I am a freelancer who works every day with various work loads (hey, wonder why my posts are so sporadic?). While the lifestyle suits me, for the most part, it is incredibly stressful and I am also a perfectionist, people pleaser, with high anxiety around finances and social networking (difficult, if you have to convince people to hire you). Recently I read about leisure sickness – when a person gets sick on weekends or vacations, because they live a high-stress work-oriented life and have trouble relaxing. I experience this like clockwork (get sick at the same time every year, when I usually have my only break), and my theory is also that my body is in such high-stress mode that it only ever makes time to fight whatever flus and colds I’ve accumulated when I’m not working – and it can finally pay attention to things such as the harmful microbes in my body.

Needless to say, I am constantly burned out – and every few years, I am where I am now – on the edge of panic every day, waking up each morning shaking and anxious, feeling unrested but unable to sleep. Some of my more poor habits (like doom scrolling) certainly contribute to this, but doom scrolling is also one of the most sure-fire ways to dissociate from the constant heightened state I exist in. 

The last time it got this bad, I had just started to cancel some of the work I had been hired to do, and then the pandemic hit (in the field I work in, this led to an immediate pause on all projects while various industries worked themselves out). Unlike many, the pandemic coming was a relief at first – I was free from my endless work obligations, and it was not even my fault or something I did. This was the first time I really paid attention to just how unhealthy my life had become, and to be honest, I’m still very much the same way. However, I was very very very lucky in that I was able to find a therapist to work with who offered a sliding scale I could afford – a miracle in this healthcare hellscape. 

The fact of the matter is one of the biggest beneficial changes in US healthcare would be a shift from a “treatment” mindset to a “preventative” mindset, which necessitates a shift away from the for-profit model. Treatment for diseases is much more lucrative for health insurance companies than preventative care, as preventative care reduces a person’s need to pay for treatment of illness as they don’t get sick as often or as badly. Health care cannot be a free market for-profit industry, or really any purely for-profit model, because there can be no good healthcare outcome because of it. If profit is the drive, then there is no incentive to offer cheaper care because when your health is in danger, there is no luxury of shopping for better care. When you have a heart attack, what you’ve got is what you’ve got. When you’re diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, you don’t have time to hit up all the insurance companies and see which one will offer you a better price for care (not to mention, until Obama’s Affordable Care Act, those companies could turn you away for your pre-existing condition). 

In addition, most companies and jobs will work you to death if they could, and even as a freelancer, I have to balance how much I need to work in order to make ends meet with how many times I’m going to burn myself out in my life so much that a pandemic feels like relief. The first time I experienced burnout was in college, the next time was when I returned to school a few years later for grad school, and then after I had been building my freelance career for a few years. Each time, the number of years between burnouts has shortened. Each time, the symptoms of my burnout are the same bur more – each day there’s a background hum of panic in my bones, each day I can’t sleep from the anxiety but the lack of sleep makes each day even harder. I am starving all day but have no energy and little time to eat, my entire body hurts even though I have no clear injuries, and every extra amount of stress turns my inner self into a rage beast (which I have to then hide from everyone around me, because nobody deserves to be around a rage beast). I’m sure some will say it’s self-inflicted, but what do you do when you work in a high-cost-of-living area (because that’s where your industry is), and even when you work every day, often 12-16 hour days, you don’t quite make enough to have any hopes of truly retiring one day, and have become so isolated that, despite everything, you made a blog so you can have somewhere to put your feelings into the world – even though you probably shouldn’t, because you don’t really have time. 

This cannot stand. I am tired of watching my friends and family work too hard for too little. I am tired of working so hard for so little.