plane back. I told myself that if I came back, I’d let myself not go to work if I couldn’t deal with it. At first I thought that I found myself hopeless and… emotionally injured because I didn’t get the rest I so desperately needed due to the distressing situation. But then maybe it was just that I was overly optimistic that one week in the sun could help me recover from such a long period of instability, emotional torment, and layers of stress. Maybe the week only gave me enough space to come down off the hamster wheel and once I was off I realized that I have no energy to lift a foot to go back on. In any case, I found myself with some medical stress leave, a referral to a psychiatrist, because the antidepressant I take seasonally isn’t working as well as it did the first year or two, and the hope of getting “fixed” in time for the most important meeting of my life – mediation for my divorce.
The wait for specialists such as the psychiatrist is usually long, so my doctor advised that I call the crisis line to get quicker access to help.
In the next week I’ve had a series of reality checks:
- The fact that the family doctor gave me leave doesn’t guarantee that my work insurance would approve it – I have to go through their process.
- The wait for the psychiatrist is 6 weeks is from the time they process the referral and they still haven’t called me after 4 weeks
- The crisis line can point me to resources, but their wait times are even longer
- The best help that the therapist I was able to access through my work Employee Assistance Program was to tell me to “not lose hope. Just remember that, don’t lose hope”. (if you don’t understand why it’s enraging to get this with nothing further to help me find the hope I already told him I’d lost, then you’ve never felt hopeless and you don’t need to read this)
After a week and a half of this and reaching out to other therapists to find someone regular to work with, I finally realized: I’m on my own with this. My reality was: I’m on my own with this, my mediation is in 3 weeks, and I can’t be this broken crumpled crying woman when I go in for it.
I’m emotionally exhausted, I have very high anxiety when I have to open my email. Or even when I try to do something better than binge watch old sitcoms to pass the time – like check news headlines or even check new podcasts. Or making plans of any kind. The only thing that feels right is watching Netflix. But I do have a timeline – 3 weeks. So I can’t just let myself lay on the sofa until I feel like getting up. In this state it’s surprisingly difficult to remember what is healthy, what really makes a difference. Really. I would have been happy to get a to do list or schedule from someone, but alas…. I’m on my own.
So here are some things I started doing and doing them reminded me how good they are for me
- Yoga – for reconnecting with my body. I’m doing the slow kind, videos from YouTube – with subtitles like: yoga for depression, yoga for PTSD, reconnecting with your body, body reset.
- Crying – to get the negative feelings out of my body. In the beginning I was just bawling every few hours, not exactly doing it on purpose. But as uncontrollable crying subsided, I told myself that I’m going to keep allowing crying, to process emotions.
- Exercises to reestablish my self worth. I’ve done a lot of work on this in the past couple of years, so I thought that I was ok in this area. But living for an extended period of time in a situation that was out of my control and being at the whim of others took a toll. So I’m taking the time to reflect on how much I’ve grown, and what I’m proud of in myself.
- Walking – I started walking every day during Covid for the extra exercise, but it has become invaluable for my mental health. In this period that feels like a crisis I wasn’t able to maintain all my good habits, but I’m keeping the daily walks.
- Hiking – for the connection to nature and longer stretches of solitude.
If you’re burned out and feeling hopeless and need to borrow a plan because you have no strength to figure out your own, do these things. Daily if possible.
