BURNOUT.

I have a confession to make. I may have been less prolific on this platform of late, but I have been in burnout. A lot has happened in the past few weeks, I had a friend die of cancer, I have had to help my father with my overly demanding mother, which has resulted in some sleep deprivation, and if you had seen Dadah Means Death (an Australian movie about two drug traffickers, Kevin Barlow (British and Australian) and Geoffrey Chambers, who were hanged in Malaysia on July 7, 1986) when my parents, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew left to go on holidays, I could see that they were stressed but I was nearly ready to respond like Kevin Barlow to the courier and yell, “Bloody hell! Go!”

I have ben in burnout for the past few weeks and was craving some solitude in order to recover. They left on Monday and will be back next Wednesday, and it took a few days for my sleep patterns to start to revert and my eating patterns too. It has been horribly hot, but I’ve been managing.

I am a couple of months shy of 50, and while I might not have been successful in a capitalist sense, I have in the sense that I finally know myself, but my folks don’t yet know me. Why I say that is, my father worries that I’ll be lonely, but loneliness was a lack of meaningful connection for me, not people to be around. I have joined several autism support groups, and despite the hostility that surrounds transwomen in sports, I have been accepted into the women’s and non-binaries groups and have not been dominating conversation or mansplaining. That is meaningful connection and an antidote to loneliness. You can be lonely in a room full of people and happy by yourself.

Fortunately, my parents go away every year, but only for a bit over a week, and I will be having a mini-break next year when I have a colonoscopy over an hour away.

Burnout has an insidious way of creeping up on you.