#multiple months of work sometimes

[popculturealchemy]

giant masses

black spears

.

climbed your everest

sherpa, my brain

sherpa, hiding red flags

sherpa, casting shadow on your flaws

highlighting your strength

.

uncanny valley.

you think you're deep

mariana trench vibes coming from your end

Interesting at first

submarines sinking

you sinking them

shallowness,

I was unprepared for the kiddie pool of your truth

.

this shouldn't feel like myst

a complicated turn based point and click wtf nightmare game.

puzzles without answers

you're just fucking vague.

not the same

no solutions; = solution

.

rather be like nintendogs

rubbing my sylus on your bottom screen

doggy style multiplayer coop mission

finding that back and forth frequency we need

.

can't find you now

not sure sure if you had one

someone else got it.

new orbit or something

.

shedding you like leaves

hurting at first

nourishing my roots

creating ecology at my feet.

belonging to the streets

putting things where they go when they go there

.

.

someothing about you died

and you never told me

.

you felt it change

I'm noticing

I'm waiting

el niño

hurricane on the east coast of your phase

waxing and waning

.

no explanation

feeling dark, distance. erasure.

your face is stuck in my vision

.

no explaination needed,

your face is terrifying though

thought I'd give you a warning

.

dropped like a hot stone

falling like a leaf

.

time healing wound of separation

no one at fault

just hurting, foggy

discrete depression all day now

till this things fades

.

oh yeah. that persons not here no more

.

they are but, just different or something

black spear

red rover sent right over

hot girl summer

hot girl stone

warming my bed, thank you

leaves feeling cold now.

.

didn't break my chain.

you found my weak links

actually, I told you

you pulled on them right away

Information used on me

supposed to be used to protect me

complete. utter. lack. of. partnership. skills.

seeing an opening and taking it

full force

my weak weakspot becomes a fulcrum

a toggle switch

trigger my seizures

howd you get in here weirdo

you did this to your grandma too.

i'm so glad you accidentally told me that

feeling protected and hurt by luck

four leaf clover

knowing how to use it

.

not sure what else to say

bon voyage

no hard feelings but feeling only hard feelings

.

focusing on something else now

blurry feeling.

snuffed by the spear

.

feeling like a good year thats mine today

leaves falling

spears forming

nests revealed

needing exploring

.

new changes for new nests

less pesky birds

birds that don't peck

.

ctrl alt del this feeling

rebooting

trying off and on again.

living in the present..

eventually getting there

a lifelong test

.

one moment eclipsing the rest

break up

light shining behind this black prism

waiting to crest

already cresting

glass 1% full today

.

get back together?

.

surely, you jest.

.

I don't want to friends.

Neither did you.

It was supposed us

weird labels

archaic words

wanting to feel special

feeling reductive

reductive popculture moment in your mind.

doing "the thing."

.

enemies feels too personal.

memory halflife

redflags in view now

unraveling.

like a bathbomb fractal galaxy bath

poising the well

my water

black spear to your memory

you're poisoning me know

you're think you're smart because your friends smile while you're talking

dollar store connection

Impetus/ response

.

and now your falling from my memory

.

letting you fall gracefully is my gift to you

and it keeps on giving

enjoy the worms

fly high

.

focusing on my 1% water and black spear

old farmer painting

feeling rugged and dragged around by horses

.

cruel tricks

.

black spear not cruelty

.

third party I need for protection

people like you exist

I know that know

.

Ted talk running late

pixel's remembering my thoughts

you're a leaf now

I'm a tree

[kirby-the-gorb]

[itspileofgoodthings]

School is going so great and also I am so exhausted and also I am having an existential crisis

[racke7]

My internet has been investigated by a professional.

There might be something weird with the big cables (to quote the guy: the "inner-pair" and "outer-pair" of the eight-cables are of different lengths, but by all accounts still work just fine), but my own equipment has at least passed (no extra-fine for crying wolf for me).

The weird stability-thing continues to be weird. And current test is for them to switch my internet-provider (internet-provider has a use-contract with the cable-operators, who are the ones investigating) over the weekend. See if the problem is on that end.

It's possible that this is the case (at which point I guess I'll try to switch permanently), or that it's that weird cable-length resulting in the problem (which is... a whole different can of worms).

[unloneliest]

the problem of the matter is i did internalize so much of what ex friend believed about me. even though i knew he was wrong and knew what was happening and tried to stop it and if i took more action to stop it would have been abusing power i held in a way i couldn't live with myself for.

[thebroccolination]

I used to humble-brag that I can spend over eight consecutive hours writing and forget to eat.

"That's really cool," said many people in the United States.

I felt good about this, so one day, I decided to impress my brand new therapist.

[paverics]

open tiktok and go to the page of the funniest woman you follow. she’s a lesbian, isn’t she?

[cookiescr]

Almost done with commissions this month

[peppermintspider]

I am so tired of receiving and being charged for food I didn’t order on Amazon Fresh. What the hell am I going to do with 4 loafs of bread??

[viiridiangreen]

Category 5 "Locked out of govt offices bc I was exactly 4 minutes late" event

[look-at-the-stars-tonight]

it is ok to ask for help. people are not going to hate me for asking for help

[florida3exclamationpoints]

Yall wanna hear about smth? good im gonna rant in the tags anyway

[drdemonprince]

The data does not support the assumption that all burned out people can “recover.” And when we fully appreciate what burnout signals in the body, and where it comes from on a social, economic, and psychological level, it should become clear to us that there’s nothing beneficial in returning to an unsustainable status quo. 

