Relearning how I learn

Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash

I’ve recently restarted my Dutch course. Half-way through a class, I started questioning whether I was actually any good at learning languages. I realised it was a somewhat farcical thought, considering I’ve been learning languages most of my life. Logically I am rather good at it, since I speak 3 languages fluently and have been learning three others.

To some extent everyone has doubts around their language abilities. That’s just part of the learners journey. Yet there is something about the course structure doesn’t particularly play to my strengths. It’s four hours of class twice a week. I don’t think such lengths of concentration are exactly my forte.

Not only that, the structure feels somewhat hard to follow. We seem to jump from one topic to another based upon a set syllabus. This week we reviewed how people introduce themselves (even though we did that last semester). Next week we are going to talk about volunteering. There doesn’t seem to be any particular logic to any of this, and I can’t help but somehow feel a little lost.

The difficult thing is knowing whether this is confusing for everyone or just for me. I’ve had flashbacks to when I was in primary school. I remember at one point that I was in the top set of Maths class, but my teacher felt I needed a kick of motivation. I was sent down to the second set. Then, wanting to compound the effect further, I was later put in the bottom set. Eventually, I was moved back into the top set but with the idea that this was a proverbial kick up the backside.

I can’t help but be gobsmacked at how I now realise that I had no idea what was happening. Nobody seemed to properly sit me down and explain what was happening and why. I simply followed what I was told. I seemed to have built this reputation of being smart but lazy, yet in reality I didn’t really understand what was going on.

Clearly, neurodivergence was at play. My brain works differently, that is pretty evident. I think I often would start thinking about something and then get caught up in it that I would miss the next part of the conversation.

Yet I’m also very cautious of having this all brushed under the ‘neurodivergent’ tag. I also remember that when I was unsure of something, I was too scared to ask. I remember this once meant that I ended up doing very little during the class, which very much annoyed my teacher.

I was cripplingly timid growing up. This, I think, stems far more from my family upbringing than anything else. Being the youngest in what was a pretty dysfunctional family environment, I generally grew up being scared to ask things. South Asian family culture is also far more strict compared to western ones around respect and deference. It meant that I was still shy and fearful around adults until well into my teens.

Disentangling all these things is pretty tricky. But I’m fairly confident that it was a mix of both things. My brain does work differently which has created additional challenges, but some of these things have been made more dramatic by cultural differences.

Fast forward to today, I’m far better at concentrating. I’ve done a whole lot of work in calming the mind and being more present. So much so that I am a much better listener than many people. But I’m left wondering whether I have become good at these things by heightened compensation of my weaknesses.

It’s why the point about me not being very good at learning languages does have some resonance behind it. I have found my own methods as a way of overcoming heightened difficulty. Much of my language learning I have done in private. I now usually use 1-1 teachers as I find that much more dynamic. I also much prefer spending time with natives rather than following a school curriculum.

In some senses, I know that it doesn’t really matter how I became good at something. Whatever method I use, the result is the same. Yet if I have constantly been using these additional compensatory measures, it helps explain why I’ve had such an implosion in my cognitive functioning in these last few years.

Another interesting point is that my Sanskrit classes feel very different. It is a slower, more thorough pace. I actually find it more rigorous and much easier to follow. Whereas western language learning seems to be rushing to up skill as quickly as possible, my Sanskrit teacher goes by slow, repetition of simpler topics and phrases.

I think our Western style of teaching has become so embedded in following a bloated curriculum that it ends up rushing around. This is rather ineffective for all of us, but I would say tends to be more difficult for neurodivergent and marginalised folk.

I do think we are also partly to blame for this. Most people are not willing to put in the time and effort to learn the more traditional way. Teaching has needed to become more about entertainment than education in order to survive. After all, a gamified language learning app lets people feel good about themselves without having to do the hard yards of grammar tests.

So where does that leave me with my Dutch class? Well, I follow it, and I actually am better at it than I give myself credit for. Whatever difficulty I may have is outweighed by the fact I turn up more consistently and take it more seriously compared to my classmates.

