I haven’t been regularly blogging for a while now, and it’s becoming more challenging for me to go back and find when a thing happened. Used to be that my blog was a digital scrapbook of sorts that I could access from anywhere, in parallel with Flickr.
So, as a gift to Future Me, here’s a brain dump of stuff that went on during the week ending 11 April 2026.
I’ve been keeping a weekly planner/journal for several years, and I find it interesting to go back through prior months or years and see what ideas I had for vacations or what meals I experimented with or what internal crises felt hard enough that I needed to take pen to paper to figure them out. What’s also interesting is looking at how much I update for each day; it tends to slow down over the course of a week, and I can totally tell where I transitioned from actively present to treading water.
This week, that transition started on Tuesday and I was in full-on phoning-it-in mode by Wednesday.
Once I recognized the shift (at the end of the week), I wasn’t sure what had happened on Tuesday morning that put me in low-power mode. I had an encouraging phone consultation with a potential new therapist first thing Tuesday, and that went quite well. I’m actually scheduled to see her in person this week.
As it happens, I maintain a list of how I spend my time at work each day — partly for occasions like this, but mostly so I can have something visible to show myself that the day was not wasted… even if I didn’t complete the tasks I set out to do. On Tuesday’s list is evidence of a wild goose chase I went on for a requirements list that doesn’t exist. Not only was the search frustrating, but my efforts to generate requirements (with the help of Copilot to search and categorize existing files) appears to have drained my brain for the week.
The next day, I attended the daily meeting that this new requirement-less dashboard is going to improve… and I was overwhelmed. I’d attended one once before, when I had little to no context for what the meeting was. This time, though, with background and understanding, the sheer volume of information being presented floored me.
Even worse, after feverishly typing notes for my future reference during this meeting, I had to switch gears to a different important project, and do a deep dive into data validation. I spent literally all day trying to figure out why my counts differed from Finance’s counts, and I never did find the difference.
On Thursday and Friday, I attended virtual training for Epic, the solution my company uses for electronic medical records and other related operational data. It’s necessary training, but it’s also presented with the assumption that the attendees have less experience in writing SQL and knowledge of database structures than I do. That was a very long day and a half, and it was draining in its own way.
And that was my work week.
At home, I continually struggle to parent effectively when I feel depleted after work. Connor and I eat a lot of DoorDash and watch a lot of streaming shows. This week has been the Netflix series The Toys That Made Us, moving on to The Movies That Made Us. Our Krav Maga class is held on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and we didn’t attend either day this week.
I’m looking forward to seeing my new therapist this coming week. I need some fresh input about how to be more present for my family, how to set boundaries and recognize when I’m stretched too thin, and how to be OK with not being OK. And maybe also some tips on how to get closer to OK.
The tiny wins are continually overshadowed in my mind by my shortcomings. It doesn’t matter that they’re actually symptoms and not personal weakness; they look and feel and act like failures all the same… both to me and to everyone around me.