You went to the meetings, you shipped, and there was silence. At some point you noticed you couldn't remember much of the morning's work, that's probably been happening for a while.
You are doing it.
Your inbox doesn't have a single chasing message from your client or your boss. Your name is on the work, no question about that, but right now you couldn't name it as yours, exactly. That might have shifted today, or ten days ago. You just don't know.
You leave.
The feeling that should be worry isn't worry. It's a flatness, and it stays for the evening. You sleep on it, the way you're supposed to, and in the morning it's exactly where you left it. Then it starts again.
You've got the incognito window open to look it up.
The first thing you find says burnout, that the flatness is your mind protecting you, it lifts when the load lightens. You read it and there's no lift, no celebration at having found the answer. Just the flatness, asking when.
The second thing you find uses the word dissociation.
It describes what you've been feeling almost exactly, the going through the motions, watching yourself do it. It says this can be a condition in its own right.
Both could be describing your Tuesday.
They could be describing your Friday or your Monday too. But you realise they're not describing the same thing.
When you're going through the motions at work and nothing quite explains it
Burnout shifts when the pressure drops. Dissociation has its own questions and its own flow diagrams to measure yourself against. A bit of self diagnosis couldn't hurt right now?
You didn't expect a third.
The charts throw one up anyway, and it's depression, which you weren't looking for and now have to think about. With that going on it might make sense to book yourself in with a GP and have a well-paced conversation about what you're feeling and have found. Chances are medication or talk therapy will come up too, or both.
Something else to think about, new labels that the flatness, well, just flattens.
There might be an answer in here in between the GP conversation and a week of Tuesdays. Not much is clear but something starts to take shape, this could be a mix of all three labels. If that's the case, how do you do something about it other than carry on as before, in a cycle of rinse and repeat?
The talk therapy conversation means you could be in a room trying to talk about flat, talking about the cinematic boredom of watching someone like you do something that you thought you did?
There isn't a flow chart for that and it isn't an online test.
There is a decision edging forward about being a person who can say I can talk about this flat film of a life I've been living.
If that holds perhaps you can think about something as simple as the nudge you're feeling.
It's not a question, just two words flattened, what next.