“I feel like a shark,” I said to a good friend, “like if I stop working, I’m either going to spontaneously die or get super sick.”
I would later learn that the implosion of your immune system after a stressful period or a mad dash to a deadline isn’t unusual and is called the “let-down effect.” The general advice to counter this physical collapse due to professional obligations appears to be to “pace yourself.” Unfortunately, this is as effective as telling a drowning person that maybe he should have learned how to swim. In a perfect world, people would have manageable workloads and ample time to destress. In actuality, we’re left with emotional eating, “revenge bedtime procrastination,” and the let-down effect.
All of which meant that by the last day of 2020, I was overweight, exhausted, and had a killer Tetris score.
To mitigate the damage I was anticipating from the let-down effect, I spent most of the first 48 hours of January, unconscious. That appeared to only delay the onset of a general malaise that triggered another game I’d played all year in 2020: Is it a cold, allergies, the flu, or Covid? Is that muscle soreness from the mere 10 air squats I did or is it corona virus? Am I just unfit or am I actually experiencing a viral infection causing shortness of breath?
Or was it all in my head? While I definitely ate something that my intestines hated in the early days of the 2021, I was almost disappointed in how functional and healthy I was. Like most of 2020, the new year has already thrown a wrench in my plans to be both comatose and unwell for at least four days. I suddenly had a stretch of 48 hours to address basic human needs that had been pushed off to the back burner. It was enough time to do four loads of laundry, write, make postcards, and send long-overdue emails. For that short period of time, I even managed to cut back on the stress snacks, take too many naps, and add to my Tetris score.
It wasn’t what most would think of as an ideal holiday, but it was a couple days away from deadlines and that quietly urgent, completely triggering, tok-tok of Slack alerts. It was a brief yet blissful reprieve from my Japanese willingness to die for a client before I was plunged back into the depths of legal research and case law.
It’s a new year but I’m still propelling myself forwards to stay afloat, a little less glassy-eyed than 2020, but still slightly gape-mouthed, looking cautiously hopeful to the coming year.