Where Everybody's Crazy

No, seriously, you want to read this one.

I am feeling so much better, and it's only Tuesday. And I sat through a particularly uninspiring all-day pastors meeting without losing the will to live. (I will admit that at times I lost the will for several other people in the meeting to live.) How come?

Well, I'm aware there's a potential for premature enlightenment, so I'm not getting my hopes up too high just yet. But the steps that I took on Sunday - sleep, talking to someone, reading about the problem - helped a lot, particularly to put things in perspective.

I think the worst thing about burnout-feelings is the internal monologue you get into: you keep telling yourself how tired you are, and how busy you are, and how nobody cares, until you believe it to a disproportionate degree. Sometimes the best thing to do, particularly if you're a rather analytical person like me, is to turn the mental tape off repeat and start doing something else instead.

Talking to the boss helps a lot, as it helps to turn off that internal monologue. Having to actually verbalise what you've been thinking makes you get rid of all the hyperbole and stick to what's actually reasonable to say.

But I think the biggest thing to ensure continuing happiness is that I've built in relaxation to my day.

Yesterday, I came home and lay on my bed and listened to England win the cricket. Today, I took some nice pictures of the sunset over Lake Biwa, and then went to the onsen. I did that last Wednesday, but this Wednesday, I'm meeting one of the young guys from church for dinner. Thursdays, I play go. Fridays, I, uh, support local industry.

It means there's always something to look forward to in the day, and also that there's always time to relax in the day. I'm not saying it's the answer, especially since I'm only on day two, but it certainly feels a lot better so far.

Is your job killing you? Over the past few week, I've felt that mine is. So today, I did three things. I scheduled a meeting with my boss to try to talk about my workload. Second, I got lots and lots of sleep. Third, I re-read a paper produced by one of my All Nations classmates about burnout. It was good, and it reminded me to get a copy of "Honourably Wounded" by Marjory Foyle.

The good news is that now I know I'm not burning out yet. The good and bad news is that I recognise I have a problem and want to take steps to stop it from turning into burnout. I suspect that unless I make radical changes to my workload and my attitude, I won't survive beyond two or three months.

I could say a lot about burnout. I noticed both here and in the IT department at WEC UK that burnout actually requires the active co-operation of a lot of actors. When someone calls you up late at night for the fifth time that week and wants to tell you about their computer problem, they're failing to respect your time. If you don't tell them, in strong terms if necessarily, that they should go away, you're contributing to your own demise. When someone asks me if I can teach their English lesson on my day off, they're showing a disregard for my well-being and my private life. But if I feel that I can't set a boundary, I'm showing a similar disregard for my own well-being.

When pastors, church workers, field leaders and other people in the mission pour obligations on to me, they are doing so because they do not care about my well-being. They just see me as someone to do their work for them. That's kind of shocking, but it's important to grasp. Once I grasp that, it makes it easier for me to say no to some of those obligations. The problem is not that they really want me to work seven days a week and tire myself out. If I asked them if they wanted that, they would say no. They're not malicious people. It's just that it honestly hasn't occurred to them that I need time to myself.

As an example of this, the WEC UK conference. In the session before lunch I had just given a plea to stop abusing our IT staff and to start treating them with respect, and particularly to respect their private time. That was just before lunch. In the lunch queue, someone who was in the meeting comes up to me and asks me about their computer problem. It's not that they're malicious. It's just that they fundamentally don't care. They had a problem, I'm the person who can fix it, and my well-being just wasn't important to them. What's perhaps more important, they couldn't see that they were going to be the straw that broke the camel's back. I said some rather rude words to them.

This is hard to grasp because missionaries are meant to care about each other; we're just not there yet. And because other people don't care, the obligation is more on us to set our own boundaries. That does not, however, excuse the abuse that we suffer at the hands of others. Maybe I should start saying no to things (although as I pointed out earlier, the culture of obligation makes that very difficult, and no, things aren't any better in the church) but also maybe people ought to start showing a bit more concern for my limitations.

