Burnout: (un)Comfortably Numb
Not really any surprise.
For the past two-and-a-half months, I’ve had…ahem…just a few things come down the pipe. My seizures have come back. My eyeball is twitching. I’m pretty sure my hair is starting to do another mass-dump. And finally…burnout.
After burnout always comes the buried-in-ash phase. To tweak some lyrics for my own perverse purposes:
I HAVE BECOME
(UN)COMFORTABLY NUMB
I don’t do well when I’m numb. I am the Fire Sign who chose the pun-name “Hart” for forever and ever because I am: All Heart. The all-singing, all-tap-dancing, all-crap-flinging monkey-girl who bleeds music, farts glitter, and sweats passion.
So for me to be MEH about my life? To have zero interest in my innumerable passions?
It is excruciating.
But sometimes ya just gotta MEH until the MEH is done.
For me, it’s almost always born of despair when I’m completely gassed from battling the ways I’m trapped. When I feel like, no matter what I do, I can’t get out of an adverse situation. That’s when the “why bother?” hits. “Why should I keep expending—no, wasting—all this time and energy? For what?”
Unfortunately, MEH has a mind of its own, and it is an awful, self-perpetuating little demon. Once ensnared in its sluggish inertia, it’s hard to break free.
**Obviously if I’m in the REALLY, REALLY bad place, I call my therapist and schedule an emergency appointment.
If you are in the REALLY, REALLY bad place and don’t have somebody like I have my therapist, or if they’re unavailable when you’re to the crisis point, these people can help you find someone now. Please, please. Always reach out:
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline
Of if you don’t like that one, here’s 13 more.
Otherwise, if it’s my garden variety desolation, hopelessness, and a numbed-out apathy that I desperately want to get out of, I’ve been sharing how I use my Elements System to do that over on Tinkerings.
That’s actually why I started writing this post in the first place. This one is less about WHAT I do, than HOW I reached this state.
Knowing what triggers my burnout can be a preventative measure unto itself. This requires getting really honest in my assessments of myself and my circumstances, and mapping out the patterns of how I got to a particular unpleasant moment.
Alas. Sometimes even knowing what my triggers are doesn’t mean I can avoid them.
As an autistic with ADHD, trying to pursue my gazillion passions while still giving my all to the relationships that are important to me and taking care of myself on 6 brain traumas and C-PTSD…
Burnout is a really consistent part of my life.
When it happens, sometimes it’s enough to simply admit, “I’m blahhh and bummed and MEH. This is how I got here, these are the reasons why, and holy crap! It is totally understandable given these circumstances.” Sometimes being understanding with myself and letting myself be apathetic, hopeless, burnt out and shut down with zero guilt is all I need to get things moving again.
This time? I think burnout is just a little comprehensible
So what happened was...
Mapping the MEH
DECEMBER 5, 2024: I decided to put up my Christmas decorations. I had planned to go over to my parents’ house and help them put up theirs a few days earlier but my mom was just…tired. Out of it. She didn’t wanna. She’d seemed kinda strange all week. She was cranky and irritable and…OFF. She gets that way sometimes. Understandable, considering her health conditions.
She was also supposed to come over and help me put up my decorations but I could tell she wasn’t up for it this year. She hadn’t been up for a whole lot since her (unknowingly second) stroke a little over a year before, so I put them up myself and purred every time I hung up something made by her.
And there’s a lot of that. She made all my quilted table runners, wall hangings, and many of my Christmas ornaments. She gave me most of the rest. Technically they were from both my parents but we know. She was the one who picked a lot of them out.
It was just…one of her things.
6:37 p.m. I had just finished hanging the last ornament on the tree when I got a phone call from my dad.
BING?!
He almost always texts me. Why was he calling?
Because he was about to rush down to the hospital, chasing the tailpipe fumes of the ambulance that had just taken Mom out of the house. When we got to the emergency room, things were…strange. Just…
OFF.
Because the paramedics had never been able to get her heart restarted. Neither had the doctors in the ER, so they were herding us into a quiet, secluded, tender delivery of the eviscerating news.
Comprehension of what they were trying to tell us hit me before it hit Dad. Mom was asthmatic, and had been having respiratory distress all week. (Remember how I said she was just…OFF?) When they started asking—almost interrogating us about her heart health, it hit me like a sledgehammer to the gut. In the doctor’s eyes I could see—he knew the moment I knew. He made a couple more spirals around the subject.
Then came the clean, merciful cut.
Dad and I went in to say goodbye to her and learned that TV and movies are bullshit. This “gentle, reverent closing of eyes” is bullshit. For the brief-but-violent way she went out, closing of the gaping, suffocating mouth is bullshit. Corpses don’t cooperate like that.