Yet the one thing I need to be careful of is pushing too hard on these compensatory mechanisms. After all, I’m pretty sure that’s what led to my burnout in the first place.

Between discipline and indulgence

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I often go through a period of wondering how to use my time more productively. Since I have time and relatively little responsibilities (aside from keeping myself alive), I sometimes get the impulse that I must do more.

Such thoughts are often a trap. The idea that I need to be constantly working on something is in of itself a toxic cycle. I have to remember that my focus is on improving my health right now, not padding my CV.

I remember some years ago how everyone was saying we should all learn to code. Coding was some sort of golden ticket to wealth and fame. There were lauded stories of people like Steve Jobs who managed it. All you had to do was dedicate night and day and eventually you will find success.

I’m glad I never really bought into this mythology. I think I quickly realised that dedicating your life to something you didn’t enjoy was a pointless misery. The success stories were based upon people who did it out of passion, not out of some sort of cost-benefit analysis. As I’ve grown older,

Even then, it is extremely tough. For every success story there’s hundreds of others who we don’t hear about. I’ve also scrutinised the stories a bit more. Turns out, people like Steve Jobs had far more winding and oft random paths to success than people realise. Times have also changed, and the golden ticket in the end hasn’t turned out to be as golden as we thought. We’ve now come to the point where programmers are being displaced by AI, meaning mass lay offs and genuine hardships.

I admit that I often feel despair towards our modern day situation. Any skill I might dedicate myself towards is due mass upheaval. Although I continue my language classes, jobs in the sector are being eaten away by AI. Likewise, writing and editing work has imploded. Even blogs like this one are being subsumed into proxy wars of social media algorithms, not to mention competing with instantly generated AI slop.

By the end, I realise it’s better not to think about it too much. It’s better to just enjoy doing things. Yet enjoyment is sometimes harder to define than we might think. There’s more to pleasure than a pure pursuit of hedonism. It is actually rather unfulfilling to constantly do things on a whim.

Learning a language for example, is hard. It’s often not fun. Like any skill, it takes as much discipline as it does pleasure. Having structure and a teacher help frame it for me. Looking at how much time it will take to ‘master’ is demotivating, yet learning and seeing my progress has its own particular fulfillment.

Then, there is following the whims of pleasure. Doing what I feel like, depending on my mood. Right now, my ‘pleasure’ time is going to my PlayStation. On paper, this sounds like a frivolous activity that extends to pure escapism. But in practice, I end up finding games that are engrossing either through sufficient challenge or a strong narrative arc.

I’m currently replaying Elden Ring, which is as far away from frivolity and escapism as you can get. Combat is challenging. You will often die to the same boss multiple times. Meanwhile, the world is extremely oppressive and depressing. Completing cryptic quests often leads to the quest giver dying. It’s not for the faint of heart.

In the end, games like this are ones that people like me return to because it manages to keep sustained engagement. If it was too easy, I would have become bored and stopped playing it many hours ago.

Finding such a balance has also put me off reading for the last few months. It’s tricky to find books that feel a good intermediate level. I’m tired of reading personal development books. They can end up being quite generic and superficial, not to mention often very white-washed. Yet my 1000 page book on the history of India feels like self-imposed study. I think I’m better off finding something that has some level of substance, but doesn’t read like a text book. Such a combination isn’t necessarily easy to find, but no doubt exist within the millions of books out there.

When I started writing this article, I thought of engagement as three different categories. The intense: formal education through my language lesson. The mixed level: reading semi-educative books. Then the pleasurable: playing video games without a ‘goal’.

Yet as I’ve thought it through, I feel like the three are actually far more closer than I thought. In the end, most of my pleasures come down to having sufficient (but not too much) challenge and stimulation.

Maybe that is the key to enjoying anything consistently.

A Regression to a Younger Age

Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash

It’s been a strange August. I think it’s been a bit weird for everyone.

Perhaps I’m a nostalgic millennial, but I miss the simpler days of the school summer holidays. Admittedly, my family rarely went on holidays, but at least it felt like a seasonal pause from school work.

