I recently had to explain to a couple of people that if I try to work more than about half time, I lose the ability to take care of myself. But what does that really look like?
Well, for starters, my living area descends into unbridled chaos. I do most things from a nest of blankets on the bed. My room isn't big enough for a full ergonomic computer desk setup, and I wouldn't use it if I had one. Sitting in a chair like a grown up gets really painful. On the bed, I can stretch out or lay down or type all spidered up with my knees by my ears if I need to. I tend to force myself to work until I can't anymore, at which point everything I've been working on gets shoved onto the TV/rat desk or the nearby floor. Picking it up is not a high priority.
Dirty clothes pile up on the floor. I don't put on real clothes unless I'm leaving the house, and I change right back into pajamas as soon as I get home. My day clothes stay where they fall. Again, picking them up is so far down the list of things I need to do that it's fallen into the basement somewhere, where I can forget about it. I do have a hamper. It's in my closet, like six feet away, so fuck that.
I don't do any laundry, anyway. There's no in-building washer, because very cheap apartment. The laundromat is only five minutes away, but that's a five minute walk with a twenty-five pound duffel of dirty clothes, an hour and some sitting in an uncomfortable chair trying to stay awake long enough to notice when I need to get up and switch my stuff from the washer to the dryer, and then a five minute walk back with twenty-five pounds of now-clean clothing. And I still can't sit down, because then I need to put it away. I have about three weeks of usable clothing, if I'm creative and okay with wearing dancewear to everything on days I have class.
I quit eating real meals. The first part of the process to fail is dishes. I have the energy to make food or to clean up after myself, but not both. If I can scrounge the money, I start eating everything off of disposable plates. The critters, too -- the Dollar Tree sells 12-packs of paper condiment cups the same size as their melamine bowls. Which I also buy at the Dollar Tree, frankly, so that if they get one of them too disgusting for words I can just throw it out instead of getting it anywhere near the kitchen sink. I feel a little bit bad for the Earth, but I would feel worse if I lived in a filthy hovel full of bugs where I could never find a clean goddamn bowl when I needed one.
The actual food part hangs on a bit longer, but not by much. I can cook just fine, and I do a few times a year. Most of the time I don't. People love to suggest that if I'm that tired, I should just make something convenient out of a box! As if this is a one-step process. First, I have to get up and walk to the kitchen, which is at the other end of the apartment. Then I have to decide what I want to eat. If I am having a bad enough day, then this is literally where the process fails -- I ask myself 'what do I want to eat?' and the only response from the rest of my brain is a flat blue field with a box that says NO SIGNAL bouncing back and forth. It is completely possible to have run out of brain so hard I cannot make any decision of any kind. Out of memory error, give up, go to bed.
If I do know what I want, discovering we're out of one of the ingredients might stop me. Insurmountable obstacle, don't have enough brain to route around it. Segfault, give up, go to bed. If I find that the necessary cookware isn't clean, washing dishes is another multi-step process to get through. Failed to initialize, give up, go to bed. Gas range acts up, burner won't light, give up, go to bed. You get the idea.
This lack of executive function also means it's not necessarily safe for me to use the stove or the oven. It's not a good idea to make three-minute ramen if I can't pay attention to the real live FIRE in my kitchen for three continuous minutes. The oven is even more dangerous. Our range is 100% analog and has no timer. I am not dumb enough to put something in the oven for twenty minutes when I don't know if I can stay awake that long.
If I was clever enough to look at my schedule and see this coming, I probably went to the store and bought a load of what amounts to tapas. Halfway-decent bread, cheese, some kind of lunchmeat, hummus, olive tapenade, some form of cold fruit or vegetables. This will hold me for a little while, but I don't dare buy more than a few days of perishables at a time, because I can't guarantee I'll be functional long enough to eat it before it all turns into sludge.
Some wiseass out there is shouting at me to just cook meals in advance for freezing. Where exactly would you like me to store them? I live with three other people, and we all share one fridge. If I tried to pack a month of my own food into the freezer, they would eat me in lieu of the frozen pizzas that no longer fit.
