Feeling bored, impatient and restless

A particular stage of my burnout and long Covid recovery

(This is an audio version of this letter, recorded by me, imperfectly and without editing. I hope you enjoy listening.)

Hello, I’m Philippine and to be honest, I feel like a beginner at life – I am forever trying to make sense of it. You can find my attempts at this, plus reflections, musings and experiences right here, in my newsletter. Subscribing is free! For everyone who feels like a beginner at life, and wants to connect in some way.

I seem to have arrived at this strange stage of burnout and long Covid recovery where I get bored a lot. I want to do more, and I am doing more, but my mind is impatient anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve experienced plenty of boredom over the last few years of illness, but there’s something different about this new kind. Before, I was either so exhausted that I could hardly feel how bored I was, or at the very least it was blindingly obvious that I couldn’t do anything about it due to my severe lack of energy. And it was this fatigue that mostly got my attention, the boredom less so.

But now, the exhaustion is less overwhelming, and the boredom much more. Whilst watching telly used to be something I could hardly do (if I did it was just Friends on repeat and not for too long, because my fried brain couldn’t handle anything else, if that), I now feel restless just sitting on the sofa watching telly in the evenings. It feels uneventful, plain, unfulfilling, a waste of time. I want to be out in the world, connecting, living. I’ve started working again (part-time, but still), seeing friends more, and the like, but it doesn’t feel enough.

I suppose that this is actually a good thing. For it must mean that I have more energy. The solution seems clear then, just do more things, go out, meet people. Yet it’s not that easy. My energy has definitely increased (and I need to remind myself of how amazing that is), but it’s not fully back and I do need to be careful.

Moreover, what my life looks like hasn’t yet caught up with this energy increase. In other words, my life doesn’t quite fit my current energy levels. Wow, that sounds like an absolute dream to my past sick self: more energy than is necessary for the life I’m living. My current self, however, is impatient. She feels bored and unfulfilled.

I want more, but I haven’t fully figured out how to make that happen yet. And the irony is that I don’t always feel motivated to actually make that ‘more’ happen. Perhaps because I lack a clear direction. It feels as if there’s a certain randomness to what I do – as if I’m preparing for something unknown, meaning I haven’t a clue whether there’s any point in what I’m doing – and so I feel less inspired to act.

Furthermore, no matter how strange this may sound, I’m just not used to this anymore – how do you live with energy? Although really it’s more complicated than that: how do you live with some energy (I’m still not fully recovered, not to mention the fact that of course no-one has unlimited energy)?

I suppose that what I need to do is simply embrace this liminal space. I wrote about that a while ago – the cool thing is, though, that this is a completely new kind of in-between than I was at back then. That’s how much I’ve recovered within that time already.

And during this transitional period I can gradually build my life – pretty much from scratch, which is kind of wild. Unfortunately I can’t, or at least shouldn’t, force or rush that. So I’ll need to accept this and my related impatience, restlessness, and boredom.

It appears then that I need to learn to sit with two kinds of seemingly contradictory kinds of discomfort. Being with that impatience, restlessness and boredom, simply allowing it without trying to fix, and nudging myself to just do things, even when I don’t feel motivated, and to move outside of my comfort zone, allowing the accompanying discomfort.

The first is perhaps one of the last lessons my burnout is trying to teach me, that I need to learn in order to fully recover. The latter is what I need to retrain in order to fully reintegrate into life, since the mental muscle responsible has weakened during these years of serious, yet absolutely necessary, underuse.

I suppose that in each instant I need to start with the discomfort that is already there, and only when I’ve (at least somewhat) accepted that, can I move onto the second kind, doing something anyway, taking my agitation with me into the activity, rather than diving into something as a means to get rid of it.

This way, hopefully, I can rewire my brain, gain strength in my accepting and nudging muscles, find a new way of being and acting – learn to live again.

Does anyone relate to these feelings? I’d love to hear your story.