Mechanical Mornings: The Alienating Reality of Burnout

I breathe in deeply, feeling the cold air graze my chest. I try to focus on the sound. Nothing bad is happening, but my head is so cluttered with noise that I can’t get to myself.

I open my eyes in the morning, and thoughts rush into my mind. I don’t even have the time to get up and stretch. My mind tries to place the time and date, the significance of the day ahead, anything I might be forgetting, scans my surroundings, and analyzes my vivid dreams, trying to recognize any significance or threat.

An hour after I woke up, I’m already exhausted.

I used to be more attuned to myself. My instinct was sharper. My gut feeling was a stable compass, and I had a very organized mind. I’d reached a point where I could silence and block anxious thoughts. I thought I was soothing my mind – that I had mastered control over my mindset.

I would say “stop”, and whatever worry or anxiety would disappear. I wouldn’t think of it anymore. What replaced it were scenarios I created in my head where I would “rationally” try to correct any wrong situations, misunderstandings, things left unsaid… I created a loop in my head where there was no place for unfinished conversations, but it was another way for overexplaining myself.

Except I started looking at myself surgically, trying to pry everything out. I wasn’t me to myself anymore. I was another person I was dissecting, so separated from my feelings that I started feeling like a machine – a broken one, at that.

When I try the breathing exercises, I see myself doing it, but I watch myself through the eyes of a mad scientist observing the experiment. How successful was this exercise? What results did it show?

Could this be a consequence of burnout? Seems like it. Gosh, it’s alienating! I’m scared of this stranger looking at me from behind my eyes.

I’m trying to sort out my future, try new, exciting things, but I’m so deeply entangled in this attack on my mind.

I ended up in an ER a couple of weeks ago with a migraine. Prolonged exposure to stressful and traumatic events creates tension in my jaw, neck, and shoulders, and causes shaking hands. Talking about my feelings doesn’t help – I’ve lost the language for it. I’d just slip into another practiced script.

Feelings are too exhausting to perform. I know how I should feel in any given scenario, but I can’t reproduce it. It looks artificial.

I’m very grounded in my present. In speech, that is. I know what I should feel, what I should believe, what is true, and what is anxiety. I get those short windows of rootedness, but the switch goes off so quickly, and then it’s completely lost to my mind, like something really important that, no matter what I do, I can’t recall.

By the time I wrote this, I’d already lost the connection to myself. It was gone somewhere in the middle of the last paragraph.

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