Job Description: Exhaustion

It has been 5 weeks, 5 Wednesday nights. The ritual of sitting with blank piece of electronic paper and making something happen. Building community around this simple act of writing. I am thankful.

While it has all been focused on healing in this moment, I have avoided some of the day-to-day struggles that all of us face in this “new normal” of Zoom-living, cabin fever disequilibrium.

But, I have heard it too many times in the last week to ignore.

“I feel like my work is asking way too much of me. I am working harder than ever, it seems. I am exhausted.”

A family physician myself, I am reduced to seeing patients by phone visits. The volume is low compared to normal, yet I too share in that exhaustion.

Let us explore and understand the exhaustion together for a moment.

First, we must travel to a different world than our current one.

Let us time travel far back, to the The World of February 2020.

Remember that world? You were buying your spring concert tickets, signing the kids up for baseball and soccer leagues? You were hugging people and should anyone keep 6 feet apart from you, you would have taken it as an insult. Crazy, huh?

Okay, so travelling back to The World of February 2020, you get a job offer that reads as follows:

“Great job, perfect for the extremely flexible. Rules, protocols, and responsibilities will change daily. Emails with a tone of “we might need to really start panicking now” will fly at you every 3-5 minutes. You will have to work with people without being in the room with people, with no drop in your efficiency. You must quickly master something called Zoom and develop Zoom skills such as “how to raise your hand” and “picking a background picture” on this technology. As an added perk to this job, you may have to be a full-time school teacher simultaneously while you work for us. Oh, one more thing - your time off from work will involve confinement in the home, so that work will become the majority of socialization in your weekly routine.”

Yikes! Raise your hand if you would sign up for that job. (No need to use Zoom for this).

Imagine how quickly the labor unions of The World of February 2020 would reject this!

Medical diagnosis in The World of February 2020 would be Meshuggah, Yiddish for CRAZY!

A moment to sigh together.

A chance to understand together the fatigue that we are feeling.

On some levels, most of us are doing less work, producing less in our time at work. But the exhaustion is about the work of adapting, bending, contorting ourselves each day, each week, over and over to a new way of being, both in the 9 to 5 and the rest of our lives is CRAZY! Exhausting!

Three prescriptions for our collective exhaustion – appreciate, structure, and laughter.

Appreciate: Take time today to appreciate the work you have done to adapt to a new world that we would have laughed at just 30 days ago or in The World of February 2020. Take arms forward and wrap them around upper torso for a tight self-hug. Affirmation that this current world is exhausting. Patience with self, reminding that fatigue is inevitable with the job description and life disequilibrium we have been handed. Replace resisting the exhaustion with working to accept it.

Structure: Take a piece of electronic or tree-derived paper and draw out your schedule for today and the following two days. Step back and take a look at what your current schedule/structure looks like. Are there simple things that you can change that would relieve cognitive load? Now that most are working from home, have you set rules about how to set a firm end to the work-day, a point beyond which calls and emails are left for the following day? Is there structure for fun and play included in your schedule? Make changes as needed!

Laughter: It might be one of our best medicines in all of this. Seriously, can we just laugh for a moment at what our current job description and life description has evolved into? Imagine us all around a campfire (not even 6 feet apart from one another!) in The World of February 2020 enjoying a hearty laugh as we ready the job description above. Laugh and keep laughing! Best results when done with others.

My brothers and sisters in exhaustion, as the saying goes, “When the The World of February 2020 laughs at you, you join in the laughter!”