It's been such a weird, changeable week for me.
On Monday I felt the old Chronic Fatigue symptoms starting to come back again and realised I needed to cut way back on my workload and relax. But a funny thing occurred - I suddenly realised my workload isn't that heavy. I'm not doing more than 40 hours a week, yet still I have symptoms.
It forced me into a bit of a rethink. If the workload wasn't causing the stress build up what was?
Long story short, I hit public forums to chat to some ladies I haven't spoken to in a few years - in fact I haven't spoken to them since I started dating Martin. I've chatted through what I felt were the problems, what's happened since I met Martin and moved house, trying to pinpoint the changes in my life that have happened and a surprising number of things have turned up.
1. This house is not my house.
In my mind, it still belongs to the people who used to own it. It still has their wallpaper everywhere, their nicotine stains, their dodgy taste in light fixtures and I can't settle in it. It's wearing me down. Did you know two previous owners of this house died? One of old age and the other of lung cancer. Can you imagine the vibes in here?
I came clean and confessed to Martin my feelings about the house and how depressed I am by it. I said I felt the house was turning us into the people who used to live here. When we came to view it, every room was stuffed to the gills with clutter and junk. Hundreds of 'just in case' piles around the house. Things that they had scavenged from everywhere. I confessed I thought we made a mistake and could we explore the possibility of moving on.
He did what every good man would do. He's set about making it our house. Over the last week we have thrown out nearly 200 pounds of clutter. The second bedroom (the Miss Haversham room) has been cleared and the planes moved into my bedroom. This weekend we aim to stabilise the plaster, replace the blown stuff and get the walls sanded ready to wallpaper and paint. Once that complete, we attack the nicotine-stained wallpaper in the hallways, landing and stairs with pure, white paint. Later, we'll rip it all off the walls and redo the whole thing but for now, we're going to make the house feel a bit like ours. Then I'm going to Feng Shui the s***e out of it.
Also, the continual cleaning of the dingy house is wearing me down. So, I have stopped cleaning. I have not hoovered, or dusted or cleaned a toilet since Sunday. I will not spend nearly two hours a day and more at the weekend cleaning, tidying and ironing. This is my life and it's disappearing in a haze of microfibre and Ecover products on a house that - at the moment - belongs to someone else. From now on I clean once a week for three hours and that's that. I've tried doing a bit a day and it feels like a never ending drudge of quick wipes and spot removal. So from now on, I will play all week and do penance on Saturday mornings with rubber gloves and a large scrubbing brush (then I might get on with some cleaning ;-P).
2. Are you a scanner?
After taking account of my frenzied need to always be doing something, my inability to relax and savage consumption of books (currently one a day), I realise I am a rare breed of person called a Scanner. Scanners have an exceptionally low boredom threshold, a constant need for variety and a book reading speed of astronomical proportions. My need for variety and fresh interests can change hourly.
This is how Barbara Sher describes a scanner as in her book What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything? (which of course I bought and read in a day this week)
What is a Scanner?
Scanners love to read and write, to fix and invent things, to design projects and businesses, to cook and sing, and to create the perfect dinner party. (You'll notice I didn't use the word "or," because Scanners don't love to do one thing or the other; they love them all.)
A Scanner might be fascinated with learning how to play bridge or bocce, but once she gets good at it, she might never play it again. One Scanner I know proudly showed me a button she was wearing that said, "I Did That Already."
To Scanners the world is like a big candy store full of fascinating opportunities, and all they want is to reach out and stuff their pockets.
It sounds wonderful, doesn't it? The problem is, Scanners are starving in the candy store. They believe they're allowed to pursue only one path. But they want them all. If they force themselves to make a choice, they are forever discontented. But usually Scanners don't choose anything at all. And they don't feel good about it.
As kids, most Scanners had been having a great time! At school no one objected to their many interests, because every hour of every student's school day is devoted to a different subject. But at some point in high school or soon after, everyone was expected to make a choice, and that's when Scanners ran into trouble. While some people happily narrowed down to one subject, Scanners simply couldn't.
