Burnout Roundup

So because I'm 40 years old I have some information about burnout across my life. Obviously(?) I've worked for pretty much all the last two decades without more than a couple weeks off at most. Why am I having so many issues now?

School was the start of this - university particularly. When I did night & weekend classes at the tech institute for two years while working during the day it was a stretch, I was exhausted, but my energy didn't grind down into nothing like this. When I took university classes and stopped working because I was feeling too exhausted, I just kept feeling more and more awful and burnt out.

The character of my work has altered a lot over the years. Landscaping seasonally I'd sometimes be working two part-time jobs in spring/summer/fall with the odd day in winter and some stopgaps in there; my hours and the type of work I was doing changed with weather and season and what gigs my employer came up with. I did not burn out on that. Indoor landscaping was more of a routine, same accounts every week but with different needs as the seasons progressed. That was ok but I did eventually get to that crispy can't-stand-work avoidance feeling; when I took over the outdoors for those employers it was pretty good because I had the backbone of some indoor accounts and the flux of outdoor work. I also got to plan my time with the indoor landscaping guys, and that worked well for me: I did the work, I submitted a timesheet. I got to think a lot about plants, which was great for my brain. The manual labour component was excellent because I was either thinking about plants for work, or I had my mind free to think about what I wanted.

My two year-round full-time salaried jobs to date have been the industry job up here and my current gov job. The industry job was a lot of work and a lot of hours. I ended up with a work cellphone with the understanding that contractors would sometimes call me on Saturday evening or whatever and I'd need to answer. I worked pretty late some days. I could come in late afterwards. My project was my own and I had mentorship from two people who were very enthusiastic about not just doing it but about the details. I worked with a bunch of people who were all different from each other and accepted difference from each other, so there was no normative society.

The gov job, where I am now... on paper is a plum one. It's low-hours on paper and can be done that way-- but, the way it's low-hours means I need to choose to be inefficient at how I do the work in order to have a low-hours job. My day is 7.78 hours long; sometimes to drive to the field takes 5-6 hours round trip. A reasonable work schedule would support going out there, doing the work over a longer day, then coming back and taking a shorter day later. The way it's set up now, I eat the extra time. In fact, the way time is managed is ridiculous, it's union-based factory hours with two fifteen minute breaks and a lunch hour that's not to be moved despite most of my work being mind-work. I have two projects I manage that are actually pretty neat in a lot of ways but they're pretty much completely unsupported: there's a legal requirements manual for both of them, but there's no one who's enthusiastic about it and willing to chat with a newbie. If I had more expertise I could join a working group and pick up knowledge there, but I don't. There's funding support for remote training but not really in-person training. I can straight-up shadow someone who does this work, which might be my solution, but it feels pretty weird doing so.

The gov job and uni are where I'm most burnt out. Both I experience as arbitrary demands. School didn't want me to learn (well, the instructors did, but), it wanted me to set numerical targets as a goal rather than the learning. There was a ton of bureaucracy - I spent more time at uni in administration than I did in any class. Gov is obv-

-you know, this is the second time I've run right out of energy while typing this up. Maybe it can stand like this.

Biromantic

So here's the thing: as a dryad I have loving feelings towards both people and plants. The word love is a little weird, it contains some stuff that doesn't apply like sex, so obviously this looks different with people and with plants but floaty happy feelings and wanting to poke and learn more and wanting to entwine my life forward into the future and wanting to stay close all exist, if in different form.

I generally have a relationship with the plants I come into contact with, much like you have a relationship with the people you come into contact with. Anything from "oh yeah, that's what's-his-name from London" to "this is my lifelong living partner" and everything in-between. For me, part of living in the same landscape for a long time is the ability to continue my relationships with plants. When people ask me why I moved up here I often say "I wanted to eat fruit off a tree I planted" and that's one kind of relationship for sure, with an individual. Generational relationship with an annual plant is another kind.

