My summer of rest and relaxation

I can’t believe it, summer break is almost over already and school starts again on Monday. I’ve been enjoying these last two months of self-inflicted funemployment and I kinda hate to say it but I don’t want summer to end. I’ve been having too much fun and now I’m feeling a kind of Sunday Scaries that is the scaries to the rest of my working life—the loans I am about to accrue these next couple of years will never let me take a break from working for wages ever again, I’m afraid.

With all the time in the world while jobless, I was hoping to have done something more with myself. My busy working life has forced me to put off so many things: cleaning out my closet, learning how to machine sew, getting fit, seeing a ton of movies, going to open mics every night and staying late to hang because I don’t have work the next day. I am sad to report back that I did…like absolutely none of these. I didn’t read a ton of books, found a new lover, walk eight miles a day, or even tried a new interesting recipe. I started a couple of crocheting projects, but I didn’t finish any of them. What’s wrong with me!!

What happened with my summer? Sure, I had plenty to do (there were SO many birthday parties). My decades of being continuously single with no prospects has given me the blessing and curse of knowing Way Too Many People and people are always wanting to do stuff and I am allergic to saying no. There’s nothing wrong with partying a lot, but I did kind of end up really only doing stuff that I wanted to do instead of needed to do and now I have not set myself up for success at all. I had prime optimization hours and I used NONE of them. Instead, I woke up at 11 and went to bed at 3:00am and played on my phone, or tried rawdogging the crossword for two hours before giving up (this is the thing that will prevent my brain from developing dementia, surely). It’s not a bad life. It’s actually TOO good. I needed this.

One of the main reasons why I quit my job in the first place was feeling some incredible burnout with what felt like compounded interest. Like I’ve talked about so many times on here, four years ago my mom got diagnosed with brain cancer that left her half-paralyzed and in a flash I had to basically drop everything in my life to take care of her. Not only was I dealing with having to go back-and-forth with neverending chores, but I also had to emotionally regulate my father, AND had to find a new corporate job that would allow me to work from home some of the time and make this whole caregiving thing easier. Sometimes, though, a flexible job like that is not flexible at all and the expectations back then were high enough that I was working through the night hours while my parents were asleep, while also working and caregiving during the day.

That was the time where I felt like my body was on autopilot. I had to take care of a dying woman, make sure my dad didn’t go insane, and also appear totally normal and productive for a company that I was still new to and the motto was “the CEO wants everything he asks for immediately and you have to do it.” I didn’t get to read much, didn’t get to think at all. I guess that’s fine because life was honestly so horrific that thinking didn’t do any good. Then, I got a week of bereavement leave and was welcomed back to work by being thrown into a bunch of important, time-consuming, urgent projects. My memory was failing because of the grief, but hey, they gave me a week!

Then more things happened and I ended up becoming Important At My Job, and since everyone on my team were in relationships and had families and vacations and weddings to go to, I barely got to have any time off. After a year of working there I took, like, a week off and my boss said to my face, “Man, I wish [former coworker] didn’t convince you to take more time off. It was so much easier to just have you work all the time.” Excuse me??? And yeah, this kept going on for years and years until every day felt like a nightmare and I would scream cry into my pillow when I would wake up with a dozen emails sent before 4:30 in the morning. Something had to be done. I had to leave. I needed to not work for a while to try and repair the burnout I was dealing with. I had to go to grad school.

I’m not in grad school yet, but I’m starting next week. It’s the area of study I wanted to do less, but it is more practical and more aligned with my past experience at this corporate job I did not like or want. With all this time to think now, I dislike my former job even more than I did because the burnout was so bad I’ve been effectively useless for three months. Have literally accomplished nothing. I barely got my shit together to order my books on time. I need a shift in personality within like two days or we might be starting school with a problem.

There will never be another time where I can afford to take off months of work with nothing lined up in the future. I do hope that I have enough saved to last me however long it’ll take me to get a job while I also study full-time. I’m about to experience the opposite of joy and whimsy—I’m about to be so overworked it’s not even funny. Last time in college I could get away with being a huge piece of shit because McDonald’s had a dollar menu and my rent was $300. I can’t think about it too much or I will just start to cry.

Maybe this is just what life looks like for everyone. Maybe I am my own worst enemy. I hope that while I’m girlbossing hard with knowledge and earning an income I can still find time to do the stuff I love. While not having to have a job, I realized that doing standup comedy (or insert your other time-consuming hobby/occupation) is another full-time job in itself and I have actually been working two jobs for years, on top of all that other stuff. It’s hard to fall asleep because I’m worried that I will never feel this well-rested again. I’m always tired, I probably always will be. Hopefully everything works out and I end up with a master’s degree.

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