Energy Accounting vs Escape to Monastic Living

You have a couple options when facing extreme exhaustion: make a list or leave behind all your possessions. You're welcome.

Lately I've been thinking about this feeling of overwhelm I've had. Maybe it's from feeling pulled in too many directions, trying to keep up with too many goals and to-dos, or the winter doldrums. Maybe it's a messy combination. But I felt tired. Like the kind of tired you're afraid you'll never recover from unless you quit everything and become a minimalist with one hobby and one friend and like five toiletries, probably. But there was the obvious conflict of caring about more than one person and thing in the world. And as for the toiletries, well, come on now.

So instead of leaving everything behind for a life of monastic sobriety, I started thinking. I thought about what overwhelms me and what I could (but don't) do that might help. Sometimes these things involved creating boundaries for myself or expressing my needs to someone else. It often feels easier for everyone if I would just go with the flow and pretend that everything's fine instead of being weird. Like, there's this fickle meter with an erratic flicking needle inside of me that no one else can see. But I feel its sharp flick out of nowhere and OH SHIT.

An OH SHIT is when something feels off, bad, wrong, too much. But do I say the "oh shit"? Do I say that being touched like that suddenly feels like the worst thing ever, or I really need out of here now, or I need an hour to be by myself for a while or I'm going to feel very bitter for the rest of the night for no apparent reason? Since no one else can see the needle, they're going to think I'm craaazy. (Am I crazy? I feel a little crazy.)

In the midst of all this pondering, I came across an article introducing the idea of the Energy Accounting Activity for autism. I know, it sounds very official. At first I thought that maybe it was some super original idea despite its annoying-yet-very-boring name. But it turns out that the "energy accounting activity" already existed within the realm of organizational efficiency. Explains the boring-ness. Why make this about autism? Well, our energy levels tend to be super sensitive (think invisible meter-sensitive) to the activities in our lives.

Basically, the idea as applied to having limited amounts of personal energy is that you make a list of things that drain your energy on the left and a list of things that restore it on the right. Then you assign numeric values to each based on how much they drain or restore you and assume that you'll have to put back any energy that is zapped in equal measure. In a way, this is really helpful - the list part, at least. It helps me to make a really abstract feeling of hopelessness more concrete and reminds me of all the things that make me feel better that I've forgotten to make time for. It can also help me to express what's going on underneath the visible glacier to people close to me who may not totally get it.

I'm not so much into the numeric values part, though. And I seriously question the wisdom of creating such an exact system for something so inexact for a bunch of people who (excuse my stereotyping) can tend to be very concrete and obsessive. Like, c'mon, the last thing I need is to just need my 32 points for the day, goddamnit. Also, something about taking methods of capitalistic system improvement and trying to use them to express very human emotional problems rubs me the wrong way. (I mean, have you seen cartoons? Those efficiency dudes always come in and fire everyone.) But if we're stripping all this down to making two lists, I'm pretty sure it's such a basic concept that we thankfully don't need to credit its long-ass name or villainy, anyway.

I feel slightly less tired than I did a few days ago. The whole list thing made me feel a little more hopeful and organized, and I did go walk around a pond twice the other day when I got off of work. Pond-lapping, in case you're wondering, has got to be a firm 35.7 points. But time passing usually helps too. Days go by and I feel better than I thought I ever would just a few days before. And that's why I generally try to hold off on embracing the monastic life for a week, at least.