Searching for that switch on my brain

I left work and got home in the afternoon today. I wasn’t getting anything terribly important accomplished anyway. Something’s off. Something’s been wrong/off since last summer. I remember being extremely productive when I first got here last year. Overloaded on classes, started intellectual work, helping professors out by subbing for them when they couldn’t make it to classes, and a lot of other things. My life was a lot more packed than it had to be, but think I handled it quite well and had fun, while learning a lot. I maintained this level of enthusiasm and efficiency for a couple of terms.

For a while, everything was good. Everything was as it should have been.

Then came summer, the first “off term” I’ve experienced. Suddenly all of that went away, and I had all the time in the world. Now, this is probably a good thing for people who have things to do, but for people like me, it totally isn’t. Apart from doing (or not doing, based on how hard it was) regular research, I had little else to do. I was forced to slow down, to idle. Now work is, expectedly, hard and complicated stuff. And you just can’t spend all your time doing it. It’s even harder when you have little else to take your mind of it and relax. I guess that’s where the Deutsche classes and photography kicked in, but still, they weren’t the same as the previous state of “not having any time, let alone having to worry about what to do with it”.

Few month’s later, it’s midway through the fall term. And I’m unable to make that switch back. I’ve tried overloading myself with classes. Didn’t work, I slowly stopped going to them until I backed off to the “comfortable levels” normal people are at. Work is, obviously, even more complicated, but I can’t do too much about it because I am not able to bring myself to a state of actually being able to sit down for hours on end and stare at things figuring things out.

I’ve even tried the few days break thing. Where I just go away or something and do nothing related to uni stuff for a while. Just hoping I’ll be all rejuvenated and fresh when I get back. Not happening, I am still in the same state.

It’s like, the mental analog of, I don’t know, a marathon runner after a big race? No, more like a regular person after a large marathon where he got so dehydrated, he permanently damaged vital organs?

(I also realize this is probably the reason for my horribly lowered threshold for bearing incompetent nonsense from other people. I’ve been impatient and lashing out more often. I could say I’m sorry, but no, I won’t. I’m not. I was just able to deal with a lot more when I was at a better place. Inherently, you were being stupid, intruding and inconsiderate of my time.)

That’s not important; I just need to get myself out of this slump. I want to be the me I like being. The person who’s too lazy to get things done. (But could, if he wanted.)

Not this other guy who’s just too weak to get things done.