Burnout; An epistemology of the exhausted
There's something that happened to the world I lived in through the hazy refractions of burnout.Burnout proto essay Burnout: An epistemology of the exhausted
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990) - Epistemology of The Closet.pdf
Preamble/ Refractions
I think a lot of us are living here, or I see the the rest of us in this fog and project enough of myself out that I want to say something about it. I think that's a lot of saying anything really isn't it?
I return to this more than a year later at least - I have reorganised my notetaking/planning/journaling/archiving/health tracking system several times since, and in each iteration a little bit of information is lost - the original dates notes were made, for example.
I've drafted emails and social media posts, endless forms and accountings, poems, journal entries, worksheets, half a zine, assessment forms and worksheets and abandoned platforms. The desire in all of it is to explain myself, to explain what's wrong with me, to explain why I can't be what I think people want me to be, why I am hurt, why I am hurting, why I am absent and hedonistic and haphazard and tired and sensitive and unfocused and compulsive and all of the sticky little critiques I brace against compulsively.
The version of this essay I titled "Explaining Yourself; An Epistemology of the Exhausted" is cobbled together with/ written concurrently with another essay "Burnout" and the way that the file links have broken in specific places seems to indicate that I have at one time titled The Essay "Burnout; An Epistemology of the Exhausted".
And it's in that compulsion, in that bracing, that the writing peters off - trying to anticipate every possible rejection and criticism and misunderstanding and reaction undermines the whole project. Trying to share a knowledge that can explain everything wrong with me is futile and self-defeating. Trying to do anything linguistic or otherwise with the world outside of everything "wrong" with me makes my chest tight. The self becomes the last safe thing to become obsessed with - the only site it is safe to claim is known.
Epistemology: from Greek - Episteme (knowledge, understanding) and Logos (argument, reason) - arguing about how we know things.
Something written, apparently, on a January 10th. I think it was 2025, as that year I had people round for New Years.
Today I realised I was finally WRITING and drawing together all of the little bits of reading and annotating and wobbling around texts and I asked my partner to do a task I'd been planning to do this morning if I didn't get round to it before therapy because I'm FINALLY writing an essay. It's clicked! I am going to enjoy it and follow it and crucially - pace myself and look after myself through it. I have raised my desk, I have put on shoes, I have planted a tree in my forest, I have put a live vinyl DJ session on in the background, and some food I prepared earlier this week in the microwave. I have adjusted myself and my life and my surroundings and am continually adjusting and re-engaging and learning and making such tiny microscopic improvements that trying to celebrate any of them on their own feels childish and not worth the vulnerability. What is someone to say to "I have nearly caught up with the washing up from New Years" (I am writing this on the 10th of January) if they normally would have taken care of it by a week ago because it's an easy, routine and everyday part of their life that isn't pleasant or something they look forward to necessarily, but just one of those things they do habitually because it needs to be done? Celebrating a small win like this becomes another opportunity to feel ashamed or rejected.
I cannot sit at my desk anymore, the exercise ball I optimistically bought to use as a chair keeps deflating and I don't have the energy to keep pumping it up and it seems such a hassle to ask anyone to do and even when it is pumped up I can't really sit on it for long before my back and hips and knees start screaming at me and I have to return to the armchair and unplug my laptop and bring all my shit back over. So what has tended to happen at my desk is I sit there when I cannot hold any information in my brain simultaneously and need to use multiple screens to think and make a tent with music and cues and rewards and then I can effectively shut my body off from my mind and Get Things Done but because my body and my mind are disconnected I do not notice that I need to pee or eat or that the sustained effort of holding my spine and legs and shoulders has locked my joints and muscles into rigor mortis.
I've been trying to/ taking a break from trying to read Berlant, L. (2011) - Cruel Optimism.pdf again.
I haven't got past the introduction because I've decided, arbitrarily, to go through doing chapter summaries as I read each chapter. I do this because I am afraid that if I don't, I will not retain any of the information I am reading or return to it again. It has been so long now that the only thing I can think to do is start reading again from scratch. But there is so much to read to unlock whatever it is I'm trying to understand or explain.
"A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing." (p.1)
"Whatever the experience of optimism is in particular, then, the affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of a fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way." (p.2)
I wrote the below around the same time I was reading Cruel Optimism.
I am affected by our devotions to our failings
As we gesture at the feet we wash
Pressed firmly through their arches,
Toes seeking heels around our throats.
A true and deep and torturous faith
Is hard to come by these days
So why not cling to ours?
Why not cling to the rock and desiccate
So we can be struck by your brittle sacrifice as we pass?
And remark on the definition of your spine
And hold you up by your tail and lament
At how this could happen to one of gods creatures
If only we'd come by sooner
We might have startled you out of the glare
Dear boot make me other than what I want
I want to be a blessing and not another creature
Votive cupped and cradled hot in hand
Held up to the light and swallowed whole
Cheap tinny cup scratching down before the flame
Hot wax smoothing movement
Through the retching prophylactic litanies
For brittle immortal selves
Pressing indents into soft opposable pads
Dear friends forgive me for pressing my back into your wants
I want to be creature and not another blessing
Do you see how obedient we are,
How pious and good?
I've burnt out several times. The slumps after exams and essay deadlines, the months off work sick and depressed, the endless abandoned apps and planning systems (On Planning) and panic attacks and just one more week or just cut back a little or just be better or just find a different system or just book some holiday to take care of life things so I feel more in control when I go back to work and try to set boundaries for a little while and cut back on the amount of stuff I do and search for different jobs because a fresh start has always felt like a reset when that reset only lasts as long as the novelty and diminished expectations I get to exceed with enough rapid bouts of hyperfocus and adrenaline I can just dig my heels in and grit my teeth and hold-fast-go-down-with-the-ship until someone either pops along in a lifeboat or I wash up somewhere new. It's familiar isn't it? From every podcast and book and account and essay and vent and post I've read and seen and heard from endless exhausted perspectives.