August no longer seems to have that feeling of being a real break. Everything seems to be in constant motion. The chase for productivity is winning out against periodic rest.

My life has seemingly regressed to a similar style of living as I had when I was young. Perhaps it’s my way of searching for creature comforts, even if the comforts weren’t all that comfortable. In my youthful summers, I spent most of my time playing video games feeling pretty isolated from the world. My current situation does feel remarkably similar.

I had few friends when I was young. I felt like I was not allowed to have them. My parents, particularly my mother, was perennially paranoid of me spending time with white people due to what she say as their dangerous influence. I grew up in a white majority town, so this ended up being a cut-off from most social contact. My childhood had regular occurrences of interrogation of where I was going, or who I was seeing. I remember that my parents at one point held an intervention because I was out of the house several days during the summer.

I noticed our wider family found kinship through fellow community members and extended family. But my father by my teenage years had become particularly prominent in the community, meaning family visits were really about homage or business. Our home regularly had people visiting. I had no idea who these people were. Aside from surface interactions, they also seemed to have no interest in me either. I learnt to hate family gatherings and functions. I’m not sure that feeling has shifted since.

I was undoubtedly very depressed when I was a teenager. I do not need the benefit of hindsight to realise this, I knew it at the time. I felt no motivation to do anything, and would often just blankly stare out in the distance. Alas, I do not know if the real tragedy was about how I felt or the fact that everyone was too busy to ever notice. The one dangled carrot that was moving away for university at 18. That was the only thing really kept me going.

For a long time, I’ve been wary of touching the subject of childhood traumas. Not out of shame, but because it has become an all too common refrain of Instagram therapy. It seems to be a trend that we blame all of our problems on our parents.

Yet blind obedience, particularly to our parents, is also a way in which such traumas are buried. In Asian cultures (and no doubt others), it is how we end up never really facing the truth. We laud authority figures as great people, turning a blind eye to the bad things they did.

I had managed to get to my thirties before the weight of these experiences forced a breakdown. I think I had gotten so used to these things in my past that I forgot how abnormal such experiences were. I’ve spent many years trying to figure out why everything felt this hard whilst forgetting the fact that most people aren’t carrying this level of baggage.

I think that if I am to genuinely recover from burnout, it means facing these things. It’s no coincidence that I’ve dreamt so much about my childhood over the last few months.

And now, I find myself reliving my teenage years. Time spent predominantly alone. An August withdrawn from the world whilst playing video games to pass the time.

Is the similarity a coincidence, a cruel irony or some sort of necessary spiritual healing? Honestly, I don’t really know.

Navigating The World of DIY Diagnosis

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

I’ve been suffering from constant low-grade nausea. At first, I thought this was a post-heat illness. The recent heatwave hit hard, and I felt an illness coming the day it cooled. But now the symptoms have gone on for numerous days, and I’m starting to doubt my original prognosis.

The result is that it makes my life a misery for several days. I missed several events because I knew my body was not up for it, and managing my eating has been a nightmare. My solution has been to push eating whatever feels easy enough to digest. In that sense, my eating has been replaced to that of a toddler. Fish fingers and oven fries have been the easy, go-to meal.

It’s difficult to have new health issues come up that defy conventional explanation. Going to the doctor seems futile because there is little obvious that can be solved, and within a few weeks it passes anyway. But by that time, some other issue seems to arise.

One other factor has been that I’ve had a new period of intense dreaming. In Ayurveda, dreaming is a sign of processing. This has been happening in waves for the last six months. So whilst I know this is a sign of healing, it also takes out a lot physically. I often wake feeling tired with physical aches.

I remember that I had a dream where I was in my final year of university. Everything was focussed on me preparing for the year to come. I remember cleaning the lounge with my housemates and I recall psychologically gearing myself up for a year of study. When I woke up, I was confused to find myself in Brussels ten years later.

But I think the actual reason for my nausea is something else entirely. My body has been reorienting itself quite dramatically over the last few months. My pelvic tilt has improved quite substantively, even though I have not actively been working on it.

