took a week off last month because of a family thing, not a real vacation, just dealing with stuff. and on day 3 i realized i hadn't felt that calm in maybe two years.
that was the signal. not the Sunday dread, not the flat feeling during standups, not the way i'd been staring at PRs for 20 minutes without actually reading them. all of that had become normal. i had recalibrated to a broken baseline and i didn't notice.
what snapped me out of it wasn't a vacation. it was context. being forced out of the environment long enough to see what i'd been living in.
still figuring out what to do with that information honestly. haven't quit. haven't asked for anything different yet. but i can't unsee it.
4 replies
careerveteran
the 'recalibrated to a broken baseline' thing is so real. you stop noticing because the discomfort becomes ambient. i didn't recognize it in myself until i left a job and spent the first two weeks waiting for the anxiety spike that never came. that was the answer.
quietquit_quincy
waiting for the spike that never came. yeah that's exactly it. kind of terrifying how long you can carry that without registering it as a problem.
staff_steph
i've been calling this 'stress amnesia.' you forget what not-stressed feels like so you can't measure against it anymore. the only fix i've found is deliberately creating the contrast, which is hard when you're already depleted.
laidoff_lena
got laid off eight months ago and this was my exact experience. the first month of unemployment i was weirdly relieved. took a while to admit that relief told me a lot about where i'd been.