Another important point: what might be a reasonable workload becomes unreasonable when it takes place in the context of language stress and culture stress. Maybe that means that my workload is OK, once I settle down here. But maybe it means that it isn't OK right now.

And those well-meaning people who say that they will pray for me, that God will give me supernatural strength, really piss me off. It's like giving someone painkillers so they'll be able to walk on a broken leg. Stress is a sign that something is wrong with my workload. I don't want to be able to cope with the workload; I want the workload to change. Something has to give, but nobody wants it to be their thing that gives. So they just want me to be able to soldier on and try to do everything. That's not showing love, folks.

One last thing: burnout is particularly a problem for high achievers. To put it another way, this wouldn't be a problem if I weren't so damned good. Because I can preach, teach English, play the piano, fix computers, and whatever, I get asked to do all these things and more at every possible occasion. If I were incompetent, I'd have a much quieter life.

But I am still seeing the positive side to this. I need to find a solution to dealing with stress not just for my own well-being, but also because I (still) have a future goal of teaching leadership to Japanese businessmen. And one problem that Japanese businessmen have is forming an appropriate response to stress and burnout. (I'm assuming, from a Christian perspective, that heavy drinking, pornography and/or suicide are not appropriate responses.) So if I crack this for me, hopefully I can crack it for others too.

Update: I met with my boss last night; we adjusted my workload and pulled me out of a couple of commitments, but he also added a wise warning - during this time of establishing myself, I can respond to stress and let off steam in either productive or self-destructive ways, (even more self-destructive than bitching about it here...) and the self-destructive ways can highlight potential problem areas in my character and integrity. In other words, when I'm under pressure I'm subject to more temptations, and, as the UK WEC director puts it, when you squeeze the orange, you get to see what's inside it.

There is no stress-free job, but going through stress - with appropriate adjustments if things are going seriously badly - can be a helpful insight into our own character issues.

I've been very blessed with my house situation; it was arranged through a member of the church, and let's be honest, the house is embarrassingly big. I expected a two room apartment or something, and I've got two bedrooms, an office, a living room, and a dining room. It's not quite a peppercorn rent, but it's certainly not a huge number of peppercorns either. I even had my first guests last weekend!

The hall, the guest bedroom, the living room and the garden

Consider this a bit of an open thread.

When I listen to When the night feels my song (Bedouin Soundclash) I need to listen to Pressure Drop (The Maytals) afterwards.

When I listen to Grace Kelly (Mika) I need to listen to Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon (Queen) afterwards.

Anything else?

I live in Kansai, which is geographically the west of Japan. It may be geographically the west, but culturally, it's very much the North. As the Doctor put it, lots of planets have a North. Kansai is in the North.

We know what the North means. People in the North are more friendly, and more relaxed. Dialects are thicker and people are more proud of them; precise language and the strict rules of politeness are less important. And your beer gets topped up with several inches of head.

People appear more friendly in the North, but actually are more reserved about their family life and what they really feel. It's much more of a rural, closed community, although more of a welcoming one than the cold, individual South.

I enjoyed living in the South of England, but I'm really a Northerner, even if the cultural North of Japan is in the west; it's in my blood. It's a harder community to get into, but a much warmer one once you're on the inside.

So, after helping my mother with the genealogical research part of her project, I picked up the tricks and techniques for doing it myself; I've since become interested in finding a bit more about my own roots. On the Cozens side, I've got things as far back as 1844, which in genealogical terms is last week, but on my mother's side I've done a bit better.

But how to display the results? Most of the Gedcom (genealogy file format) web publishing out there allow for minimal styling; I wanted something that I could template and make it fit in with the style of the site here. So I wrote the templates, and used the Apache::Template and Gedcom Perl modules to bring them to life. I didn't need to write any Perl code at all.

There are still a few improvements I want to make, but for now, here's my family tree!

Since I came to Bulstrode in September, my sleep schedule has been very poor. I guess it always was, but people here tend to start and finish their day earlier, so I'm more obviously out of phase. But also I noticed I wasn't getting to sleep until 2 or sometimes 3, and needing naps in the afternoon. This week, I decided to see if there was anything I could do about it.

