I was gonna write about post-book burnout, and the need to refill the well with time and new input today.
Then I went to the farmer’s market. I love our local farmer’s market, not in the least because we actually have two farmer’s markets – the city-approved one in the city-designated space, and the group that banded together and said “You want HOW MUCH for a rent increase? On the profit margin for vegetables? NO!” When they “could not reach an agreement” with the city, they relocated to an outdoor basketball court owned by a church, about 5 blocks away.
Which comes with all the parking the city-approved spot doesn’t have, and started with a small number of defiant and hopeful vendors doing breads, jams, pies, and veggies. And one gourmet chef who does granola that is “proper ingredients” and amazingly good, and one French pastry chef who does macaroons. And macaroons. And sometimes madeleines.
It had grown massively this year. Now, the vendors spill out both sides, even into the parking lot across the road, and the customers are shoulder-to shoulder. Unfortunately, this means a bunch of tables have new vendors now offering scented crap. Soaps, lotions, incense, candles… full of things I’m allergic to.
And today, I hit that, it hit back, and I got wiped flat by an asthma attack. An antihistamine, thirty minutes of rest with hydration and food at my favourite coffee shop, and two hits on the emergency inhaler later, I got back to my HEPA-filtered home, and did not pass out. No, I merely put my head down on my desk while this computer booted up, and was very quiet and still for a while.
When I felt better, I went to go stick my head outside to see if I was up to mowing another chunk of the lawn. (Hey, one of my best friends is a nurse who went to work with appendicitis, and after she stopped to talk to a doc coming out of surgery about the annoying belly pain, still went back to work while waiting for the CT scan. I’m not the most stubborn woman I know!) At which point my lungs decided to seize up hard on the amount of pollen in the air – which apparently is at severely high levels. And I hadn’t allowed for that, or prepared for it.
So maybe this is about burnout anyway. About – you can be “doing fine” as the background problems are very high, right up until you hit the trigger that smacks you all the way down hard. But you can’t recover to “doing fine” with that level of problems. Nope, there’s got to be rest, and recovery, and being gentle with yourself if you want to keep enjoying sweet sucking oxygen, and a flow of words from your backbrain.
And maybe right now, you should look at what stresses are going on, and your level of self-care. Not your level of coping mechanisms, which are the desperate shortcuts we do to deal with stress, but the level of deliberate care and attention to our bodies, or schedules, our diet of social media, news, and interactions with others, and the scheduled downtime and care and feeding of our souls. Why wait until burnout?
(Image courtesy of Cedar Sanderson; all rights belong to her. I just felt “phoenix from a dumpster fire” was appropriate for rising to writing a post out of today.)
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “Sweet Sucking Oxygen”
My problem isn’t current health (which is reasonably dealt with, whatever its pros and cons) — I’m suitably resigned to the notion of mortality. It’s the angst of what’s coming re: brain. I’ve got Alzheimers or worse (male familial suicide) all over 4 generations of my father’s line, from my brother on up. So every time I hit a short-term memory snag, I run the test: is this age-appropriate (as they say), or the sinister dragon starting to rise?
Here in rural PA, the dearth of neurologists is sufficient to create 9-month-out scheduling delays. It’s gonna be a long summer…
Karen — Learn a new language. Something weird and non-Indo-European maybe. And do stuff with tastes and odors. (Not ones you are allergic to.)
You have so many skills in so many different brain areas that I think you have it covered. But maybe reciting poetry or learning all the Pokemons, for memory stimulus, because adults neglect new kinds of memory games. Even playing Concentration might be helpful.
If you notice weak areas, then strengthen them. Better to get ahead of it, whether it is old age, Alzheimers, or just worry and stress.
Dorothy — Is it pollen, or is it geraniol in the perfumes and in the cut grass? You could have just been overdosed with geraniol, instead of it being all allergy?
Not a doctor, just throwing out ideas. (Also I am paranoid about geraniol, because I had the allergy called “rose fever” for about ten years, and found out everywhere it was.)
Thanks! I needed that.
The one advantage of working on several projects at once is the smoothing out of the ending issue.
I found that getting done what I *needed* to get done for the summer, and being able to ignore all the politics and stuff that I am required to follow for Day Job was a wonderful breather. It helped, even against the increased foreground stress (flooding, other rain-related problems, an unwanted medical surprise). That tells me that once Day Job resumes, I will need to monitor myself more closely vis a vis the politics and stuff, especially once January 1 arrives.
It should have been a HINT that I got sick every 3-day weekend in the Fall semester. A neon illuminated CLUE.
Back when we were legally required to wear masks to venture into hospitals and the like I bought a batch of 3M N95 “respirators” (N95 because I thought that if I was going to go masked I might as well get something that might work, and 3M because they produced masks that didn’t fog up my glasses when I was doing woodwork).
These are no longer needed for their original purpose but my wife is asthmatic and last year was particularly bad for pollen (mostly from trees rather than grass). She took to going masked on her daily walks and this was a total success. Even when one could see the clouds of pollen being blown from the trees she was unaffected – so some good has come from our purchase. I don’t like going masked in public and would understand if you feel the same but it might be worth a trial in the hayfever season, though I fear that they may be less effective against perfume than pollen.
There is a company named VogMask, which makes washable N-95’s. Yeah, they’re hella-expensive compared to disposables, but they are reusable designed for long-term wear, with an exit valve so it doesn’t exhaust weak lungs to push against the filter with every exhale. I learned about them from a friend who has Mast Call Activation Syndrome – which means that her immune system is so screwed up it actively keeps adding to the allergen list, all the time, at anaphylactic levels.
I have several, for the worst days… I got them before Lung Pao Sicken, as I am incredibly allergic to many things in Chattanooga, and was looking forward to looking stupid but having oxygen when attending the con next with a brightly coloured cloth mask with inset vents. Hoping I could work it into cosplay, because I knew it’d be offputting to everyone who depends on lipreading.
And then wearing a mask became political, and they got shoved in a the back of a drawer like the swimsuit I don’t fit but maybe someday.
…Yeah, I pulled one out, and it’s going back in the purse, for “in case of need.” The filter media is probably getting close to date of expiry, but… thanks for reminding me of its existence.
Exit valves are a very good thing. 3M has them on their woodworking masks – I think all they did to convert these to medical ones was removing the valves (though I’m cynical enough to assume that this simplification did not result in a price cut). Reusable is also good, but I get a lot of use out of each “disposable” one, basically reusing it until the elastic snaps. This actually is in accordance with 3M’s advice that their respirators “can be reused until they are dirty, damaged, or difficult to breathe through”.
My problem is that I’m in the middle of-
*Dealing with Mom’s death and getting everything cleaned up and resolved after that.
*Hunting for a new job.
*Trying to write more to extend the cash for a while.
*Mulch.
*My own (lack of a) life.
-and so many of my coping techniques are like stuffing a huge wad of bandages on, wrapping them up in duct tape, and not stopping because you can’t stop.
I’m not sure what stopping would look like, some days.