December 23, 2024 4:20 AM
to make my cup a little emptier
It's 4 a.m., and I'm wide awake. No, I'm not playing Scrabble. I'm just unable to sleep. I just have a lot of thoughts swimming in my head, and I've had a lot of thoughts swimming in my head all year. This would probably be a good time to write in my diary, but let's be honest, these days I can write maybe three sentences on paper before my hand starts to hurt.
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Inability to sleep is a thing that's plagued me every so often since the start of the pandemic, and whenever it happens, it just drives me crazy, and I feel so much envy for people that can just sleep their problems away. I have never been able to sleep my problems away. My anxiety rises because I have work the next day, or I need to be up early for an appointment, or I need to make a long drive and I know I will struggle to stay awake during it. Or I'm just really really upset and I've been crying, and my nose gets so stuffed up that it prevents me from falling asleep.
But I'm not upset tonight. For the first sleepless night in a while, I feel...a little bit of comfort. I had originally planned on taking PTO tomorrow to drive to see family on the other side of the state. But my plans changed over the weekend, and I'm driving out later in the week instead. I figured if I'm not driving tomorrow, I might as well work, right? At least that's what I've always told myself. I have things in work that I want to get done, so working more days will get them done sooner. I only take days off for official vacations or for making long drives. I have to rack up my PTO days because I've already used so many.
Except I don't have to. I'm leaving my company in a few weeks. I can just hand my work off if I don't finish it. I have more PTO days accrued than are even available to use before my last day. My brain wants to say that I'll squeeze out a little more money if I get paid out in more PTO days at the end of the year. But I don't need to. I can just...take the day off. Especially because I already planned on doing that.
So I don't have to work tomorrow. And while I do have to make a long drive later this week, my partner will be with me, and I'm realizing that just the presence of one other person in the car with me has calmed so much of my usual anxiety.
So it's okay that I'm awake. And maybe if I write down some thoughts, maybe my cup will empty a little.
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All my life, I've felt travel anxiety. I'm always worried that I'm both packing too much stuff and not enough stuff at the same time. I can never pack the day of. It's too stressful. I already use the bathroom a lot and I use the bathroom twice as many times if it's the day I'm travelling.
What if I'm making a long drive and the weather is bad? How am I going to stay awake? Am I going to make it on the plane on time? Will the TSA agent get annoyed at how slow I am?
So I've slowly learned better ways to cope with this. I generally try to be as frugal as possible when I spend money on myself, but I pay extra to make the trips better. I never travel and do other things on the same day. A travel day is only a travel day for me. I will put my travel as smack in the middle of the day as posible, so I don't have to worry about waking up early or driving at night. And I will pick whatever flight minimizes my time en route to my destination.
I've learned to always buy refundable plane tickets and hotel rooms. Before this year, I would always, always pick the cheapest option available. And that usually meant no refunds. But I have been burned by this too many times. I've had trips canceled last minute, and then uncanceled the next day. And it's not just trips that I take with my partner. It's trips to see my sister. It's even trips for my dad. Each change of plans still puts me into a shock.
But maybe one day traveling won't seem like such a big deal.
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I had my usual dental appointment a few months ago.
I've always had bad teeth. It's my genetics. I know some people that often forget to brush their teeth, never floss, neglect to see a dentist for years, and when they finally do, their teeth are actually fine. If I don't brush and floss my teeth every single day, I will have a cavity. Even when I take care of my teeth, if I'm not having my every-6-month cleanings, I end up having a cavity. And yes, I have so many fillings.
I must have had a string of years in my childhood where I wasn't going to the dentist, because I remember having my first dentist appointment in a while some time in fourth grade. I was so incredibly nervous about it, and I ended up needing fillings on at least four different teeth. I had followup appointment after followup appointment. I was legitimately (but irrationally) worried that my teeth would fall out. I don't have that worry now, but I still get nightmares about it sometimes.
I was pretty good about brushing my teeth daily after all of that, but once I went to college, I wasn't able to go to the same dentist regularly. And then I graduated college, and I wasn't going to the dentist at all. I finally did find an "adult" dentist, but by the time I had my first appointment, it had probably been a year and a half since my last cleaning. So I had several cavities.
But man, I was really diligent after that. And the dental hygienists would remark to me about how clean my teeth looked. How they could tell that I brushed and flossed, and that they really didn't have to do much for my cleaning.
So as I'm sitting in that dentist's chair a few months ago, with the hygienist taking so much time to clean every tooth and every crevice, I could tell it wasn't good. My dentist asked me if I flossed every day, and I got that look of slight skepticism when I told him I did.
And he asked me if I was wearing a night guard, because he told me I should be wearing one the last time I saw him. I tried, I really did. But I guess I gave up too quickly. He told me to keep trying.
I can only bring a horse to water. I'm not going to make it drink. But you're doing irreparable damage to your teeth. It's only gonna get worse.
There's no followup work needed today. But things are happening.
I know I haven't been as good about taking care of my teeth this year. Maybe I should have felt relieved that I didn't need a followup appointment. But I just felt so dejected.
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2024 is not my year.
That's what I kept telling myself on so many of my walks from my apartment to Aldi. But I kept pushing on, taking it one day at a time. One task at a time.
One of my cousins visited me about a week ago, and I made coffee for him one morning. I normally make just one cup for myself, but I obviously had to double everything to make coffee for two people. My mind must have been somewhat on autopilot because I left my single-serving mug in the coffee maker rather than the coffee pot, and shortly after I turned it on, the mug was overflowing, and the coffee was spilling everywhere.