*There are even more of them now, since first writing this first ramble. They have arrived, like my shower stool, my walking frame, my overchair-tilt-top-rolling-table and the sunshine now streaming into the living room to warm me as just enough flotsam and jetsam and driftwood and cargo and fragmented hull to pull together into something to lie down on. These are the terms we have now to describe these things I feel and experience. Other people who feel similar things described by these terms have written and spoken and organised and come together around them to make space in the world for all the ways of being they describe. People experience these things and have experienced them under different terms and frameworks and times and understandings
"The book is about what happens to fantasies of the good life when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to "have a life" that adjustment seems like an accomplishment." (p. 3) Berlant, L. (2011) - Cruel Optimism.pdf
I was, at one of the times - I think it will have been the September-December/January of 2024-2025 time in that brief window where regular (if somewhat fraught) social contact and free, facilitated biweekly exercise classes specifically for joint pain were crudely patching the raft together - reading Unapologetically ADHD and attempting to apply the principles and exercises within to my life with my usual anxious rigidity. I remember stopping when it came to ask people in my life what they thought my strengths were. The thought of doing so still makes me feel sick.
I wonder what that continuity of disappointment and weariness does to how we form and develop knowledge, how we learn, what we can learn, how we can grow. I can only think now I have rested. I can only catch my thoughts and hold them now I have stopped expecting myself to succeed in having them.
I'm now in a long, slow, physical decline, it feels. Or. My world is narrowing. Or. My mind is sharpening to my world. Or. I am pushing myself to experience and reflect more at the expense of protecting my body from pain and fatigue and unfortunately my body is very vulnerable to pain and fatigue which has something of an effect on my brain as a constituent of that same pained and fatigued body. It is easy to forget, from who and where I am in the world and who and where I have been in it, that the distinction between the two is some bullshit made up by a French bloke who spent too much time obsessing about himself and it got popular and spread about because the conditions that allowed him to sit about thinking about thinking were made possible by a system of exploitation and extraction that was rapidly industrializing and shifting hierarchies around uncomfortably for those accustomed to their position in the higher bit of the -archy. Mind-Body dualism offered a framework for new ways of legitimizing hierarchy and extraction and exploitation of the "lower" by the "higher" and naturally those positioned as "higher" in that hierarchy thought it was a jolly good idea and encouraged and financed it and told their friends all about it and now hundreds of years later that French Bloke and his mates (please ignore timelines for the sake of the bit) are still in here messing about with how "we" think about thinking.
Before the extract above where I realised I was finally writing sits the following:
I've just finished Unapologetically ADHD and built a planning system based on the process to test out. I've done it in Office because I impulsively bought a years subscription when I left work under the impression that using it would get me back into work faster. During that year I have made three OneNote planners (and deleted another 2). I have started planning a PhD, documented every aspect of my various disabilities, started a rehabilitation programme and occupational therapy, gained a diagnosis and made progress on others, adjusted my life and approach to living around the "seismic shift" Devon Price describes as:
"one that the body enacts by force as a self-preservation tactic — and that some people are so transformed by the experience they can never piece their old life back together. But what’s most difficult (and most delicate) to tell Hea is that all of this might be a good thing. In many ways, burnout is an attempt by the body to give us our freedom back — but it can only do so by taking away our ability to be exploited."
I have some complicated thoughts on Devon Price's work that I have yet to articulate.
Followed by this quote:
For those who are fortunate enough to imagine that their careers and life projects can be meaningfully shaped by their own desires, depression in the form of thwarted ambition can be the frequent fallout of the dreams that are bred by capitalist culture - the pressure to be a successful professional, to have a meaningful job, to juggle the conflicting demands of work and leisure, or have a "personal life" in the form of a sense of self that lies outside the circuits of capital. Cvetkovich, A. (2012) - Depression.pdf pp.17-18
I am hungry, and I find when I am hungry I seek or need more reassurance that I am understanding and being understood. I ask the assembly of people my mind conjures "is this anything? Does it make sense? Can you follow it if I let my hand assemble at the pace and rhythm of my thoughts?" and am reassured by their uneasy silence that my mental hyperactivity and disorganisation are not progressing beyond my ability to manage and then ashamed for being relieved when we live in a world where people with the same symptoms I am relieved not to have are stigmatized and de-autonomised and institutionalised and abused for having them under the same system which I have sailed through with relative ease because of my family, background, education and obsessively articulate self-awareness. I have not been diagnosed with OCD, for example. And what a privilege to have the time to reflect on my privilege when the world is as it is and all I can see are shipwrecks. And perhaps, perhaps. I should make some fucking toast because guilt is useless. (I continued to faff about with this thing for another hour)
I have eaten toast and woken my partner up and made some apple, orange, hibiscus, fennel and rose assam in my glass teapot with the metal on it that they got me for my birthday and I am using it because the tilt-top-overchair-table sometimes gets its wheels stuck in my blanket and tilts itself over and has so far claimed a wax melter, the larger glass teapot my mum got me for my birthday and the downstem of my glass mini percolator bonga nd I do not know why I need to justify the use of one teapot over the other or that my medically prescribed cannabis is medically prescribed but dear landlord if you're reading this ner-ner-ner-ner-ner I guess.
asides and to-develops
self-improvement culture/ optimization/ the branded self.