the vicious cycle

what if the burnout never goes away?

When I came to stay with my family for winter break, I felt burnt out. More than ever before, probably. I even mentioned it in a couple of my pieces on here. But my main hope for winter break was that this burnout would lift, would go away in time for my return to the big city to study for what I expect to be the most difficult exam I’ve ever had to take to date - it’s an exam in economics, made to be difficult for econ majors (I’m a journalism major), and which is failed by about half of said econ majors, according to our professors. I expected to build back the strength I needed to take one final, heaving leap that would finally send me flying over the finish line of this tough first semester of my second year of college. But, when I publish this, it will be the day that I travel back, effectively ending my winter break. And the rejuvenation…hasn’t happened?

Okay, that may be a bit dramatic. Some degree of recharging has occurred for sure; my desperately, painfully empty batteries have had some of that electricity allowed back into them; however, it feels like it’s the furthest thing from enough. I find myself still carrying a heavy, hollow burden of fatigue, restricting my breathing, my movement, my thoughts.

It’s not like I’ve been engaging in heavy labor over this break - physical or intellectual. I’ve mostly slept fine. Yet, the radical improvement to my state that I was, perhaps naively, hoping for, never came. So I’m left here wondering if a change like that is going to happen at all.

Will I be able to enjoy things to the fullest again? Will I be able to write songs again? Will I be able to invest my full strength and concentration into work, or art, or anything? Will I fall in love again? Or was I overworked in December to a breaking point so absolute that I’ll never fully recover?

What if the burnout is here to stay, even until the end of the educational year? What if I enter my 20s still feeling like this? I guess, in the words of Noah Kahan, pain’s like cold water, your brain just gets used to it. Maybe it’ll become a normal part of me, like my bad eyesight or my hemophobia. Maybe I won’t be able to be a musician again. Maybe I’ll have to leave the band I myself cofounded with my best friend four years ago now. Maybe I’ll become a different person entirely - colder, more reserved, less energetic, less passionate. Maybe people won’t recognize me anymore. Or maybe they won’t even notice that something’s happened to me. I don’t know which of those hypotheticals I like less. Maybe that one month will end up changing the trajectory of my life completely.

Or maybe it won’t. Of course, the rational part of me recognizes that all the things I just described are extremely unlikely, basically impossible, and that these thoughts come pretty much exclusively from my tendency for extreme overthinking and the certain, sometimes pretty high, degree of cynicism that my life has given me through various circumstances (which I’ll definitely write about in the future). But unfortunately, as it often tends to be, the sole fact of me acknowledging that I’m overthinking, and that things aren’t as bad as those thoughts are telling me they are, is not enough for me to suppress those thoughts completely. It’s enough for me to usually not think about them during the day, when I’m doing at least something - but they feel like ghosts, never too far away, out of sight, but still tangible in some haunting way.

And, in the dark, these ghosts thrive. When I’m trying to sleep, these thoughts - that the burnout could be permanent, that, in the rapid rhythm of life as a college student, and then as an attempted functioning full member of society, I’ll never get the time to stop and recover properly, as well as a range of others, suddenly start to feel as if the neighbors have filled their house with the loudest speakers ever developed by mankind, and started blasting all of my least favorite music at full volume on them all simultaneously. They become painfully loud and utterly impossible to ignore, and leave me desperately scrambling for a way to drown them out.

This is the newest evolution of a cycle I fell into last month. As I was approaching exam season, I had a huge amount of work to do, because for some ungodly reason our professors thought it was totally normal to keep giving us big assignments up until literally the last week before our finals, and leave us almost no time to just study for the exams themselves. So I worked, I worked from morning until late at night for almost all of December; for the final couple of weeks before the holidays, I didn’t even leave my apartment for anything except classes, exams and the occasional quick shopping trip. This left me increasingly tired and burnt out as time went on; in turn, I became less productive because of the burnout; this lowered productivity caused me to expend what mental energy I had left on stressing about the fact I wasn’t doing enough work; and this, of course, led only to the burnout getting worse, restarting and deepening the cycle. As a result, I’ve been stuck in a state of near-constant, gnawing anxiety, and an equally persistent, dully aching sadness. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve listened to this song a concerning amount in the last week or so:

I wish I could bring this around into a motivational, self-affirming philosophical conclusion. I wish I could say that, despite all of this worry, I’ve found something, or someone, that keeps my happiness levels going through all of this. But then I’d be lying. And what kind of personal essay would this be if I was disingenuous?

The truth of the matter is, I’m not doing well. I’m trapped inside the burnout and stress cycle without a tangible way out, I’m sad, I’m lonely, and I’m scared to death of failing econ. Are things looking bleak? Yes. Will they get better? I really, sincerely hope so.

Until then, though, I’m just going to try and keep the thoughts as quiet as possible, until the day after my exam at least. Then, once my university’s final test of the semester is over, I’ll have to confront the riddle that life has set for me - making it off of this self-sabotaging hamster wheel.