Fucking sucked to learn that in this way.
Now it’s branded into my mind. And especially into Dad’s.
TWO WEEKS LATER: Happy flippin’ birthday to me. I bought a carton of ginormous, decadent, gorgeous cupcakes—the kind Mom and I usually get got for our annual Deer Camp Halloweenie ShenaniganFest. Over the course of the week, I ate every flippin’ one by myself, except for the last two chocolate ones. They were really fucking good.
A FEW DAYS AFTER THAT: The anniversary of my big car wreck. Joy to the world. I call it my RebirthDay because in many ways, that drunk driver killed me. I just didn’t die. Winter Solstice is always a really big deal in my world.
This year, it kinda…blipped on by.
Meh.
I knew it would sneak up and gut me later. Some other time when I was least expecting it.
Because the next week was Christmas.
DECEMBER 24: Dad and I spent the holiday together. Doy. I made him the Special Enchiladas for Christmas Eve dinner, and we split those last two cupcakes down the middle to share. We transferred more photos from their albums into digital format for the memorial slideshow, and watched Christmas Vacation.
Like we do on Christmas Eve.
DECEMBER 25: Dad and I figured out how to put together The Egg Bake and The Cheesy ‘Taters. Alone. I’d been Mom’s sous chef enough times that I had a good idea what her directions meant.
They turned out perfectly.
We ate ourselves stupid and watched Christmas Story. It was good to laugh. We’d already watched Home Alone 1 & 2 earlier in the week as a palate cleanser from grief, and to have a shred of normalcy. But watching tear-jerker Klaus was right out. Prancer?! No flippin’ way either of us could take that! Our hearts just…
It was enough to do Christmas without her.
DECEMBER 26: After I came back home, I finally finished setting up the last of the altar decorations I’d gathered for Winter Meditation. Now this altar is all about my mom. I hadn’t even realized what I was gathering together when I snagged her favorite coffee cup and the teacup I’d inherited from my grandma, the night I put up all the decorations.
Now we know.
Because, like my mom…sometimes I just KNOW things. Even if I don’t know that I know as they’re happening.
DECEMBER 27: I flew to New Mexico to spend a few much needed days in the arms of my Eternal Flame.
JANUARY 1: I returned home. Dad and I worked like gangbusters to finish everything for the memorial.
JANUARY 4: We hosted my mom’s Celebration of Life on Zoom for our family and friends. As excruciating as it was, it was also really, really amazing. Because she was really, really amazing. Dad and I loved telling her story to so many people who’d had no idea just how many facets to her there were.
JANUARY 5: I got unceremoniously dumped.
JANUARY 6: I had knee surgery.
THE NEXT WEEK: While on my butt, I couldn’t log into my clinic’s portal, or so much as even download the Sunroom app so I could start exploring a new way to share my offerings and maybe get a friggin’ income back. Of course I couldn’t, because the iPhone 8 had become unsupported, so I finally had to get a new phone.
JANUARY 20: Merry Late Christmas to me, they had a deal on an iPhone 15 that kept my whole plan at the same price as my old phone, so I got one. Alas. The Slick-Willie Salesmen who sold it to me did not switch me to the cheaper plan. They did, however, add on insurance that I did not want, and they talked me into a completely unnecessary upsell they said would “get me a huge discount” on my new phone.
LIES.
This was the standard price between Apple and AT&T. Needless to say, my monthly bill was double what had originally been quoted.
Thankfully, I’m anal retentive and I double checked my bill the next day. I went back into the store. An equally Slick-Willie Saleswoman tried to schmooze me by saying how pretty I am and I look like someone… Margot Robbie if I was wearing pink and blue pigtails? “Yeah! That’s it!” Mmmmmm-hm. Then she delivered a great many words and circuitous excuses why she couldn’t help fix my bill—that I had to call support. Sure. Whatever. So I did. We got it sorted. (Or so I thought. Wrong.) After using the phone for a week, I tried to exchange it for the Pro model.
It took THREE FRIGGIN’ WEEKS of being on the phone with billing, tech support, sales, billing, back to the store, onto the chat with Corporate to make Willie do his flippin’ job and stop lying about what he “can’t do,” over to a different store, calling a third store, back on the phone with sales, billing, another call to billing, and a third call to billing before I finally got the whole fiasco sorted out.
Oh, yeah.
Did I mention that I bought my phone on the day that the Orange Crush hit?