A few months ago I remember noting an improvement, but this was followed by me having dizzy episodes. I even had one moment where I was just on my computer and suddenly needed to throw up. I ended up lying in bed for the next 24 hours because my head was spinning so severely. I think the correction of standing taller actually caused a vestibular episode. My perception was thrown off between my brain’s perception and my eye’s reading of objects from this new height.

Today I recall that I noticed that my hips were naturally starting to engage more. It felt like I was holding myself up better in the glutes, and it meant I could slowly put less pressure on my lower back. It does mean that I felt more space for my spine to elongate.

So my latest hypothesis is that this shift has led to another vestibular episode, though less severe than the one in April. What supports this hypothesis is that going out for a walk does seem to make me feel sicker rather than better.

I’m aware that what I’m describing sounds a little insane. Whilst in an article such as this, I can take the time to explain my reasoning, in a casual conversation I have no such luxury. It is such an uncommon experience that it’s easier to suggest I’m imagining things. Yet there are real studies that exist around vestibular issues, and it is only through pointers from AI that I know that they even exist.

Either way, it doesn’t change the practical solution. Eventually my body will adjust, and the issue will solve itself.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to manage each day as it comes.

The fruits of a slow, consistent baseline

Photo by Barnabas Piper on Unsplash

I’ve been humbled by how much my physical capacities have nosedived. I’ve had to reel back many of my daily activities. This was from an already diminished level compared to my days pre-burnout. I’ve gone from being able to juggle a full time job, evening activities, writing, travel and exercise to having to pick a single activity per day.

What made it particularly tough was that about a year ago I had already hit the worst of it. I had found some level of consistency, and it seemed like I was slowly improving from that point on. But around last November, the ‘real’ burnout seemed to hit.

My sleep worsened. Dreams intensified. Body fatigue massively increased. It turns out that I had only hit the point where I had the energy to do the emotional processing.

The cost to my body has been one of deconditioning, weight gain and random physical pain. I went from doing three sets of romanian deadlifts lifting 50kg (exercises to strengthen the back) twelve months ago to having debilitating back pain from a ten minute walk.

For one reason or another, a positive has been that I’ve spent little time wallowing in self pity. I stopped going to the gym since it became evident that my body was no longer able to handle it. A few months later, I stopped going to dance classes as I started to find even holding a basic posture quite painful.

Over the last few months, my new goal has been to do 5000 steps in a day. The number was somewhat arbitrary, but it was what was already set up on my phone app. If I wanted to get scientific, then around 8000 is probably the most effective amount. But 8000 steps felt too much, and doing that every day just didn’t seem unreasonable.

Truth be told, I thought it would be more temporary. By the end of June, I started to regularly surpass my goal. I even did a hike which meant a day with around 23000 steps. Although I did have some physical pain, I have managed to slowly overcome it overtime.

Yet this last week has demonstrated why having such a low baseline goal was best. I’ve had another wave of fatigue stemming from emotional processing during sleep. My physical capacities were far lower then they were even a few weeks ago. These waves seem to come a little arbritrarily, so it’s not something I can plan for.

Having such a low baseline means that even on the rough days, I can do the minimum. It’s meant that even when I’m extremely tired, I’ve pushed myself a little to get my steps in. Critically, it’s only a little push, as anything further would actually do damage to my body right now. It’s also meant that I can keep up with my goals, even with the ridiculously hot weather we’ve had this summer.

One of the hardest parts has been navigating this all with professionals. My gym trainer would try and push my through fatigue, even when I said that it wasn’t what I wanted. More recently, a physical therapist kept trying to convince me that pains I had from exercises were just typical delayed muscle soreness. It seems that physical regression of my kind is so outside the typical clinical expectation that the assumption is that I must be doing something wrong.

A self created goal is one that I can manage. There is no overly-eager professional trying to push me beyond my limits, nor tell me my own bodily understanding is wrong. It also allows me to structure my day more flexibly, based upon how much energy I have, or commitments that might wipe me out. It also tackles an issue I had with my previous gym routine, where I would essentially push very hard on one day then have days of significantly lower activity. The boom and bust cycle isn’t so good for my current situation.