I came up with the following measures, for the following reasons:

• A regular evening routine, to help my body get into a habit of shutting down. It's the same reason you read bed-time stories to children - it helps them to know that it's actually time for sleep now.
• No computer use after 10:30. Not just because I'd be on there for hours, but because of the phase response effect of the monitor's light on the body's circadian rhythm.
• Similarly, switching off the main light and switching on the bedside lamp at the same time in the evening.
• And then a glass of warm milk and some toast, for melatonin, half an hour's reading in bed, and then sleep.

I've done this every night this week apart from last night, (I was in hack mode...) and it's made a huge difference. I can wake up in the morning feeling like I've actually slept. I can go right through the day without feeling tired. I'm feeling tired at the right sort of time in the evening. It's rather good. And now it's getting late, and I need to get to bed!

Ack, chromatic got me with one of those silly memes. Here you go, then, five things you didn't know about me.

• I've spent a fair chunk of the past month as a research assistant on my mother's garden research project, looking into the life and history of the guy who planted the gardens on top of the Rockefeller Center and The Roof Gardens. I'm not into gardening at all myself, and when I was at school I hated (and dropped) history, but I like research! Genealogy and historical research is basically problem-solving and requires a lot of lateral thought, and it's strangely addictive!
• I wrote Beginning Perl in three months, while holding down a full-time job - in Japan, so Japanese hours. It was hell. I only got into writing the book by accident - I was helping to organise a UKUUG conference and Wrox came along and gave us all review copies of their books. My comment was that they didn't have anything on Perl, so they asked me to write something. When I started writing the book, my Perl programming was actually not that great, but I submitted myself to #perl and they drilled me into shape. I then wrote two more books back to back, and so 2006 was funny because it was the first year for seven years where I haven't had any writing pressure at all. I only have distant plans to write more... theology this time!
• Questions like "where do you come from?" and "where do you live?" confuse me. You should never ask a missionary these questions unless you have ten minutes to spare! I was born in Wigan, grew up in south Wales, went to school in mid Wales, then lived in Oxford for ten years. I don't live anywhere, I just stay places temporarily. I will live in Japan, from March, but right now I stay in Wales and Oxford and Gerrard's Cross.
• I'm very serious about music, although much less so than I used to be. I used to play the cello, badly, and the piano. I can still hack out a tune on a piano and follow along with a song on the guitar. I was tricked into composing music by a great teacher who put me in front of a computer and got me playing around with Notator. I did little else in school, and wrote a new song every week or two. Most of them weren't very good, but the odd one worked out. In return I convinced him to let me do a Music Technology AS level, and despite being completely abysmal as a performer, I got a B! I still compose a little, from time to time. The last thing I wrote was a setting of a psalm in the style of an enka.
• I have, at one point in my life, trained and showed dogs. Yep, really. I had a mate who bred Irish setters, and helped out sometimes, and once got to take one of the dogs to a show and, well, show it. I really enjoy dipping my toe into as many things as I can, learning a little about each, and moving on. Some things, like music, photography and go stick, but most don't, and that's the way I like it.

I'm not going to tag five people, because this meme is growing like Topsy already, so I shall tag three: Henrietta, Dick, Nuno. Your turn!

So it was a mate's wedding the other day - congratulations Dan! - albeit a mate I've only seen twice in the past ten years. Dan's a generous guy, generous with his time, and we spent an hour or so catching up even in the midst of his wedding celebrations.

I also caught another couple of friends from my school days; stories were swapped, memories were jogged, and friendships were rekindled.

But were they, really? I remember rekindling a friendship a few years ago, and after we'd caught up, we carried on with our separate lives; the situations that had bound us together all those years ago had long passed, and the roles we had for each other had been filled by others. Really, what happened was that idle curiosity was satisfied.

So anyway, I headed over to Friends Reunited, got myself all profiled up, and wondered all those people were who were supposed to have been at university with me. It's nice to think I'll catch up with them again. But I know, realistically, I probably won't.