ALSO JANUARY 20: The horror stories started trickling into my text messages and inboxes from friends, as well as some agencies who stand as guard dogs against abuse of the disabled. Layoffs, censorship, interrogations, policies, legal battles to remain independent entities…
Given that I’m a Worthless Eater—excuse me. Given that I’m a disabled, loud-mouthed, boat-rocking, whistle-blowing female over child-bearing age, I casually started to wonder how long it’ll be before I’m flipping up my middle fingers inside a gas chamber. That is, if our AI overlords don’t beat them to it and decide that I’m a drain on this planet’s resources, thus requiring extermination for the efficiency of the Matrix. Woot.
JANUARY 31: As is typical in DisabilityLand, while all that was going on, my entire application for Winter Heating Assistance was returned to me in an over-stuffed envelop that could barely hold the ginormous packet I have to send for these types of applications because I don’t get W-2s and rarely get 1099s.
All of my proof-of-income and proof-of-payment copies had been scrawled on in an unprofessional, condescending tone, basically asking me the same question over and over: “Why the BLEEP did you send me all this crap?”
In red pen, no less.
With multiple question marks.
It felt like some sort of snooty, pursey-lipped schoolmarm swatting my hand with a ruler for writing cursive outside the lines.
At that point, I…uh…
I may have had a slight reaction. Ahem. Thankfully, nobody else was around when that last straw hit me in my mailbox. Not even any neighbors.
Oh, yeah. And I had just overdrawn my bank account. Like I do.
You see, Your Honor…I commonly lyzdexize numbers in the hundreds column so balancing a checkbook is a risky endeavor around here. I also can’t currently pay my medical, business, and basic living expenses so everything I do gets put on a credit card.
Only one problem. I just had to pay $300 out of pocket because there’s no way Medicaid will cover the laser treatments that my surgeon and sports med chiropractor both wanted me to have for better and faster healing of my knee.
(Oh, that’s right! I was still on surgery recovery and grief-brain while trying to do all of this.)
So instead of paying 10% extra in credit card fees, I wrote a flippin’ check. Good girl, productive girl, on-the-ball girl that I am, I promptly came home and paid all my other bills. Including paying down my credit card.
WITH THE MONEY THAT WAS RESERVED FOR MY KNEE TREATMENTS.
🤦♀️
Because that’s what we do in Dain BramageVille.
(We call this “TBI Tax.” Because I do this shit allllllll the time. This is why I was medically removed from doing these tasks for a living in 2001.)
Annnnywaaaay… After getting my overdraft notice, the next piece of mail I opened was that crappy, red-pen swat in the chops from one of the assistance agencies who could make it possible for me to pay a heating bill this winter without being a Worthless Eater Millstone around my grieving father’s neck.
Did I mention that it used to be Mom’s income that allowed my parents to save my drowning ass every time my credit cards maxed? So to see my entire application returned in such a cruel, calloused way by someone who is supposed to be helping me…
Ahem. Yeah. That was pretty much me.
Woosahhhhhhhhhhh…
Oh.
I also had my first physical therapy session with an assistant, not an actual physical therapist, in spite of how detailed I was in the caliber of rehab I’d need. I came home—not muscle-sore like I’m supposed to be. No, no. Instead, I came out re-injured in the surgery site itself, which set my healing back to about Week 2.
Then my dishwasher broke.
Didn’t really have any ability left to react. Just stared at the sudden line of raised linoleum—the telltale sign of the leak—and said, “Huh. Well. That sucks.”
UP NEXT:
We all have our numb-out mechanisms. Mine involve no pin-pricks, smoke, or intoxicating liquids. But rest assured. I have them. We’ll talk about them. Eventually.
In the meanwhile, now that we’ve covered the HOW, if you want to move onto WHAT I do to get unstuck from this muck, you’ll have to head over to Tinkerings where we’ve been working through the tools of my 5 Elements System.
These days we’re in FIRE: Realm of Passion & Emotion. Also firestorms, shitstorms, and recovery from the inertial ash-pile of Apathy. Because sometimes even knowing what the heck caused a burnout and having complete compassion for myself isn’t enough to inspire me out of MEH.
Or if you don’t want to jump ship you can hang out here. We’re finally about to get back to my 5-Day in-hospital EEG they sent me to half a year ago.
© 2025 Hartebeast
Anticipatory Grief
The post I drafted a year before my mother's death, after she had her 2nd stroke.
I think, as you said in own words, given all the crap-ola you’ve had to deal with of late, burnout seems like a perfectly reasonable spot to hit!
Keep your chin up, Alexx! Things have to get better sooner or later. :)
Also, I loved this line, it was classic you:
“The all-singing, all-tap-dancing, all-crap-flinging monkey-girl who bleeds music, farts glitter, and sweats passion.”