gement | Not in the best of shape...

Guess what, it's another whiny post about how I've been too stressed to post! (The undiscovered highlights this time: ALA RULES! I got a lot of free books and signed up for a committee and Jason and I had a nice time cruising the vendor hall. I like my classes and groupmates this quarter and my workload's pretty even. And many other things I cannot remember. Like Christmas, and at this point probably Halloween as well. Sorry. This is not supposed to be a post about the angst of losing the most interesting parts of my past to being too busy to record anything. I'll write about that another time.)

I'm burned out, and ~~probably~~ definitely need to find a therapist again. General categories in which I am burned out:

Communications: checking e-mail (school or personal), answering the phone, checking voicemail, reading LJ, posting LJ (this is a pretty dramatic exception because I need to scream, and then I'll fail to check my e-mail for comments), contacting people socially or professionally in any way.

Scheduling: I forget appointments constantly, my massage therapist hasn't even bothered calling to check after my last missed session, I have not been back to tutoring since the turn of the year, and I promised a former girlfriend that I'd drop by the next day and then forgot, and haven't opened my e-mail in the two weeks since then to find out if she remembered.

Negotiation: I need to talk to the tutor supervisor about the fact that I've been doing stuff outside my job scope, find a new therapist, apologize to my massage therapist, and talk to my advisor about my plans for portfolio and graduation. All these things paralyse me.

Maintenance: I have not thoroughly done the household accounts in three months, when it was the first task I claimed when we moved into the house. The bills are getting paid, but the divvying has been sitting in queue for an ominously long time. I manage to open my mail about once a month. There are four baskets of laundry to fold, and they're already gutted for clean socks, so we must wash again. I'm having trouble mustering the wherewithal to keep cooking up my no-maintenance vats of food.

Projects and actual career work: I volunteered to be on a committee and then have not been able to face even thinking about it. I've let the card game project languish since last spring. I haven't updated my resume with my summer job, I haven't gotten any further on my website design and I haven't even touched the content of my portfolio. The prospect of a jobhunt almost brings me to tears.

So what am I doing? Sitting at my computer desperately casting around for ANY distraction, any game or meme I can find that keeps me from thinking for a few minutes. Right now, while I type this, I have an overdue assignment from this morning and handouts to design for a presentation tomorrow afternoon. I spent from Wednesday through Sunday afternoon thinking, "Wow! I have all this time! I should Get Stuff Done!" Then I played Kingdom of Loathing with intensive, obsessive fervor, to the exclusion of Taiji class and almost to the exclusion of my perfect attendance record. It was a very close call.

I don't feel deep-down saaaad and panicky depressed, which is what I'm used to. My brain just shies away from continuing commitments (or really any commitments) like it's been burned. I need a therapist, and I need a reset button. And I don't know how to find a reset button - I've been burned out on e-mail since my 2001 breakdown and never gotten over it even when I wasn't checking it for weeks at a time with no pressure. And I probably need to do something about this other than wail about it to LJ, but there you go.