A little over a week ago, I finished my second (of three) year in my grad program in Book Publishing. As with so many things, it went by both quickly and slowly.
It was often a frenzy. Especially this past spring term. I can say definitively it was the most intense term I ever experienced. And yes, that includes med school. I’m sure I’ll get more into the details of the term before too long on here, but now, in the more immediate aftermath, just thinking about it makes me too tired to function.
Since the term ended, I’ve gone through some swings in energy. And I’m remembering and realizing that it’s almost always this same pattern. The terms and the workloads may change, but this after-pattern is pretty constant.
I wonder, does anyone else have this same pattern too?
First there is a glorious full day off. I don’t know about other people but an entire day off in grad school is almost unheard of. In med school we used to talk about golden weekends, and now I’d often give anything for a golden day. I realized at some point that I’d maybe had 8 days off in total since September. It’s not healthy. I’m probably tipping over some edge into a burnout danger zone, if I’m fully there already. I need to do some deep thinking about how to make next year more sustainable. But that too is a topic for another time.
The point is, there is that first day off and it is glorious. You sleep in (as much as you can anymore). You resist the urge to blast music at an hour that while early for you is way too early for your neighbors, and instead spend the whole day reading. (I read half of Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers and lived in that world from the comfort of my saucer chair in my reading nook.)
The next day, you feel like you were shot out of a cannon. You’ve never had more energy in your entire life. Or at least, you believe that could be true. It’s some sort of weird rebound energy when you’ve been so drained for so long and then suddenly in the absence of that draining, you feel almost invincible. You clean your house, do three loads of laundry, including the sheets, and you wonder if this is what speed feels like. (I did all that and finished The Great Believers.)
You think it will last forever. The term is over and so now you must be at eternal high-energy state. You act accordingly, catching up on projects and chores and organizing your paperwork which you don’t think you’ve touched since maybe sometime in 2023.
Then, the crash comes. A few days later, your limbs might as well be made of lead. You suddenly remember you’ve been through this before and if you had any sense you would’ve known that rebound energy was more like some last gasp. You remember how wrung you were by all that work. You can barely get off the couch. You can’t put on an audiobook or a TV show or get horizontal in any way without napping a nap that just makes you more tired when you wake up. You cancel all your plans and resign to your need to recover. You can hardly move. You wonder in fleeting moments, if this is anything similar to what it would feel to have a flare of a chronic fatigue syndrome or severe clinical depression.
Then, like the bullheaded person you are, you try to push through, even in small ways, but that isn’t really a thing and your eye won’t stop twitching so you can’t even indulge in reading like you did those first two days, and so you eventually have to more fully surrender to the recovery and the leaden limbs.
You log some good recovery days. You start to feel a little human again. A little like yourself again. Not fully, not this soon, but you can at least glimpse the possibility in grasping, fleeting glimpses.
But then! Oh no! Break is over in a blink and the new term starts tomorrow. The whole thing is about to start again. You’re nowhere near ready. And yet you must be, anyway.
That, my friends, is where I find myself this evening. I’ve had this past week off and it’s been both so necessary and not nearly enough.
Originally, I had this really ambitious plan for all the things I would do this summer. It wasn’t some vague idea, either. I had sketched it out entirely. Picked a theme. Assigned different things in each of the different realms of my life to each of the summer months. If I had the energy level I had in those first rebound days after the end of Spring term, I’d still be gung-ho on all of it, but I don’t, and I don’t want to push myself over that burnout edge. Or if, in all likelihood I’m already there, I want to do what I can to bring myself back to the other side, to something more sane and sustainable
At least summer term should be more chill.
~Chrys
Image Description: my reading nook with a red saucer chair surrounded by bookshelves and a table with tea.
Chrys Buckley 