Shortly after publishing Necrotic City, I returned to traditional employment to rebuild my savings. At the same time, I continued creating content for this blog and working on longer stories. It was sometimes a struggle to find time for all of it, but I still had a dream of fully supporting myself by writing, and I didn’t want to lose the progress I’d made.
Fast forward a year, and it had become apparent that the new job wasn’t much better than the last one. It was a miserable (and miserably unsafe) place to work, and I wanted out– the sooner the better. To that end, I gave Patreon a shot. I hoped that by increasing my workload for a time, I could build up enough of a following to replace the day job– or least get close enough to stage an escape.
How I Burned Out
I have a particularly toxic combination of problems: I’m a perfectionist and I don’t like to leave work unfinished. This means that I’m not great at typing up a brief blog post or short story, giving it a cursory once-over for errors, and slapping it up on a website. I’ll keep grinding away at it long past the point where I should have called it a night, trying to get something polished to my liking while sticking to a deadline.
These are also traits my new employer was happy to exploit. As I proved proficient and willing to fix things that were broken, more and more duties fell on my shoulders. I went from working 50 or 60 hours per week to 70 or 80. I trained new hires and audited their work, answered management-level inquiries from customers and other departments, acted as my department’s IT, and generally filled in for management on a daily basis. I even built and taught a DOT-compliant Hazmat course– a task which, at more reputable companies, is typically performed by someone hired specifically for the task and earning a significant salary.
I did all of this while also performing my normal duties: loading and unloading trucks, inventorying and storing freight, loading and unloading aircraft, answering phones, creating invoices, and collecting payment from individual customers and corporate accounts. In a company with 350-plus employees, it’s safe to say that the only departments I didn’t do work for or in some way touch were Aircraft Maintenance and Records.
What made this possible was not that we had a small amount of work to accomplish, but that I put a truly inhuman amount of effort into getting everything done. I worked through my lunches and didn’t take breaks. It was not uncommon to for me to work twelve-plus hours and realize after I clocked out that I hadn’t eaten all day.
This job made me excellent at multi-tasking. I could be typing an email or performing data entry or creating an invoice, while answering phone calls and keeping an ear out for problems with customers at the front counter and loading dock. Doing this now and then for short periods is fine. Doing this for ten or twelve hours straight is utterly exhausting.
On the worst days, I’d have to triage emergencies: do I try to get this customer to fix his hazmat so it can be transported on tomorrow’s flight? (A flight which he’s paying $25,000 for.) Or do I enter the three pages of new freight that has to be in the system so we can load the flight that leaves in two hours? (The load needs to start in the next twenty minutes.) Or start offloading the ten customers waiting impatiently for their freight to be accepted, two of which have 40-foot trailers for us? Or answer the twenty emails from customers wanting to know when their flight leaves, or where a missing freight item is, or pestering for a list of their freight on hand?
Throughout this, new emergencies would crop up right and left: a cargo agent discovering hidden hazmat on a pallet destined for the flight that’s being loaded now. A front counter employee calling me in a panic because she accidentally charged a customer’s card $7000.00 instead of $70.00, and she can’t figure out how to reverse the charge. Decimal points are slippery things. Please help, the customer’s really upset!
Then the passenger counter calls to say that they tried to add our cargo to one of their flights, botched the process, and now the inventory is all messed up for their flight that’s about to be loaded. I must drop what I’m doing, go into our shared freight management system, and fix the mess ASAP.
During my second year at the Other Job, days like this became the norm. They’d be three or four days out of five– or all five on a really busy week. This was my normal. Like a prisoner becoming accustomed to being waterboarded, I became better at ignoring the feeling that I was drowning. However, that only went so far. I was still drowning.
People began to comment on the fact that I was there (and clearly had been for some time) when they came to work, and that I was still there when they left– even when they worked a 10 or 12 hour day. In fact, I was often there for considerably more than 12 hours. At one point I realized that I could work 24 hours a day and still not accomplish everything on my plate.
And at the end of the day, I still needed to write stories for Patreon and content for this blog.
Sometimes You Have to Stop to Move Forward
As I and my department drowned in work, requests for better staffing continued to go ignored by management. I’ve detailed my time in the trenches with this employer fairly extensively in past posts, and I invite you to give them a read for a more 10,000 foot view of my three years there.
The Company Finally Takes Action
Update Part I: Author In Crisis
Update Part II: Where Do We Go From Here?
Life’s Short. Don’t Work Yourself To Death
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
The End Of The Other Job: Escape And Loss
Eventually it became apparent that there was no fixing our workplace. The owner and his cronies did not want anything to change. As long as that system was in place, any attempts we made to fix things were going to be about as effective as throwing ourselves against a brick wall.
When I finally departed that employer at the end of 2020, I was well and truly burned out. I had trouble remembering things, difficulty focusing, and my ability to be creative was shot.
I took a break from traditional employment but kept pushing myself to write. Most of what I published during that time took far more work to write than it should have, and was of lower quality than I’d have liked. Posts often weren’t on time, and I felt terrible about that. I slowly fell further and further behind. 2021 was not a great year.
At the end of 2021, I started a new job and went on what I hoped would be a brief hiatus. Because that job also ate a significant portion of my time and because my burnout still hadn’t improved, the hiatus stretched through 2022, 2023, and most of this year.
During that long break, my ability to be creative gradually returned. I relearned how to stop pushing myself, disconnect from the internal to-do list, and just relax. And I figured out what went wrong.
Coming next week: Part II: How Do You Fix Burnout?