Whilst I do hope that most people benefit more from healthcare professionals than I have, there is something valuable in building our own independent goals that we control. When we outsource our health and wellbeing to someone else, we bypass the signals of what our body genuinely needs. This is as much the case for nutrition as it is for exercise.

And if we’re making a goal, we may as well make it realistic. A small goal done everyday is better than one large aspiration that never arrives.

The lack of logic in recovery

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

I’ve often wondered whether I will ever get better again, or whether constant fatigue is my new reality.

Logic says that it will. There’s nothing identifiably chronic about my health. Yet logic also dictates that this should have been over by now too. In fact, if everything was dictated by logic, I don’t really think I should be sick anyway.

For every positive marker, there is a countersign which confuses everything. For every better night sleep and blood test score, there is an accompanying new debilitating pain and wave of fatigue. It can be practically impossible to really understand what’s going on. Yet spending more time worrying about it will also make me sicker.

There is something that feels particularly cruel about my situation. I see many people with more chaotic, unhealthy lives that are totally vivacious. They can live without a care in the world, and often can be the ones that love to give advice on how to stay healthy.

I also see people who have taken great liberties with their health and then collapsed as I have done. These folk can often fall into bitterness, disguising their regret for ignoring the warning signs.

After a few years of questioning myself, I’ve come to the conclusion that I didn’t actually do much ‘wrong’. My years preceding burnout was me doing an incredible amount of inner work. My health and fitness were areas I put a particularly high focus. There were no big issues that I was ignoring, or big emotional problems I was hiding in the closet.

Yet despite this, my burnout has taken me down a trek of emotional turmoil, whilst my body feels in its most broken condition ever. Looking back, I’m not sure there’s anything I would have particularly changed. On a sober assessment, I think most things were out of my control.

I’m aware that there are ways to rationalise this. The latest recovery wave is going harder and deeper to the core. Although it may be counterintuitive, this is a sign that my body has the capability to deal with things that earlier on it simply could not. Returning health and vivacity to my skin and nails somewhat back this up. So does literature on the pattern of burnout recovery.

Yet there is also a part of me that wonders whether this is more a fool’s hope, rather than rationalised thinking. Am I wisely putting my faith into the universal law of nature, or am I simply a gambler, constantly convincing one’s self that the pay off is coming soon?

It is one of those moments where the truth doesn’t actually matter a whole lot. Giving up would be dooming myself to a negative option either way, so there is little choice in continuing, come what may.

I am not sure if this stoicism is particularly hopeful. But at least it keeps me going.

On living life without a plan

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I’ve lived my life always planning ahead.

My whole generation had the idea of planning drilled into us. We needed to always know what we were doing next. Anything to the contrary was a failure. To be standing still was to be sinking in quicksand.

I actually rather liked planning. I ended up building career experience around it. A few years ago, I ended up crafting a GANTT chart with somewhat made-up dates on how to get a legislative bill through the UK Parliament in record time. It was planning that gave everyone a sense of reassurance despite the whole project being a terrible mess.

Yet here I sit without a plan. It’s the antithesis of what I’ve been taught and know.

Planning for planning’s sake is a creature comfort in delusion. The truth is that there is little point in planning too much right now, as I have little grasp of where my life is heading. Any time I’ve tried to plan anything, I’ve ended up trying to rush my recovery, and life has hit me hard.

So now my focus is simply taking it day by day. Sometimes there are too many moving parts to be able to actually plan our lives. That’s probably true for more of us than we would like to admit. Coming to terms with the fragility of our lives is too frightening to deal with.

Planning is good when we have a clear goal in mind. There is certainly a place for it in many aspects of our lives. But attempting to plan everything in our lives becomes impossible when we live in such a complex world. With the world changing as much as it is, it’s becoming practically impossible to predict what might be happening in five years time, let alone in twenty.

