March 10, 2025: Half-way Through Busy Season
I want to kill myself. Not out of self-hatred, but out of exhaustion. I’m too slow at work. I don’t “get” things as quickly as I want to. My skills are lacking. Maybe if I paid attention better in school then my retention rates would be higher. I’m so forgetful nowadays. All my days start to blend together. “You told me that yesterday? That felt like a week ago.”
To make up for my “slowness”, I pay it back with dedication and loyalty. I can’t be slow AND lazy. Pick a struggle. I start working overnight. Some cases I’d be working 36 hours straight. One full day of work with no sleep PLUS the next day’s workload all without stopping. I can’t even have time for my lunch break. I’m too slow. Eating during my break will slow me down. I have to use that time to catch up. I can’t multitask to eat and work, I want to concentrate on finishing my job. Also, I can’t let those valuable hours go to waste. I need to be there when my seniors and in-charges are there so I can use that time to ask them my questions. The work I can do by myself, I do that at night when everyone’s already logged off. I can take my time and have slight breaks. But once my coworker’s Teams’ statuses turn green, I have to rev up my speed and concentration.
Speaking of concentration, that is equally too low. TikTok is too much of a distraction. My phone is too much of a distraction. I wish I could be prescribed Adderall. Instead, at the local market, I saw “OLLY Laser-Focus Gummies” being sold. 2 a day is the directed dosage, but I take however many I need to keep me engaged throughout the day.
Staying up late like this all the time for the past 3 months…how do I do it? Caffeine pills. During the weekday, all I drink is tea. I overdose on caffeine in the night. I spend those hours when everyone is offline to retch it out. My thought process is, I’m unaware of how many milligrams of caffeine my body can personally handle, so I’ll take as many as I wanna and stop when I puke it up. My thought process is, everything I just puked up is the excess, so now whatever I have in my body is exactly what I need for the rest of the day. The caffeine pills make me stay awake, but all I can think about is how tired I feel, so the focus gummies make me lock-in and clear my tired brain fog so I can keep working.
The weekdays are busy sure, but on the weekends I come back to my parents and the sponsored family and they need everything and more. I feel like I can’t rest, so, to escape, I overdose on sleeping pills. The bottle says once per night, but I take 3-7 pills. I don’t want to be awake on the weekend to give my family members even an OPPORTUNITY to ask me for favors. I only stay awake for my regular body functions, but after that I stay knocked out until it’s time to go back to work.
Although I’m scheduled 50 hours a week, I work up to 80-90 hours a week. I don’t even log in that extra time. In my head, I believe that extra time is just making up for the “slowness” I exhibit during my actual working hours. Though it’s not like it changes my pay or anything. Thats what working salary is like. No matter how much I work or how many days I take off, my paycheck is still the same.
On Monday, I pushed myself too hard. I was too careless. A substance abuser. I worked from Sunday 5pm to Monday 8pm. To keep myself awake, I had a Vietnamese iced coffee and shots of concentrated green tea. I only pull out the caffeine pills when I’m tired. I was able to have a rest day on Saturday and slept 20 hrs, so I wasn’t too tired working Sunday to Monday morning. Though, nearing the final hours of the Monday workday, I was feeling the sleepy brain fog, so to make it go away, I took some of the focus gummies. It worked. After about an hour of work, I didn’t want the concentration to weaken so within 30 minutes, I slowly chewed through 3 more. After 2 hours, my brain started feeling weird. 30 minutes later, I was yakking in the bathroom. This usually happened in the office at night. I’ve never puked during actual working hours before, but whatever. On other days, I just throw it up once or twice and it’s normal, and I’m back to work.
3 hours down and I’m still leaving my office room to puke in the bathroom. My head feels weirder. I feel lightheaded, disoriented. Fuck. My house is over an hour away from the office. Can I even drive home in this condition? I’d go to the bathroom, puke, go back in my office to keep working, and 5-10 minutes later, I’d need to go back out to puke again. It felt like a never ending cycle I hated to go throw up. After every session, I felt like I kept getting dizzier. I wanted to just hold it down. For most of my caffeine overdoes, you need to replenish your fluids, and that’s especially what you need after throwing up too much. I downed a cup of water, and it immediately came back out.
Work-wise, I wasn’t making any progress. I had to throw in the towel. After a call to my supervisor, I took the rest of the night and the next day off to recuperate. I hated that. Then it’s like all my efforts and work to clock in for so many hours were wasted. I was working so hard to get AHEAD of schedule, but now, due to my carelessness, I’m going to be behind. I needed my brain to feel normal before I could start driving, so I showered in the office gym. It helped a little. I was on the road for no less than 7 minutes before I felt the overwhelming need to pull off to the side and vomit. I didn’t. I pulled off to a gas station and sat still to push it down. I was scared another puking fit would regress all the progress I’ve made to push the dizziness aside. I pulled into my nearby cousin’s place I was renting at and crashed for a night.
That morning, the entire family was gone. They’re Jehovah’s witness’s or something so probably something to do with that I couldn’t really care to know. My stomach felt uneasy so I stayed in bed and tried not to be so mobile. After about an hour, my sister texted needing to borrow my car. I make a call that (1) I don’t want to be here when my cousin’s family gets back since they’ll be asking me all sorts of questions of why I wasn’t at work and (2) I don’t wanna go back home and let my family know what’s been going on with me. I make the executive decision to go to my sister place and crash there for the day.
On the walk from my cousin’s front door to my car outside, the sun was shining brightly and warmly throughout this icy winter. How long has it been like this? When did it start becoming so much warmer without me noticing? How many beautiful days were there that blindly passed by me as all I’ve been doing was looking at screens and working past midnight? Like a warm mother’s hug, the sun embraced me throughout my brisk walk. I turned the corner, and the edges of my eyes caught a glimpse of a beautiful flower. Not as extraordinary as a rose or lily, and not as simple as a wild dandelion, but just a common pink wild flower. I was about to pass it to make it to my car, but the weather was so perfect and the flower was so beautiful. I had to stop to touch and look at it.
And then, I started to cry. I started crying so much. When you cry, you can usually think about why you’re sad and why you’re crying, but that day was different. I was wailing and sobbing so much, and yet I couldn’t even think. It’s not that I couldn’t think about the reason why I was crying, but my mind just blacked out and all I could do was sob from my tears. I made sounds too painful to ever want to hear again. Weeps so tragic it’d break my heart to ever hear a recording of ever again. “Why am I crying so much? Why can’t I stop?” The only thoughts I could muster up at that time. I pushed my body to keep walking to my car and to trap my weeps in my car to not disturb other neighbors. “I need to stop crying. I can’t continue today in this condition.” In the car, my sobs kept breaking through like there’d be no end.