On 13/12/2022 13:51, Ameya Nagarajan via Silklist wrote:
Alaric, I'm sorry for your loss <3
Thank you! In practice, it was a gradual loss over a few years... with the final end being a relief, if anything.
Which is a controverial thing to say... We're expected to be more horrified about a nearly braindead person stopping breathing, than about watching a once articulate person, with thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams, slowly dissolve into dementia. I'd argue that the real "them" dies slowly long before the body does, and those final months are probably just a confusing torment for the fragments of personality trapped within, unable to communicate or understand what's happening to them :-(
The rest of her extended family were somewhat in denial about her condition, though; they avoided coming to visit her, and when given any news about her were all very "Ah well she'll be back on her feet soon". So I think her final death forced them to come to terms with things in a much more distressing and abrupt way.
I do want to say one thing about burnout: we're all so excited to get over it and start doing the stuff we *want* to do, but in actual fact, burnout is your body and your brain telling you to literally not do anything at all. So don't sweat it if you can't do the thing you want to do. Those 3 days of doing nothing is what you need to be able to do the things you want to do.
This is definitely true. I just struggle with the feeling that I'm wasting my time off by not doing the fun things I want to... I used to be so enthusiastic about my projects, and working on them is really what I want my life to be about! So I'm still working on ways to allow myself to "just relax".
I was stuck so badly in 2021, it took me three months to be able to care about anything, and it's taken me until literally last month to be able to read anything I can engage with instead of binge reading trashy genre fiction.
I feel that too! I miss reading...
Sometimes I worry that we feel like time off from work has also got to be "productive" so much that we forget about proper rest, the kind where your brain gets to turn off and do it's own thing, which is something that is supposed to greatly boost creativity.
Definitely :-)
There is some research a colleague sent me when we had a discussion about burnout, and I said that I set aside time every week to stare at the ceiling and look at nothing, or even better at trees, that shows that staring at trees can equal deep rest. I have, of course, lost that link. (Tangent: I keep MEANING to store links in a spreadsheet but somehow...) Anyway, here's something from Psychology <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fallible-mind/201605/stressed-out-science-says-look-some-trees> Today on the subject.
Funnily enough, one of the domestic projects the wife and I have started to try and inject some fun back into our daily grind is... buying a small patch of woodland, not far from us (near Colechester, Gloucestershire, UK - on the edges of the Forest of Dean, if anyone knows of that). We only recently finished the paperwork so have only been to it three times, but we hope to hang out there a lot when the weather's nicer!
It has a disused quarry and lime kiln hidden amongst the trees, and is on a geologically interesting bit of landscape (my wife's the geologist, so this isn't really my field, but it's on the boundary between "Old Red Sandstone" and "Carboniferous Limestone", if that means anything to anybody here). I'm hoping there might be caves.
Thanks, -- Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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