At its worst, creating delusional plans can end up being harmful. It often gives people a false sense of security, or creates blind allegiance to a truth that never was. Many people fail to see the warning signs that something might be wrong because the idea that their neatly crafted plan going off-track is too scary to contemplate.

In my last job, the idea of planning sounded nice, yet nobody had the discipline to follow it. When a plan got knocked off course, it was far easier to blame external circumstances for the problems, rather than taking a genuine look as to whether things were set up correctly in the first place.

I think there is a level of radical honest in saying that we simply do not know. It’s a statement people are absolutely frightened of, particularly in overly-educated, intellectual circles. We’ve spent so long learning how to sound convincing that we are scared of being ‘found out’ as not having all the answers.

But the truth is that nobody can really have the answers right now when so much is unclear. It’s okay to not have a plan when there is so much we do not know.

Avoiding the trap of overanalysis

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash

I’ve been feeling frustrated with my health. Despite building what is a rather aggressive approach through supplements and powders, it’s hard to see much empirical change.

The first moment I’ll truly know whether things have shifted is when I next get a blood test. My hope is that I can have demonstrably better insulin sensitivity, reduced liver fat and an increase of HDL cholesterol.

In the meantime, all I can do is interpret the subtler signs. My energy is a bit better, and I have been doing more exercise. My eating is objectively better, and I’m generally improving in sleep.

At the same time, I have new woes that have appeared. My knees feel far more delicate with additional walking, and I’ve been consistently waking up with a headache in the mornings. It’s hard to tell whether this is genuine progress when each stage seems to have a new issue crop up.

When I get so caught up in analysing my health everyday, the temptation is to delve ever deeper. I’ve been watching videos, reading books and getting AI interpretations with some attempt to understand what each daily shift might mean.

But at some point, I have to recognise that there are some things that I can’t really know. And to be honest, even if I did, it would probably not change a whole lot anyway. I can vaguely infer that my body is getting better. And even if that’s not the case, my approach is not likely to change right now anyway. Any attempt to push harder will cause more harm than good. I’m better off just letting things be for a while.

It’s a trap that nearly all of us fall into. When we get so caught up in a goal, we can end up making them our whole existence. The irony is that when we focus too much on that one issue, the lack of progress ends up hitting harder and we end up doing much worse.

Of course, recognising the pattern is one thing, shifting the behaviour is another. Although I have experienced such a challenge before, I recognise that this test is probably bigger than any other I’ve had. This challenge to my health and wellbeing spans multiple years, and honestly, despite my imperfectiosn I think I’m handling it better than most people would. Nonetheless, it’s tapping into lifelong difficulties around weight, which has been the one area that I’ve never really succeeded in getting to grips with, despite numerous substantive efforts.

So I’m giving myself some grace. I’ll follow the approach I’ve come up with, then see how it lines up with the next blood test. If I then need to do something different, I can adapt. But there’s little point in fretting on the details on a day to day basis. Even in the most optimistic of scenarios, sizeable, sustained change will take months. Realistically, it may even be years.

I’m better off shifting away from overanalysis and instead focus on living life. It’ll probably be more beneficial for my health anyway.

Playing the game of whac-a-mole in physical recovery

Photo by Carl Raw on Unsplash

‘Do you ever feel like you’re playing whac-a-mole?’

Someone asked me this once. They explained the situation where you try one thing which only partially solves the problem. This then leads to other issues popping up.

It’s a metaphor that has stuck with me, because it describes my experience in many different domains exceptionally well. When I try one thing, a plethora of new moles seem to pop up. I find myself in a perennial battle of reactivity.

I don’t think anything better epitomises this better than my current health challenges. Recently, I’ve been looking to walk more. Unfortunately, at one point walking seemed to cause bad back pain. The back pain led me to go to the physiotherapist for mobility exercises.

Whilst the physiotherapy helped, the practice also led to more phystical fatigue. The fatigue meant that I ended up staying at home to rest. The rest meant that I had deconditioned, so by the time I started walking again, the soles of my feet would start hurting so much it restricted my movement. Eventually, I tried a few solutions, eventually realising that I needed to do certain ankle stretches and replace my old shoes. Now that I’m able to walk more, I’m now starting to get knee pain. It’s like every step has some new weird obstacle crop up.

