I'm burned out, but my baked goods aren't!

Sadly, it seems that Despair, Inc's designs are not covered by the good ol' Creative Commons license, but I'd ask you all to take a moment to check out this de-motivational poster for a sense of where I'm at today.

Funny stuff, eh?

To be fair, I'm not quite to that point yet, but I am feeling pretty exhausted. One of the women in my office will be going on maternity leave soon, and I'll be covering many of her duties while she's gone. Fortunately, someone else in my office will then be covering many of my duties, so I shouldn't be stuck entirely in the situation of trying to do two jobs at once. It's a really great opportunity for me, and in many ways I'm really excited for it. I'll get a chance to work in some areas that I'm not currently involved in and fill in some gaps that I feel are missing on my resume right now. But with any new challenge comes new stresses, and the weight of all of those new challenges is suddenly hitting me. I'm also in the midst of training for that position, organizing training materials and training the person who will be covering much of my work, and trying to do all of my regular work at the same time. Yesterday I sat down and plotted out all of my meetings and training times on my calendar, and I discovered that I have about 4 hours free in the next week--to do 35+ hours of work. Yikes.

It certainly doesn't help matters that I'm a bit of a workaholic. Even without all of this crazy added stress, I'm usually at work much later than I need to be. And to some degree, this is pretty common in my field, but I absorb much more work stress than is healthy. I need to find a way to A. be more efficient while I'm at work and B. learn to tell my supervisors when I've reached my limits (instead of smiling and saying "No problem, I'm not sure when I'll have time for this, but I'll make it happen.")

All of this stress has led to a near explosion of baked goods in my kitchen. Some people stress eat. I am one of them. But in particular, I get cravings for baked goods, and homemade is always better than store-bought. So apparently I also stress bake. In the past two weeks, I've made two pans of brownies (one was tonight, so they should last a bit yet), peanut butter chip cookies (those went to work, so we were saved from ourselves), and a batch of butterscotch/chocolate chip cookies. We are suddenly remarkably low on chocolate chips, butter, eggs, and flour. I'm not sure how that happened...

If you're looking for a good brownie recipe, I would highly recommend these Extreme Chocolate Brownies, which I made tonight. The first step is a little putzy, but not hard, I promise. (Okay, third step I guess. If preheating the oven and greasing the pan are too difficult for you, please put down the recipe and go buy some brownies in the bakery at your local grocery store.)

How do you deal with work stress? Any tips to share? Or any recipes for chocolate baked goods?

The one where she comes home late

I start blog posts in my head all the time about work. And then I remember how dangerous it is to write about work. I have all of my clients' stories bouncing around in my head all of the time. I feel like I should write about poverty and intergenerational trauma and systemic dysfunction and transference. But I don't know how to talk about any of these topics without telling you pieces of their stories. Even sanitized of names and personal details it feels too dangerous to talk about.

In the marginally safer world of offline conversation, my work stories sound different outside my office walls. At work, stories that include drug abuse and incest and suicide attempts and prison and foster care sound normal. Outside they sound a lot more intense. I think there's a certain amount of desensitization necessary for doing this type of work. Sometimes though I fear that it holds me back from providing everything that I should to some of the families who need it the most.

This post isn't flowing the way I want it to flow. Perhaps I should have stuck with my original topic: exhaustion. Sometimes it feels like the exhaustion is related to the stories bouncing around in my head is related to the desensitization. Or maybe it's just the 1am bedtimes. Either way, it has been a long week (despite only being four days!), after a few other long weeks. Monday we did the drive back from MA, Tuesday evening we had an insane rendezvous with a lawyer and two other lesbian couples (more on this some other day), Wednesday I worked late and then we socialized at Kara's until much too late, Thursday I worked late again, and now it's finally Friday.

Another worker said to me tonight "I just can't fight anymore," regarding trying to summon the energy to argue with a supervisor about whether to indicate a case. We spend enough time dealing with exhaustion from our own lives and exhaustion from the intensity of the clients' issues. Why do we also have to fight with the system itself to get anything to work right?

Snack Time

My office has an official weekly snacktime. One afternoon each week, we all take a half hour off to sit in the conference room and eat treats while talking about anything non-work-related. And each week, a different person volunteers to bring the snack.

So today we were passing around the sign-up sheet, and one of my co-workers was looking at the available dates in December and said, "Well, I don't want to sign up for the week when Becky might bring in Christmas cookies, cuz who could compete with that?" (It may be relevant background information that last December I made about 10 different kinds of cookies/candies and brought them to our holiday party. This is particularly shocking because New Yorkers don't bake much for themselves as far as I can tell.)

I was like "Whoa, it's not a competition."

And then another co-worker, who obviously knows me far too well, said "Uh huh, she says outloud that it's not a competition, but in her head she's like 'Haha, I totally win.'"

I laughed so hard I cried...which only made the rest of the office laugh even harder. Sometimes work is incredibly stressful, but I'm glad that I work with fun people.