I’ll drown in the water

(Head Underwater – Flyleaf)

Lately it feels like I am drowning. At first it felt like for everything I finished there was another bigger thing added to my plate. And now it feels like for everything I finish two or three bigger things get added to my plate along with something that I already supposedly finished.

I feel frustrated and overwhelmed.

And I have about a million things obviously that really need to be done.

And this evening I have gotten very close to zero of them done.

I left work in a hurry because the longer I was there the closer to everyone seeing me cry I was.

And I got home and did a meeting from home and by the time it was done and the camera off, I cried…and as I’ve gotten older my skin has gotten more sensitive and the tears felt like they were burning on my face…

…and after a few hours of trying (and failing) to get anything done because I was too stuck in overwhelm, frustration, and stuff to actually get the work done, I decided maybe taking a shower to at least get the current tears off my face might be a good alternative…and that gave me a few minutes of pressure-free time to cool down and realize that maybe taking some time to write might at least help me calm down enough to get a few minutes of work in before bedtime. It might not be much and it is absolutely letting more things pile up, but I’m going to be really honest here.

Before I took that break at not break time yet, I was starting to think about ways to die. It wasn’t like I was actually thinking about using those ideas, but it also isn’t probably healthy to be thinking about that…so I think probably it was a good choice to take a break a little early. Now I am still very not happy about some things and have an email that I am still too angry about to respond professionally so it is going to have to wait at least another day, but I am at least at a place where it doesn’t feel so much like my blood is boiling. And I’ve finished dinner…I mean, to be fair I had like 80% of dinner plus a post-dinner snack earlier, but part of dinner was still sitting next to my bed, so now it isn’t…I’m thankful it is almost Christmas so I will hopefully have some rice and other easier foods to make for dinners…’cause I was thinking this morning about what it would taste like to mix powdered sugar and spinach powder with water to make icing…and when you’re getting that desperate for meal ideas, you know it is past time to obtain more food…

So yeah, this is one of the most useless blogs I have ever written, but if that’s what it takes to at least mostly keep my sanity then that’s what I am going to do.

It’ll take a few battles to win this war

(One Day – Christa Wells)

If you’d told me a couple years ago when for the first time in my life shopping was just a normal activity that needed to be done that today I would be buying groceries for the first time in 16 months (unless you count buying onions one day at the gas station in February) and so incredibly proud of it, I would have thought you were crazy. Sure, my social skills do occasionally wax and wane with stressors and with lack of practice, but surely there was nothing that could set me back that far…right?

Wrong.

Grief is hard. Grief changes everything.

But I am so proud and so thankful I did it. Sure, I only successfully came home with two bags of sugar, but that is something. I think it will be so much easier to build on even what from the outside might look like a small success than to keep trying (and failing) to build on the dreams and memories of what used to be and what I hope will one day be again.

And it isn’t like it was easy the first time to make shopping second nature. That was something that took self-guided exposure therapy at the target at the mall nearly daily until it gradually became less difficult…and to be honest even at my best shopping was a means to an end and the checkout was still an anxiety producing part of the experience which is definitely a piece of why I usually still only planned on buying one item per trip whenever possible…but I mean, I successfully purchased something almost every week…and then everything changed.

I am so incredibly proud of myself. There are still at least 10 more things on the list on the post-it note on my microwave of things that I want (like flour, beans, oil, rice, fruit, frozen peas, sliced bread) but some things I might get for Christmas, I do still have a couple cups of flour and a bottle and a half of oil left, and now that I’ve had this success, I know I *can* go grocery shopping again…so I still am figuring out reasonable meals with what I have left, and know that someday I will have normal looking meals again…one thing at a time.

Today I listened to a midyear (pharmacy conference) session on grief. I learned almost nothing, but it felt so good to have my experience validated. People might feel disorganized (check), isolated (check), lack motivation (check), feel lost and need extra guidance (check), struggle to focus (check)…but I did learn that normal grief lasts 6-24 months. It felt really good to hear that, because while anecdotally I’ve heard people discuss the intensity of grief months down the line, people expected me to be a lot better a lot faster than I was and it was hard feeling like I couldn’t measure up…and it made me feel like I was wrong to not be able to get over it faster. So it was good to know that I’m not “supposed” to be totally ready to jump right back in at this point.

Speaking of grief…I don’t want to jinx it, and I don’t really know if it is really improvement of just change, but I am finally starting to get some sleep pretty much every night…I’m still super struggling to get up in the morning, but after over a year of very little sleep it feels like success…sure, with the timing of it the increase in sleep could very well be more of a depression type of situation rather than healing from grief, but finally getting what I’ve been chasing for so long is at least mostly positive…and even if getting out of bed is just as hard as it was before if not harder, I feel like sleep research would probably still say that getting the sleep is better for my body than not getting it even if both options are linked to negative emotions…and there is certainly still the possibility that I did something right and am finally healing and the difficulty getting up is just the cumulative sleep debt for the past 16 months…

Is this really how you want to spend your days?

