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Needless to say, it’s been a whole month since the last post, and things haven’t improved.

Actually, it’s been worse — I’ve been stuck in a cycle of being angry, being angry at myself for being angry, and wishing I could take all the lessons of stoicism and Taoism and let it go like water’s off a duck’s back. Instead, I replay conversations and interactions, over-think as I am wont to do, and end up feeling more indignant and helpless than moments before.

To wit: I think the burnout is super real, y’all.

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I’m also not sure what is fun for me, anymore. More to figure out when I have some free time, I think.

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Either way. I want to be better and I want to do better by myself. Using my own personal laptop for the first time in the past month should hopefully help. Then the week comes by, and I find myself staring at my work laptop screen from 8 in the morning til midnight, and if the ‘work async, not ASAP’ sticker that I keep as a reminder had eyes, it would be my favorite monkey puppet meme.

(Inspired by Brianna Wiest’s 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think)

1. You’re still functional — physically, at least. You can walk and you can sit, and you can shrug off the pain when it gets a little too much.
2. You hold on to your values, even when it’s easier to just go with the path of least resistance. You can be proud of who you are.
3. Work is tough, and some days it’s annoying, but so many people would love to be doing what you do.
4. You earn enough to live comfortably, to go where you want and eat what you desire; enough to live on your own terms.
5. You’re allowed to think and ponder about what living on your own terms mean, and know that even though life isn’t ideal or where you’d thought it would be, it’s still a journey to get to where you envision it to be.
6. You have the weekend to decompress, even if decompressing means losing track of time as you doom-scroll through Reddit.
7. You just spent a good hour preparing for your lunches in the week ahead, and that is going to help with keeping track of actually eating lunch, which is something that has been a miss for so much of the last two years.
8. You have comfort shows and movies that you can dive back into; an embrace into a familiarity that makes your brain feel happy.
9. You have amazing friends. Quality > quantity, especially in this case.
10. You think about all the different ways to get better, and to be better. You might fail and stumble along the way, but you’re still trying. You’re figuring it out. You’re still here.