avoiding responsibility by Anika H. '26

I’m not hosed

I’m no longer neck deep in school work, and I finally have a manageable workload, but I have spent the past few hours doing nothing in particular except think about all the things I need to do. They’re not even big things, just little chores here and there. Like taking my clothes out of the wash, sending emails, cleaning up my room for CPW, running a quick setup test for a UROP, filling out a when-to-meet, things like that. And since I’ve gotten absolutely nothing done today, instead of being reasonable and going to sleep, I’m going to write this in one sitting so I can feel like I didn’t just waste my entire day.

 

Some Initial Dissection

After crawling my way to the freedom of spring break, I expected to feel refreshed, ready for a round three. But it’s not happening. I wouldn’t quite call it mental exhaustion. That’s already happened, and it’s gone now. It feels like my brain is constantly on pause, like it’s an intermission in between two acts of a play that’s lasted too long. Where did the actors go? So I go on eating through the bottom of my bag of popcorn, imagining what might happen next, what I’m supposed to do tomorrow. My lack of focus causes stress, and the stress is in turn distracting.

 

 

Inertia

It occurs to me that every physical and mental process has a bit of inertia involved. Starting to push a boulder is difficult, and stopping it is equally as hard. The same goes for much that happens in your brain. Take sleep for example. If you take a 15 minute nap, it’s a lot easier to wake up and go to class than it is after getting a full 8 hours of sleep. Your body has gotten comfortable in it’s state of unconsciousness, and hauling yourself up is like trying to shove the boulder to roll from a standstill. If you’re working it’s a lot more difficult to start an assignment than it is to continue working on it when your pen has already started moving.

In my case, I’ve spent too long in the transition time between lab and starting my next task. I spent too long trying to decide what to do next, and because I got “comfortable” in my dilemma, tricking myself into thinking that flicking through my hundred tabs is productive, I procrastinated. It’s not even the usual “I’ll do this tomorrow” thing, it’s “I’ll start in 15 minutes, right after I read my messages”. Just like that, 2 hours passed. A similar pattern repeated for the past three days.

I realize that my current issue is that the mass of whatever ball of responsibilities I’m rolling is increasing in mass without increasing in volume. I haven’t gotten more work, but my hardware is reacting otherwise. It’s taking longer for me to wake up to an alarm, and I’ve hit the snooze button more often than I did first semester. The going to a dining hall feels like more of a time commitment than it used to. I gained a higher tolerance for low effort, and I’m scared that it might start to form habit.

Just, somehow, inertia increased.

 

Why?

So what’s exactly happening? I wish there was a different, more easily resolvable answer, but it’s probably burnout, as is the answer to most of my “why is this happening to me” questions I’ve had this year. Unlike what people tend to think, burnout doesn’t disappear after a week or even two-week long break. It generally takes months to fully recover from burnout. It’s not like physical activity, where it takes only hours to regain your stamina after running a marathon and only days for your muscles to stop being sore. Recovery needs inertia as well. Once you start lightening the load, your hardware tries to hang on to that feeling, even working against your software— what you want to do, to get there. When you sleep 3 hours a night for a week and suddenly get 8 hours the day after the midterm you were cramming for, it gets so much harder to do sleep that little again.

 

Keep burning lmao

However, even though some people know that they’re burning out, that what they’re doing to survive academically isn’t sustainable, we do it anyways. Many hold the mindset of “there is nothing else I can do to get to my goals” and employ the solution of “suck it up.” I for one, despite my writing, tend to gaslight-gatekeep-guiltrip myself into doing more work. Unfortunately, there is not much girlbossing involved in fighting burnout. I’m still deciding what to do with myself. Sometimes, it almost feels like I have too much agency; there’s no one but myself to keep me in check. But given the option, I’d still choose to continue doing my little clown dance and kicking the boulder, partially to satisfy my ego, and partially to remind myself the little work I do is still a result of my own motivation.