Most people understand the concept that the body is far more complex than we often describe it as. Yet such an explanation often takes a lot of energy, and often requires overcoming a natural scepticism. For example, I had to strongly advocate that exercise was making me more sick rather than healthy

I feel like this appraoch to trying to solve every issue individually is symptomatic of the overly specialised, interventionist healthcare system based upon the western approach. When everything turns into a problem that must be solved, it can often neglect the bigger picture.

Unfortunately, our whole system is built upon solutions that are made within a ten minute appointment. With such time constraints it’s no wonder doctors must prescribe easy, catch-all solutions. When my GP once prescribed me antidepressents, I had no explanation of it’s effects or what it actually would do. It was instead left to me to research all of this myself. I knew intuitively that they were probably not right, but I took them anyway because my doctor suggested it.

My natural conclusion has been to hone my natural instinct and listen deeper to my body’s signals. ‘Listening to your body’ is a cliché that is oft repeated, and it is not a monolith. But it is repeated because we are in a system that discourages ourselves from doing so.

A slow shift into a more peaceful life

oplus_11534336

It feels like my life is hitting a new equilibrium point. My energy fluctuations feel less chaotic, and basic tasks are no longer feeling like a struggle.

Yesterday, I went to the sea-side on the Belgian coast. I went with a similar group of people to the ones I went with a year ago. It was a nice day, and the ocean waves are always a calming sight.

But what was noticeable was how much calmer I was about life compared to a year ago. Things are certainly not perfect, but I feel like things feel more settled.

In 2025, I felt like I was caught in a whirlwind. I was in a continuous anxious state of how to heal myself, but with little to show for my work. Meanwhile, I was constantly plagued by worry around what I was meant to be doing with my life.

Today, the noise just feels lower. I’ve made peace with a lot of things. Lots of them are probably small, but I think they have now added up enough to be making a substantive impact. I have certainly not figured out the big questions, most notably what I actually am meant to be doing in life. But I also feel less pressed to worry about it.

A big change is that I now feel like I’m progressing. Rather than constantly searching for solutions, I finally think I understand my underlying health problems better. The neurodivergence explaining the chronic tension. I feel like I’ve also found an answer to my perennial weight problems, which stems from very high insulin resistance. I can now actually target it as a problem, rather than attempting general weight loss tactics that were ineffective.

The real world impact is that I find myself strategising around my life far less. The big things like career and work are not worth worrying about until my health gets better. Meanwhile, the moderate improvements mean that I don’t need to be so careful about every aspect of my life, compared to what it was before.

At the beginning of my burnout, I would strategically decide when to go to the supermarket based upon whether I had the energy to get out of bed. As time went on, my capacity increased somewhat. Nonetheless, I still needed to be extremely careful to not overextend and crash out.

Basic things having a higher cost meant that they came with more tension. There was far more pressure for basic social events to be ‘worth it’ because they took so much energy. When I went to something that didn’t feel good, it ended up hitting harder because of how much energy it took.

As time goes on, this barrier to entry is slowly decreasing. I can go without a sense of expectation. Life is a lot easier without worrying about such things.

An important factor is that I’ve cut out areas that have given me consistent friction. Social settings where there’s either always some level of drama, or where I feel like something is of. I think I’ve dearly underestimated how big of an effect that has had on my health over the long term.

It’s probably why I also feel more confident that this moment will be a genuine recovery signal rather than a single positive blip. In the past, a good moment often was followed by one where I felt like I was getting dragged back down. Now, I feel like I’ve removed a lot of the things that would have that negative effect, whether internally or externally.

Still, it’s important to be patient. Walking passed important-looking people in the EU quarter is a big reality check. Their busy hustle and bustle is not something I can currently do, and certainly not five days a week.

Yet If the next few months are simply slow and peaceful progress, I’d be ever so grateful for it.