(The Other Side – Greatest Showman)

I had a whole list of things I wanted to blog about…and then I lost the list…and now I feel like I really need to write because my brain felt like it was spinning, but it isn’t spinning in a direction I am ready to write about at the moment, so maybe more on that later or maybe not, but either way I gotta come up with something to write about now I guess…’cause I know writing really does help my brain feel better.

…not sure where I am going with this, but I grew up in generation you can do anything you set your mind to doing…and it isn’t true. You can’t do everything just because you want to do it. It isn’t a realistic standard. There are things no matter how hard you try you won’t be able to do. Sometimes your skillset just isn’t a match for what you want. Sometimes your circumstances will make what you want nearly impossible. Sometimes things just don’t work out. It is supposed to be encouraging, but sometimes it sets us up for failure. There are things I can’t do. And it doesn’t feel like that is okay…but it has to be okay because it is the only reality I live in.

The other problem with the mindset that you can do anything you want to do just by wanting it enough is that it implies an unrealistic locus of control. And now I guess I have kind of come back to what I wasn’t going to talk about…

…so…

I guess I’ll put it this way. There are a few places fingers could point. At me is not one of the first places they would point, but yet I pretty much completely blame myself. I mean, realistically I can look at the situation and come to the same conclusion as other people that it isn’t realistic to think I could have changed anything. And that doesn’t change the way it feels. That I should have been able to control the situation. And I couldn’t keep it from happening. And it is frustrating to not be able to make things turn out how I want them to turn out…and I am thankful. I am thankful for a coworker who let me explain how I felt like it was my fault and instead of pointing out how dumb that was encouraged me more gently that even if it had been my fault that things that don’t turn out can help us grow…and y’know, she’s right even if it doesn’t feel like I want to learn if it means a patient doesn’t get the best treatment. And I know after more than 24 hours to think about it now and writing it out that there really isn’t anything I would have recognized as an option and done differently that would have been likely to lead to a different outcome (but I also see what I learned could have caught it sooner)…and I feel thankful because a doctor I talked to protected me from a conversation that I would have really struggled with. At first I was frustrated because I felt like I was being sidelined and it was important to me and I don’t want to be “just” a resident – I want to really be part of the team…but with some more space, I can definitely see that it was better for me to not be there. For me personally it might have been some closure, but at the same time it might have been less of a good idea. I was already emotional though able to hide it over the phone, but in person with someone who was probably also going to be emotional I wasn’t necessarily going to be able to keep my demeaner professional which would probably make it harder for me to come back on Monday and face people who had seen me cry the week before. There is also the possibility that I could have gotten to the person I needed to talk to and had stuck words. The doctor didn’t know that about me, but it would have been a disaster if I got there and couldn’t use my words…so I’m thankful that wasn’t something I was involved in.

Also, I feel conflicted. I stretched the truth yesterday. I think it was the right thing to do, but at the same time it feels so incredibly wrong to not tell the whole entire truth. Someone asked me who did something. I felt like that was something this person didn’t need to know and something that wouldn’t change anything…so I said I really couldn’t tell her. It is technically true that I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her because I felt like it was wrong to tell her. But the sense of the statement wasn’t true. I knew exactly who did it, and even if I didn’t I had very easy methods in front of me of identifying exactly who it was…and I think realistically I made the right choice, but I also feel bad about stretching the truth.

Okay, so I really want to end this on a more positive note.

There is an article someone shared on one of the listserv’s I am on about burnout and work life “balance.” The article actually pointed out the problems with the concept of work life balance and seemed to be pointing more towards the terminology I heard in an interview and immediately latched onto as my preferred terminology: work-life blend.

This is the article.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2014.00026/full

It is geared towards pediatric healthcare workers, but I think really the thought is totally relatable regardless of what career path you are in…I don’t feel like it is super well-written, but I really like some of the thoughts conveyed.

Here is a quote from the article:

This leads me to the second question: how would we know that we achieved it? Exactly how much life do we need to balance our work? Will we just wake up one day and feel “balanced”? Unfortunately, the absence of an objective outcome measure makes the chances of ever achieving this goal rather elusive…The pursuit of a concept that is intangible and lacks validation is unlikely to result in anything but a sense of failure and helplessness, or what most of us know as “burn-out”.

So yeah…I am drowning in all the things I am supposed to be getting done but haven’t *actually* gotten done. I am feeling really overwhelmed about application/interview season, particularly as I am very poorly prepared this year…but I’m going to get it figured out one thing at a time, and if I fail then I’m going to have to live with it…I’m super thankful for a friend who asked what I was eating this week and when my answer was that I had no idea made sure to send me home with lunch and to suggest we find a time I could come over for dinner.

And I’m stressed out because my anxiety has me convinced that I’m going to be sent home from work on Friday because someone will think I have covid. Yep…I’m not worried about getting sick with covid because of actually being afraid of being sick, I’m worried about getting sick with covid because I’m worried about getting sent home…hashtag social anxiety meets OCD life…and I feel like if I was going to get covid it would probably be when I was in the ED constantly surrounded by people who were exposed to covid and almost never wearing my mask and also incredibly sleep deprived, not while I’m in the nicu…but anxiety doesn’t care about logic…