A little while ago I wrote this:

"Gaspe corn. I'm having so many feelings right now, it's hard to write. Gaspe is a tiny corn, the plant grows knee-high if that. The cobs are as long as your shortest finger. It doesn't produce a lot of corn per acre, if a full acre has ever been planted in the last century.

It was bred by the Mi'kmaq people of what we call the Gaspe peninsula. It's the northernmost thrust of this amazing array of forms of corn that co-evolved in the Americas in a supportive dance between humans and an unremarkable-looking grass. It's the physical form of thousands of years of humans all united in giving labour and thought and recirculation sustenance.

There's probably enough of the genetics left that it can survive. I can hold it in my hands. I can put it in the soil. It's given me more seed already; I've sought out a wider genetic base so it can continue to do so. I can give these seeds to other people so it's more likely to live. I can be a link in that chain.

But more than that I can hold it, and grow it, and that's very good."

I was handling more than the gaspe seed this evening though. I was handling Magic Manna and Cascade Ruby-Gold, which were bred by Carol Deppe for the pacific northwest as a staple crop out of I think Painted Mountain and something? and the magic manna was some from Adaptive Seeds and some saved from last year's Adaptive and Snake River seed planting, which looked quite different vidually from the original seed. I was handling Painted Mountain itself, four different acessions of it: from Salt Spring seeds, from Annapolis seeds, from Sweet Rock farm, and from Glorious Organics. I was handling the flashy new Atomic Orange sold through Baker Creek. I was handling Adaptive Seeds' Mandan Lavender Parching and Great Lakes Staple Seeds' New York Red Flint. I was handling "American Indian Flour Corn" and Saskatoon White. And I was handling Morden.

Morden corn.

John Sherck thinks it's maybe the earliest corn in the world. It's one of the loneliest. Corn is a group entity; it gets lonely; it needs some diversity of genetics supported by a large population or it succumbs to inbreeding depression pretty easily. They say you should generally have a population of at the very least 200 corn plants to save seed from, or else bring in corn friends every couple years. Corn reaches out over long distances to mingle with other corn, I think the safe distance to prevent pollination is something like a mile? But for a corn to fully retain its character it can't mingle with other types, so it needs a big enough group of almost-similar, same-variety individuals to maintain itself.

So far as I can tell all existing Morden corn descends from 28 individuals. That's not enough. It's not enough diversity for it to be happy; it's planted and doesn't quite want to fill out its ears, its kernels are small, it doesn't leap vigorously out of the ground. All grasses are group entities in some way or another and they do best in groups. It takes the heart out of them to be lonely. Morden's heart is heavy, but it's alive.

Now Morden is in my possession. Its genetics are fragmented. Its story and its people are lost. Most seeds come with some responsibility but this one is bigger than most. What do I do? Do I try to preserve it as it is, growing out every seed into a plant and saving as large a number of seeds as I can to avoid any more diversity slipping away, trying to trap it in time? Do I give it a very different friend, maybe gaspe, maybe something colourful, a new infusion of genetics that brings it back to life but indelibly shifts its original character? Even with years of selection it would never be the same. I want it to continue. I want it to be neither lonely nor eradicated.

And I want it not to be so lost. I want whatever vibrant population it came from to continue to exist, to not be missing. I want it to be lively and gregarious as it moves into the future, to leap out of the ground and fill fields with some farmer's heart's green delight. It was once that way and maybe it can't ever be again; maybe not dying, but certainly changed unalterably and certainly surviving in some way.

All that is in my hand. It's such a weight. It's so many feelings. My understanding of masculinity is that it's supposed to be linked with this urge to protect, and femininity with this urge to nurture, or something. Those genders are supposed to complete each other in those roles. I hold these seeds in my hand, so small and so few, and I want to protect them against anything that may ever harm them. I want to spend sleepless nights running out with a tarp against a hailstorm. I want to stir them into life and warm them and feed them and gently ease away the weeds that threaten to take their space. These two corns, Morden and Gaspe, they reach into me and draw me into roles that fit me so comfortably. I want to live with them, and I want them to live.

Let's see what we can do to make this happen.