That Mushy Brain

I can't wait to have some autopilot at my job.

I still love it a ton, but I still feel like I know very little. The application support borders on coding which I haven't done since high school. The business aspects of the job are understandable but out of my range of innate abilities.

Basically, I dread signing in every day because my brain hasn't recovered from the previous day.

I miss having 3-4 hours of my day where I could go on autopilot because I knew what I was doing. Right now, it's still 8 hours of new information. I actually don't know if I've ever had to concentrate for that long of a time.

My previous job, even when I was learning it, there was downtime between calls. I would come home tired, but not completely destroyed like I am now. I maybe had to concentrate 5 hours when I first started in tech support and browsed video game forums in between calls.

College, I maybe had to concentrate 3 hours a day if I had a heavy 3 class day.

High-school, hell, besides math, Spanish, and maybe a few science classes, I could auto-pilot the crap out of history, English, health, social studies. So besides having to wake up at the ungodly time of 5:45 am, it wasn't so bad. I maybe had to engage my brain for 2-3 hours a day.

And elementary school before that was was breeze. I was usually done with my work by 10 am, free to leisurely read in the bean bag chairs.

But right now, 8 hours is brutal. I can't wait until I just know a few things, just so I can run with something and with minimal brain effort get it done.

I miss wanting to do my hobbies outside of work.

Brewing, I really had to push myself to do that this weekend and I'm still exhausted from it.

Haven't written anything outside of a blog in nearly 4 months.

Even video games, a hobby where I can slouch down, drink coffee / beer, and save the world with relatively minimal effort has been hard to do.

There are times where I start fearing that I'm slipping into an early mid-life crises. I start thinking, I may never have the energy to push myself to do something awesome again. Is this what there is? Is this what that angry, trapped feeling 15 year old couldn't wait to have access to?

I turn 32 next week. 32! I thought for sure I would be a cartoonist, a musician, a great American writer by now. I felt like I had the talents but never developed them enough. Never pushed them enough. But I never felt it was the end of the line on those until recently, and that scares me.

But I know it will pass. Everyone I've talked to says it is really hard for six months and then it just sort of clicks. It's really the thing that keeps me coming back because I really do like my co-workers, I liked the company, I can believe in the company, but my brain constitution just wants to give up and let me go work at a Chipotle... because they have some dope burritos and that would be the easy way.