Somethings that are Killing Me

Oh man. If I could explain how exhausted I feel - and how ridiculously paralyzed this exhaustion makes me feel - I think I'd feel a whole lot better. But that's the problem: I can't even articulate what I'm feeling.

I've spent weeks rushing through life. Work is killing me, simply because there's so much going on that I'm caught in an endless swirl of tasks and projects and things I have to be aware of and remember. The thing with this job is that I love it, I really do. But the other thing is that I'm a boss now (of, like, an entire team), and while it's awesome, it's also a level of responsibility that carries a lot of stress. This is especially true because I'm someone who takes work and responsibility and my obligations to my employer very seriously, so failure is not an option. I'm not very forgiving of mistakes. So, I'm sure I make regular stress that much worse. There's also the fact that I'm still newish and still on a learning curve, which I'm constantly trying to overtake. That's a big factor here. Once I've completed a year and I get the full cycle, I think I'll be able to ease up a bit. I hope.

But then, preparing for IAS is killing me as well. While I love the subjects I'm studying, they, like everything else, require time and attention and focus, and I'm generally short on all three. None of the work I have to do is technically difficult or unrealistic -- yet I manage to overwhelm myself anyway.A lot of it is still feeling like a newbie college kid, because a lot's changed since I got my bachelor degree 3 years ago. This is just not my world, and I didn't even like it much when it was my world, so I feel like an outsider. That doesn't help. I'm not immersed in this stuff, because the truth is, my personal life and my work are all more important to me. I keep telling myself that I'm doing the right thing, that this stress will be worth it in a couple of years, but meanwhile, it's just another thing that's killing me.

And finally, there's my personal life. That's killing me about as much as anything else. I can't even properly explain this, as nothing is actually "wrong." Even so, these last couple of months have felt important in a not-very-clear way (and yeah, that lack of clarity doesn't help). I've sensed some things crystallizing in me, and while it feels really, really good to know exactly where I stand on some important things, that somehow carries its own uncertainties. At the same time, I've been realizing how some things are really, truly fluid, and I am not able - nor would it be right of me - to act on any of it. This is a hard lesson for me; once I analyze something to death, I am almost always compelled to act. And in the past, acting - in haste, out of pressure, because I just feel like awareness compels action - has proven fatal. To stand back and let things unfold -- this is a difficult lesson for me. I've also realized that a lot about my personal life is not - not right now, anyway - in my hands, and letting go in this way, this feeling like I don't have all the control in my own life -- it basically kills me. Of course, I get that when the time comes to act, when everything's as unfolded as it's going to get, I may be up against some big, serious shit. And yeah, a lot of my stress is because of that. Life right now is not on a clear path.