I've always prided myself on being a hard worker and being very thorough with any sort of project I'm working on. I believe that I commit well to my tasks at hand and have a very strong organizational intelligence that allows me to balance a wide variety of projects/tasks at a time, properly triaging the most urgent and handling everything in a time-sensitive manner.
I'm typically able to accomplish this be expending an enormous amount of psychic energy, completely devoting myself to the task list. It's a great if tiring practice at work where all of the mentioned skills, and more, are required to do my job well. Today, I walked into work and was bombarded by one thing after another that all required my immediate attention, needed to be finished ASAP, and no one else could address it.
I got through the day successfully, meeting my goals and (ideally) pleasing both clients and company. I've reached a point where many of my coworkers have grown comfortable trusting and depending on me to do a very high-quality work, and that makes me extraordinarily proud.
But lying down in bed at 3:30 am, I discover the cost of committing so strongly to my job: I can't leave it behind.
This is an issue that has slowly been creeping up on me lately and I keep brushing it under the rug, but as I laid in bed and listened to some old music from years and years ago, I found my nostalgia interrupted time and time again with visions of work. Last night, I fell asleep on the couch after a long shift and dreamt I was right back at work, back in the trenches, never having left.
It's driving me crazy. I can't seem to leave it behind me. I've memorized account numbers and names of all sorts of people; I could probably do half of my work blind-folded since I seem to have memorized it all so thoroughly. I just want to separate from it, but I can't.
When I was younger and I'd obsess over video games, I'd memorize all sorts of little things from them, to the point that I can comfortably play through same entire games in my head (I've done it, too, on long flights or something). Now that same freaky-weird memory is biting me in the ass because I can't seem to shut down the part of my brain that is 'work'.
How do you do that? How can I 'just say no' to thinking about work when I leave? All I want to do is sleep without worrying and worrying and worrying... I don't even work tomorrow.
How can I cure myself of this daily dose of separation anxiety?
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