I rarely have the money for takeout, but even when I do, it fails a lot for the same reasons as cooking. Can't make a decision about what to order, can't stay awake long enough to run downstairs and collect my food, can't stay awake long enough to eat it, can't manage to clean up.
Any personal relationship that I can't cultivate during work/school hours dies. Those are the hours I need to be awake and functional, so those are the hours I force myself to be awake and functional. I don't have any reserves, because doing this much stuff is already my limit, so once I get home and switch off, there is no switching back on. I don't go out, I don't hang out, I start to leave a lot of people on read, because I can't scrape together a response to whatever they asked and the idea of having to pull myself together to interact with anyone makes me sob anyway.
I call out of anything I can possibly avoid. The priorities list is: paying work, volunteer work, things I promised other people I'd do, classes where the instructor is expecting me to attend, household maintenance things, fun things, literally anything else. I don't usually explain why, because explaining does not even have an entry on the priorities list, and I do not have the spoons to try. 'Migraine' is a good excuse. I do get them, they're not contagious, they happen at random for mysterious reasons, and it's not suspicious if I show back up the next day pretending nothing's wrong.
I stop doing things other than sleep, work, and stare at a wall, or at least a flat panel auto-playing YouTube. If something is keeping me from actually sleeping, like I'm waiting for antihistamines or painkillers to kick in, I knit. It's repetitive, tedious, and I don't need any attention span to do it. I have knit entire bedspreads like this before. They get a lot of compliments.
The rats get fed even if I don't. This is because the rats get Cheerios and mixed vegetables for dinner, and they don't care if the veggies are still frozen. Their cage tends to get a wipe down and a change of newspaper rather than a full scrub and reset, and not as often as it ought to. They are adorably disgusting little creatures who are pretty tolerant of a living space that's messy, as long as it's not utterly filthy. Crawling all over Mommy as she sprawls motionless on the bed also counts as quality time.
When things get really bad, I start skipping showers. If I haven't gotten unbearably sweaty, and I don't need to go out the next day, I start bargaining with myself that I'm not that grimy, and I can get away without washing my hair. I keep baby wipes around for getting cruft off of rats, sometimes I use them to get cruft off of me. If I do have to go out the next day, the bargaining will be 'I can shower when I get up tomorrow'. I try to make that happen, but it doesn't always.
I have taken a lot of showers sitting in the bottom of the tub. It's not ideal -- my hair is so long I sit on it, especially when it's weighed down with water -- but if it hurts too much to stand, or I'm having a hard time keeping my balance, it's better than nothing.
My absolute worst bout of this ever was right before I moved to Boston. I had a job stocking shelves at a local department store. It hovered around 30 hrs/wk, which was kind of too much, but I had no other responsibilities whatsoever and it was overnight, which are the hours when I'm actually awake. I made it most of a year of doing literally nothing but sleeping and working before I stopped being able to wake up to my alarm. First I slept through it, woke up in a panic and had to scramble to get to work on time. Then I started sleeping through more than one alarm, waking up in a panic, and scrambling to get to work only slightly late.
I hung on by my fingernails as it got progressively worse over time, mainly fueled by the fact that I needed that job to pay my rent or I'd have to move back in with my parents, who at that point were the cause of almost 100% of my non-job-related problems in life. The first time anything happened to destabilize my personal life happened to coincide with a corporate change from late night shifts (good for me) to early-morning shifts including staffing the sales floor right after opening (BAD BAD BAD). I completely disintegrated and ended up in the emergency room. I actually went in begging for antidepressants, because I wasn't sleeping and couldn't keep any food down and there was no way I was going to get in to see a PCP in time to fix that. They dosed me with Ativan and sent me home with a 90-ct bottle of Xanax and orders to take them as needed until I had gotten a decent amount of sleep.
Do you know what kind of basket case you need to be to get an ER attending to insist on giving you, an uninsured patient with no records on whom they have never laid eyes before, a very large bottle of Schedule IV benzodiazepines instead of the completely non-recreational uncontrolled substance you asked for? I do now! I do not wish to repeat this experiment, I took enough notes the first time. Thus why, even if I need the money, I do not take "full-time" gigs. It won't matter how much they're willing to pay me if I'm not physically capable of work.
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