That mug is my brain. I can really carefully add a drop of liquid to it and it will form a meniscus and it will be okay, but one sudden movement and it spills. It spills and I freeze up and I don't know how to handle a small request to look into something, and I get too bothered at work by the little things, and I see my family's desire to add fun activities to the holiday gathering as just another burden.
And I literally spill. I am spilling out water because I tear up and if I let my guard down I start crying.
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My glass of water may have started to empty out a little towards the end of 2023, but by the first week of 2024 it was full again. My little sister was dealing with a lot and she would call me often. And I would always drop everything to speak with her. It didn't matter if it was the middle of the work day or the middle of the night. If I heard her call, I took it.
My dad would often email me asking if I could read over something he got in the mail. Or he would need to do something insurance related and wanted my help. Or my aunt would ask me for help on some paperwork. It seemed like once I got done one task, another one would quickly come up.
It's not like there's one big thing that's bothering me. It's a lot of little things. Feeling burnout from my job. Dealing with paperwork and phone calls for my family. Worrying about my relationship. Not taking care of myself and dealing with the health consequences. I got sick twice in the first three months of the year. I got sick again later in the year when I caught COVID. I haven't gotten sick this often since I was a child living in Virginia.
And it feels like there are so many things that happen that are out of my control. Verizon grossly overcharges our phone bill five months in a row and I give them phone call after phone call just to get that fixed. My car tire gets a leak and needs to be replaced and I'm standing in Pep Boys and they're swamped with maintenance requests and I'm freaking out because I need to drive home the next day.
But the one thing I feel like I have total control over is my job. I'm good at my job. I make decent money. I even like a lot of the people I work with. But it takes up so much time of my week. And no matter what I do, and how much work I get done, I always have this feeling of needing to do more. I have six different tasks happening at once, and I'm still worried that I'm not getting enough done.
I know it's a me problem. I'm terrible at the whole "work life balance" thing, and it unfortunately just feels like it's in my blood. Even if I have the option to work part-time, I don't think I'd be able to work less. It's like, I'm all or nothing. So I'm choosing nothing. I want to regain some control over my life and give myself time to just do things that I want to do.
A couple of weeks after my company's annual in-person meeting, I took a look at my finances. I look at my finances every month or so just to see if I'm making progress towards retiring. And after I ran through some numbers, I thought, "I can do this". I had a 1:1 with my boss' boss a week later and that's when I told him I wanted to leave the company at the end of the year.
I honestly don't know if I have enough money to never work again, but I know I can take a long break and still be okay.
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My brain just seems so filled with knowledge about California property taxes and insurance. I guess everyone needs insurance so I've gotta know some things about it, but I don't own property. I never want to own property.
And yet, it doesn't even seem like I have enough brain capacity to know all the things I should know about property taxes. I'm convinced that a single human brain cannot comprehend all of the complications of the California property tax revenue and taxation code. At work, they talk about wanting to build up more Subject Matter Expects (SMEs) in different areas. I think I've hit my limit in SME areas though. If I try to learn about a new domain area, I'm inevitably going to forget my knowledge in another.
I used to remember everything I did at work. Maybe not all the details of every ticket, but I remembered what projects I worked on. I generally remembered what issues I had to look into, even if I couldn't explain them as well later. But that felt like it changed this year. Just a few weeks ago, I was looking into a warning message that our application was producing, and I stared at the line of code that caused it and I thought "What the heck is this??" After I looked through our code's git history I realized that I was the one that wrote that line in the first place. I wrote it three years ago and I had no recollection of it at all.
I also noticed that one of my coworkers was asking for help diagnosing an alert. I looked at it and thought "I have no idea what this is about". Eventually he ended up determining that it was a known issue that we had already documented. And I was the person that filed the original ticket to document the issue not even a year ago! I was trying to troubleshoot another problem that turned out to be an already known issue where I had specifically already commented in the ticket that proposed to fix that problem.
These situations keep popping up more and more at work, and I will be relieved when I can expel all of the property tax knowledge from my brain. Because I really do love learning, and I need more space for other subjects.
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My motivations for wanting to retire early weren't always like this.
It only took about six months into my full-time job to start to really feel dissatisfied and bored. I had a nice cubicle, but I kind of hated it, and I was starting to regret my decision of getting a software dev job right after college. This can't be what my life is going to be like for 40 years. I missed college. I seriously considered applying to grad schools.
What ended up happening instead is that I heard about the idea of early retirement. The FIRE movement. I read all of Mr. Money Mustache's blog and I was hooked. At the time, it was really just some extra goal to keep me motivated enough while I was still working my normal job.
But it kind of worked. And I got better at my job, and I grew to have a desire to do even more. I eventually even started enjoying work.
But...you know what happened next. I kept working more and more. I originally wanted to retire early out of boredom, but as the years went on, often I would say "I need a break".
But if it were just that, just needing a break, that's all I'd do. I'd take some time off to get refreshed and then go back to work. It's not just that though. I want to do so many things. I took a two month sabbatical from work, and it was amazing.
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I'm going to hit my 10 year anniversary at work on January 5, and then I'm going to leave a few days after. I'll admit that I still feel anxious about my decision sometimes. What if I'm making a huge mistake? People think that I've planned this out meticulously and done a lot of math, but I really haven't. I just set a goal nine and a half years ago, and I told myself I had hoped to work ten years and be done. So the ten year mark just feels right. And contrary to how people may see me, I'm much less about numbers and way more about gut feelings.
And my gut says that it's time.