The term “burned out” is sometimes used to simply mean “stressed” or “tired,” and many organizations benefit from framing the condition in such light terms. Short-term, casual burnout (like you might get after one particularly stressful work deadline, or following final exams) has a positive prognosis: within three months of enjoying a reduced workload and increased time for rest and leisure, 80% of mildly burned-out workers are able to make a full return to their jobs. 

But there’s a lot of unanswered questions lurking behind this happy statistic. For instance, how many workers in this economy actually have the ability to take three months off work to focus on burnout recovery? What happens if a mildly burnt-out person does not get that rest, and has to keep toiling away as more deadlines pile up? And what is the point of returning to work if the job is going to remain as grueling and uncontrollable as it was when it first burned the worker out? 

Burnout that is not treated swiftly can become far more severe. Clinical psychologist and burnout expert Arno van Dam writes that when left unattended (or forcibly pushed through), mild burnout can metastasize into clinical burnout, which the International Classification of Diseases defines as feelings of energy depletion, increased mental distance, and a reduced sense of personal agency. Clinically burned-out people are not only tired, they also feel detached from other people and no longer in control of their lives, in other words.

Unfortunately, clinical burnout has quite a dismal trajectory. Multiple studies by van Dam and others have found that clinical burnout sufferers may require a year or more of rest following treatment before they can feel better, and that some of burnout’s lingering effects don’t go away easily, if at all. 

In one study conducted by Anita Eskildsen, for example, burnout sufferers continued to show memory and processing speed declines one year after burnout. Their cognitive processing skills improved slightly since seeking treatment, but the experience of having been burnt out had still left them operating significantly below their non-burned-out peers or their prior self, with no signs of bouncing back. 

It took two years for subjects in one of van Dam’s studies to return to “normal” levels of involvement and competence at work. following an incident of clinical burnout. However, even after a multi-year recovery period they still performed worse than the non-burned-out control group on a cognitive task designed to test their planning and preparation abilities. Though they no longer qualified as clinically burned out, former burnout sufferers still reported greater exhaustion, fatigue, depression, and distress than controls.

In his review of the scientific literature, van Dam reports that anywhere from 25% to 50% of clinical burnout sufferers do not make a full recovery even four years after their illness. Studies generally find that burnout sufferers make most of their mental and physical health gains in the first year after treatment, but continue to underperform on neuropsychological tests for many years afterward, compared to control subjects who were never burned out. 

People who have experienced burnout report worse memories, slower reaction times, less attentiveness, lower motivation, greater exhaustion, reduced work capability, and more negative health symptoms, long after their period of overwork has stopped. It’s as if burnout sufferers have fallen off their previous life trajectory, and cannot ever climb fully back up. 

And that’s just among the people who receive some kind of treatment for their burnout and have the opportunity to rest. I found one study that followed burned-out teachers for seven years and reported over 14% of them remained highly burnt-out the entire time. These teachers continued feeling depersonalized, emotionally drained, ineffective, dizzy, sick to their stomachs, and desperate to leave their jobs for the better part of a decade. But they kept working in spite of it (or more likely, from a lack of other options), lowering their odds of ever healing all the while. 

Van Dam observes that clinical burnout patients tend to suffer from an excess of perseverance, rather than the opposite: “Patients with clinical burnout…report that they ignored stress symptoms for several years,” he writes. “Living a stressful life was a normal condition for them. Some were not even aware of the stressfulness of their lives, until they collapsed.”

Instead of seeking help for workplace problems or reducing their workload, as most people do, clinical burnout sufferers typically push themselves through unpleasant circumstances and avoid asking for help. They’re also less likely to give up when placed under frustrating circumstances, instead throttling the gas in hopes that their problems can be fixed with extra effort. They become hyperactive, unable to rest or enjoy holidays, their bodies wired to treat work as the solution to every problem. It is only after living at this unrelenting pace for years that they tumble into severe burnout. 

Among both masked Autistics and overworked employees, the people most likely to reach catastrophic, body-breaking levels of burnout are the people most primed to ignore their own physical boundaries for as long as possible. Clinical burnout sufferers work far past the point that virtually anyone else would ask for help, take a break, or stop caring about their work.

And when viewed from this perspective, we can see burnout as the saving grace of the compulsive workaholic — and the path to liberation for the masked disabled person who has nearly killed themselves trying to pass as a diligent worker bee. 

I wrote about the latest data on burnout "recovery," and the similarities and differences between Autistic burnout and conventional clinical burnout. The full piece is free to read or have narrated to you in the Substack app at drdevonprice.substack.com

[the-bluestreak-cat]

I think it’s the seasonal darkness but this dental stuff feels like the last straw

[loverboybrightsideghost]

they should invent a me that's good at everything i want to be good at. [thing from the addams family pokes out of a nearby box and hands me a piece of paper] thank you, thing. what's this...oh! why, it's a paper that says i have to be the one to do that for my future self! huh.

[yiddishfisting]

tumblr works perfectly fine on my work computer and i cannot for the life of me figure out why the desktop version won't load properly at home