In the past few years, it’s become crystal clear to me that time doesn’t work the same for everyone. Hell, time may not even work the same within the same person in July as it does in October. However, being unable to function on the standard capitalist clock frequently disrupts the livelihoods of all stripes of people, especially trans survivors.
The rules of the standard clock are usually unquestioned until you start running into them: morning being superior to night, the 9-5 rhythm, the prioritizing of specific timezones, the disregard for seasonal patterns outside of state holidays, and more. And when you’re experiencing something new, whether that’s an illness, mental health condition, or otherwise, having the information to make the best use of your likely limited and distressed time can make the difference between being able to recover or not.
For this post, I want to narrow in on different ways I’ve coped with having a rhythm that doesn’t work in the rules of the standard clock. For context, I am someone who has seen a lot of different “symptoms” that would be classed as “mental health crises” and moves through them (now! It didn’t start like this) with a level of ease and clarity about what is happening and how to deal with it. I’m also Black, a woman of trans experience, a survivor, am self-diagnosed autistic & have chronic health conditions. This is me sharing from my limited experience and may not be applicable to you and shouldn’t be treated as expert advice, professional or otherwise. In essence, these are tips I wish I could give my younger self. But if you want to seek professional advice, check out these two other posts on finding a therapist and when to seek therapy and the National Queer and Trans Therapist of Color Network for further support.
When I had my first major episodes of neurodivergent burnout and could understand what was happening, they followed patterns that were very consistent. I, like most people, tried to discipline those patterns out of myself for work, school, or whatever else I needed to do in a day. This never worked for me. In one of those long spats of being too tired to walk around or speak, I realized that fighting my internal clock wasn’t going to work. This to me is one of the benefits of those middle of the road burnouts; terrible physically and extremely isolating, but if there’s any way to meet survival needs it can free up a lot of mental space to assess mistakes or successes and pivot.
The dilemma was this: force doesn’t always work when trying to adjust to the demands of the standard clock. Rejecting it will usually also fail. So both are required. Over time, I started to realize that sick time was running on the lunar calendar. It didn’t care about Monday through Friday, it cared about cycles in seasons, moon phases, and day/night. There were constant shifts in productivity, periods where I could burn through a bunch of work in a short time, then be wiped out for the rest of the week. Or where one outing would make the next week feel like a few days from manic energy and fatigue. To resolve this dilemma, here are some questions and practices I’ll use in my day to day.
Knowing your internal rhythms is key because they’re not completely defined by standard time. They’re shaped by you, your lifestyle, genetics, your friends, your family, and so on. They’re your signature, you don’t write your signature like a font in Adobe Acrobat. You write it like you. No one fits the mold perfectly. Knowing the places where you can or can’t fit it is useful information for creating a lifestyle that can adapt to you.
Here are some questions I asked and still ask myself to audit what my rhythms are
- When do you consistently feel fatigued or have worse physical or mental health symptoms? When do you feel energized or alert?
One obstacle for me was noticing where that was because gradations weren’t always apparent to me. If you’re exhausted all day, you may not notice a tiny bit less exhaustion, whether because of dissociation, pain, or whatever else.
Mapping out levels of experience in a way that makes sense to you helps. I mapped it out for myself as:
- Burnt out / wiped – nothing works, can’t do any daily life activities
- Enough energy for the bare minimum (making food, other life necessities)
- Okay-ish – functional but on a tightrope over losing the energy
- Energized – has a consistent level of ability to engage in tasks (with or without symptoms)
Applying caveats and edge cases is important: knowing when an “okay-ish” is really just pushing past a migraine or riding anxiety or when an energized is because you have feel more “alive” after skipping meals or other activities can be the difference between ending up back at the bottom or getting to a solid foundation.
Then, finding where shifts in your baseline happen and why can support you in self-knowledge & making changes.
- Do you notice any shifts in your baseline in: a week, two weeks, a month? Note what changed and how you can notice it later. Do those shifts have a standard pattern you could track?
- What influenced or caused any major dips? What influenced any major peaks?
One final note is this: don’t let the standard clock or the lies associated with it trap you. It’s not your friend. Burnout is often a time where previous meaning is lost and we seek new ones. Your inability to adhere to the standard clock and “normal” life can quickly be pathologized if you seek meaning in places that can’t give it to you. The biggest time waster is not having the language to explain something that is happening for you internally and because of that, being misdirected into false solutions, tools, or treatments that will only aggravate the issue, wasting your time and your money.
Sometimes making it through is made by cutting down to your specific situation, what you have access to, what you can do, and what you can control. Staying close to what you know works with as few drawbacks as possible, and finding the gaps in your systems so when that period opens up where there’s less demand or a reprieve, you can implement changes fast. Be brutally honest– because if you don’t, your body will be.