“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire”
I’ve always heard people talk about the breaking point. Being pushed past their limits and having nothing left. I thought I knew what that meant. I’ve spent three days trying to come up with the best analogy for what happened to me. Shorting a system, boiling a lobster alive, burning out a motor. I am a fully-functional disaster. The problem is that I cannot control my fire. I set myself, and everything in my path, on fire. I do it often and with the same reckless abandon every time. Like a drunk, I lose my ability to judge my own capability. I have no flight instinct, only fight; always fight!
I skipped OKC Pro-am because nobody from the team was going and there was just too much happening for me to handle that and then a trip to Tulsa. Jo was all in on Tulsa, so I skipped OKC. Then Jack crashed and Jo pulled out of Tulsa with 3-days notice. All of a sudden, I was left to handle a trip to Tulsa on my own with little time to prepare for the details. I had already been low on sleep and feeling exhausted for over a month but I thought, “I can push through this”. Then the charz data came in for the June launches and it was bad, very, very bad. Instead of it being an obvious pull back of the launch date, the VPs made it clear we were to persevere. They had full confidence that we could find a way. The employee assigned to this launch injured himself Wednesday and was bedridden Thursday with no idea when he would be back at work. Still, I told myself I could handle it, I could “push through”. Even as I looked to my management for help and guidance on a difficult launch situation and found myself left standing alone, I said “You can handle this!”. Even as I found myself forgetting what I was doing seconds after getting up from my desk to go do it. I would find myself walking down the hall and I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I was going or what I was doing. Still, I told myself I’d been through worse. That this was what separated the good from the great. I would not fail.
I left work 2-hours after I intended which left me scrambling for time. I hadn’t packed, had at least 5 long emails to send, needed to find food, and had to get my openers in. I started filling my brand new cooler bag and found it was just taking more time than I had. I thought “I’ll just get my bike off the trainer then I’ll turn the water off”. I stood next to the sink getting my bike ready, headed out on my openers, and only realized something was wrong when I got home and found a stream of water running down the driveway.
The immediate reaction was, again, to fight. I moved furniture by myself, I shop-vac’d, toweled, and moped water with energy I didn’t have. I lost even more of my ability to concentrate and stay focused. I did what I could and shut down. I haven’t touched my bike in 2-days and don’t know when I will again. The line I need to draw is at work but I don’t know how. I love my job but I’ve quit it 5-times in the last 3-days and I need to be honest with where I’m at right now before I burn this whole place down.