I'm interested in one of those prepositions in particular these days - that is, burning out. Dealing with burnout is never an easy thing, even for otherwise healthy and well-adjusted people. Throwing something like bipolar disorder into the mixture makes it an extremely tricky issue.
Originally, prior to treatment, my bipolar episodes cycled with abnormal rapidity - I could shift from being wildly manic to deeply depressed in literally a matter of a few hours. One of the easiest ways to recognize an episode was to sleep it off; if, after napping for a couple hours, I felt different, chances are it was a bipolar spike.
One of the biggest effects that treatment has had on my symptoms is to slow down the cycling drastically. I now take several days to fully swing through an episode, although thankfully I've been largely symptom free for several months now.
At least, I hope so.
In the past couple of weeks, I've been grinding to a halt. My energy levels have dropped through the floor. I don't want to work on anything. I don't care about much. Aside from vegetating in front of Battlestar Galactica or Starcraft, I barely do anything outside of work.
And even work has suffered tremendously. My output has slowed down to a trickle. I find it difficult to focus for long, and lack the motivation to tackle any nontrivial problems. The result is a lot of false starts, tiny and insignificant efforts to assault major challenges.
I'm not hacking in my free time like I used to. After the brief burst of interest in Epoch, I've almost completely neglected the language, to the point that I don't really clearly remember what I was last working on.
For most people, this would just be classic burnout. The symptoms and causes are easy to recognize. I feel stifled and cramped in my current apartment, which is a large part of why I've been looking into moving out into a bigger house. I feel unmotivated and drained, with minimal support from a team who is all caught up being ridiculously busy on other issues. Worst of all, I've questioned my desire to even work in the computer field - which is a drastic step for me; computers have been my passion since age six.
Usually, there are stock solutions to burnout: exchange projects if possible. Change the working environment as much as can be done. Take a serious break. Look for communication breakdowns with teammates and coworkers.
Exchanging projects isn't an option; we don't have any other projects to work on, at least for the time being. The downside of being a small studio is that all the eggs lie in a single basket.
Changing my work environment is difficult. In a single-bedroom apartment, there's not much that can be done to rearrange furniture or the like. And although I am working on getting a house, that takes a lot of time - and, problematically, introduces a host of stresses all its own.
Taking a break sounds deeply attractive at the moment, but I fear that I'd end up feeling guilty partway through, and return to work prematurely. I've always had problems disciplining myself to get away from work, which ironically overall lowers my quality of work because I cook my brain too quickly.
Communication and support are just going to be permanent problems; it goes with the territory of working remotely. I can't lean over to the next guy and have him pair-program with me to solve some difficult issue. I can't sit down with the art team and have them directly evaluate the results of the procedural content generation stuff I'm working on; I have to wait days for them to get a free minute to read through my emails and respond. The whole setup is just fraught with teamwork landmines.
But the difficulties in treating vanilla burnout are not my biggest worry. By far the thing that concerns me the most is that this may not just be burnout, but rather the doldrums of a particularly nasty depressive episode. The medication has slowed down my cycles to the point where I can't just sleep through the worst of the symptoms; so if this is truly born of the disorder, I'm stuck in it for the long haul.
I know, deep down, that working in such a high-pressure industry - and in particular in such an awkward working arrangement - poses a serious risk for me. I take the chance every day of aggravating a serious and powerful disease, merely by showing up to work. It's less physically obvious but no less real than watching your lungs slowly eaten alive by coal dust, day after day in the mines.
But regardless of that danger, I'm not yet ready to let go of the career that I love. It may be a brutal struggle indeed, but I'm here to stay.
I just have to figure out how to survive without destroying my health and sanity along the way.
One thing that might help is striking up a physical hobby. Micheal Atiyah I believed once said that if you have a mental job then relax with tennis and biking. If you have a physical job then relax with chess.
Perhaps taking up yoga, gymnastics or similar may help. You would be leaving your apartment, possibly meeting new people and releasing endorphins from the physical activity. All these count as a the proper type of change of environment that would allow you to attack problems with a fresh more motivated mind. I think.