The conventional wisdom was overwhelming and seemed indisputable: If you're a jack-of-all-trades, you'll always be a master of none. You'll become a dilettante, a dabbler, a superficial person -- and you'll never have a decent career. Suddenly, a Scanner who all through school might have been seen as an enthusiastic learner had now become a failure.
That's me. Up until now, I thought I had some form of Attention Deficit Disorder. I was hurling myself from one thing to next every few minutes in some kind of desperate search for something. I did the same thing this year and hit the wall in April with Chronic Fatigue.
Once I realised this and read Barbara's book it became clear that it isn't overwork that's hurting me - it's boredom. I've spent so long focused on business and copywriting I've neglected every other part of myself. I believed that unless I pulled my socks up and focused on one thing I'd never get anywhere.
That's not to say I find copywriting boring all the time. Not at all. In fact writing is a great career for a scanner to have because it exposes us to new subjects and new ideas and new people all the time. But I do notice that a week is about the length of time I can sustain myself effortlessly in one writing project - from research to finished piece. If after a week it's still ongoing - perhaps through client delays - it becomes like pulling teeth for me and the momentum and interest is gone. My pay off, as Barbara puts it, is the new knowledge of a previously unknown subject ie. the research. I'm still getting my head round all the different types of scanners there are to narrow myself down a little more and learn some structured ways of coping with it, but on the whole I'm very pleased with what I've found out about myself and am quite excited rather than fearful.
3. The Joy of Burnout
The second thing that turned up is a new understanding of the word burnout. I discovered another book this week called The Joy of Burnout by Dr Dina Glouberman and a passage in it leapt out of the page and made total sense:
Burnout is a state of mind, body and spirit reached by those of us who have come to the end of a particular road and haven't acknowledged it.
Another piece of the puzzle dropped into place. I have come to end of the road with the business side of my life. I've been treating the copywriting as a very official business entity and dutifully running along to networking meetings and business clubs and playing with bookkeeping software. But the truth of the matter is I got bored a long time ago. I've taken all I wanted to know about business and have now had enough.
I will never employ people to run things while I'm not here or find business premises and take on huge long term rents. I'll never take on work from firms and send it out to others writers so I can just edit it when it comes back. This has been a running mantra of every business owner I've ever met because they simply don't understand me. I like writing. It's a passion. If it wasn't I wouldn't spend my spare time writing this blog and frequenting forums to chat extensively to people all over the world. Bottom line I don't really give a stuff about making a million or having an expensive car.
I just want to have fun in whatever I do.
Also, did you know that, although burnout has been a term used in association with work and industry, you can in fact burn out on anything, even relationships. With this new knowledge, I realise I have burnt out not twice, but four times in the last 11 years.
The first time in 1995 during the second year of my degree (failed relationship, trapped to stay and finish degree even though I wanted to take off abroad), the second time in 1998 during the second year of my PhD (trapped to stay and finish it even though I wanted to take off abroad), the third time in 2005 (never acknowledged the stress I went through transitioning from employed to self employed and having no money) and the fourth time in April this year (bordeom and overwork).
I now realise all of them were directly the result of coming to the end of a chapter in my life and not taking the time to acknowledge and deal with the situation before it reached fever pitch.You see burn out forces you down quickly until you cannot physically carry on. Bang. You're down on the floor with no way of carrying on. Literally. I was on the floor in April. It was a Tuesday morning and one minute I was on a chair typing and the next I was on the floor. No idea how I got there. You have to face up and make changes to recover.
So with that in mind, from now on the writing will be placed in my life where it belongs - as the enjoyable means by which I make money to pay bills so I can go off and have experiences and learn more new stuff. It is not the be-all-and-end-all of my life anymore. I will do 40 hours a week and enjoy them. Some weeks I will do less and enjoy them even more.
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Here endeth this chapter in my life. On with the next.
