I sat too much in 2023.

I mean, there were reasons. I was in school, or drawing. It was icy here for the first six weeks of the year. I didn’t feel great for a bunch of it (and then had some, ahem, procedures, to find and — hopefully — fix the issue(s)). Fabulous and talented husband caught Covid right in the middle of the Thanksgiving/end of semester/surgical procedure mayhem, which was… not great. (Thankfully, he recovered fully, but he tested positive for almost three weeks.)

The outdoor learning center where I volunteer lost an owl. Hopefully he’s fine (like NYC’s Flaco), but he’s no longer with us. We also gained an owl (different kind of owl, much smaller, lives in an indoor enclosure)… he’s cute.

We welcomed a new dog, Lucy, into our home, and she is a trip. She’s a big lab mix, full of joie de vivre and sass. I love her with my whole heart.

I’m writing this while walking on a (walking) treadmill. (I got the treadmill at the beginning of 2023, but then Lucy came home, and it was all hands on deck for a few months to get her on the right track.) My Christmas gift to myself was a standing desk. It was inexpensive, and it’s not very robust, so if I like using it, I might upgrade.

Do I have resolutions?

No.

I have continuations of things I started last year. I’ve had some success, but it’s been hit or miss, so rather than try anything new, I want to keep working on the “old”… like:

1. 20 minutes of yoga, 6 days a week, with added emphasis on strength and balance. I’d like to work up to include a couple of 45-60-minute practices a week, but for now, twenty minutes is sustainable. In January, I’m doing a 31-day challenge (some of those days might be TEN minutes, heavy on meditation), so we’ll see how that goes.
2. More walking. Now that I can do some walking while listening to lectures, that should be a little bit easier. Am I going to be ready for the NYC marathon with my neighborhood walks and “working walks”? No. But I think it beats sitting so much.
3. Continue with school (MLIS, SJSU). I’m moving in the direction of archiving/preservation and technology, with a small emphasis on controlled vocabularies and metadata. I’m a librarian, but not the kind of librarian most people interact with.
4. Also “leaning in” to my illustration and design experience. I don’t want to do it professionally, but I miss the work and would like to engage more with it.
5. A bunch of house projects (painting, decluttering, replacing the AC), some of which I won’t be involved in, but will call people for help.
6. More work with the outdoor learning center birds… I’ve been volunteering there for almost 12 years (!), and I love it. I may be able to disengage from some of the day-to-day this year and “float.” I’ll deep clean the mew of the red-tail (still doing my part!) and work on special projects (replacing platforms, fixing perches), but I may “lose” my regular day to new volunteers.

I grew up in a family full of pathologically busy people. Probably some coping mechanism there, along with the internalized Puritanical admonishment against “idle hands.”

So I did school + after school activities (sports/theater/music), went to church twice a week, threw homework and flute practice into the mix, spent time with friends. I also took a bunch of dance classes (which was the thing I really loved).

When I got older (in college), I was in school. I worked. I volunteered with my church youth group.

I was not idle. But I was so tired.

By the time I graduated high school, I was exhausted. By the time I graduated college, I was struggling with suicidal ideation.

And then I spent more than a decade working for a company doing election work, which meant weird, exhausting schedules for months at a time, while working with a management team that, um, was not great. During that time I developed an autoimmune disease, and then I lost the ability to sleep more than three hours at a time… for several months.

I was not idle… but I was falling apart.

I left that job more than a decade ago, and thought I was done with that part of my existence… but apparently not. My mother came for short visit earlier this summer, and by the time she left, I could barely move.

It had nothing to do with my mom’s visit — it was a wonderful to see her and we did some really fun things. In other words, there was nothing about it that should have caused that kind of reaction.

I mentioned to my therapist that I was feeling completely burned out, and I couldn’t figure out why. When we took a peak through the last 18 months, though, things became clearer:

• In January 2022, Lilo, our 16-year-old, little dog, got very sick. She had kidney disease and pancreatitis, and in addition to hospital stays, we were at the vet a couple of times a week for fluids for several months, until she passed in October.
• When she passed, I was in the middle of a master naturalist course, and trying to get into graduate school.
• After a fun trip to Las Vegas in December, we spent a couple of weeks being pretty sick (not Covid, but maybe RSV) over the holidays.
• I took a kidlit course (amazing, but a lot more work than I anticipated) starting in early January.
• I started graduate school in mid-January.
• Lucy came home in late January. (Lucy is wonderful, but she threw a wrench into what was supposed to be a carefully managed schedule.)
• After dropping one of my grad classes (to accommodate Lucy) in early Feb., I started a coding certificate course in April.
• The Americorps person at the Outdoor Learning Center where I volunteer left in April, so a bunch of us had to pitch in a little bit more to get through the school year — I had originally planned to do one event, I ended up doing three events and holding down the fort for a construction project for 2 more days (in addition to my regularly scheduled volunteer shifts).
• Took Lucy to puppy kindergarten (2 classes, each 4 weeks).
• I was cooking five nights a week… composed meals. (Why?)
• Finished grad school school term #1 in mid-May.
• Finished the first coding class, mid-June.
• Mom came to visit, end of June 2023.

So, uh, yeah, I am burned out.

Again.

I’m proud of my ability to power through during emergencies. I seem to be unable to manage my schedule in such a way that leaves space for the unexpected, though, and that has become a problem. I think my body has probably never really been great at perpetual motion (see suicidal ideation, and inability to sleep), but as I get older it takes a lot longer to recover from the fatigue, and that recovery seems to be accompanied by some unpleasant physical symptoms (GI issues this time around… whee?).

How do people avoid this? I never learned this adulting skill, and I need to figure it out.

I read something helpful on Instagram(?) earlier this summer. The poster suggested that burnout is not managed by taking a break; it gets fixed when you create a more sustainable structure for your life. So let’s try that.

I’m heading into the fall still in recovery mode, with a reduced school schedule (one class instead of two), along with a coding class. Once I finish the coding certificate, I’ll start adding in another graduate class.

I’ll keep volunteering once or twice (but mostly once) a week with the birds, because I like that (and it helps me maintain my master naturalist certification).

And I’ll try to figure out how to eat without pain. (Working with my doctor on that!)

Non-calendared (is that even a word?) priorities include more training with Lucy (who is getting quite good at working with her tunnel, and the ball, and a platform). Her recall is improving, and she’s starting to get the hang of “stay” — at nine months old, she is just starting to get to the point where she can focus on us enough to take treats when she’s away from the house, so I think more leash training is high on the list of our priorities with her.

The other non-calendared priority: journaling and drawing.

And figuring out how to adult without burning out.