There is a special corner of hell that nobody warned me about, and it is the exact place where burnout and overstimulation shake hands and say, let us ruin her entire day. I keep ending up in this cursed intersection where my brain is so exhausted it wants to lie face down on the floor forever, but also so overstimulated that the sound of my own breathing feels like someone is revving a motorcycle inside my skull.
It is the psychological equivalent of being stuck at a stoplight while every neuron I have slams the gas pedal. I want to sleep for nine years, but also if one more notification so much as blinks at me I might set my phone on fire and move into the woods.
Burnout Genna wants stillness, maybe a blanket fort, definitely no responsibilities. Overstimulated Genna wants everyone and everything to shut up immediately, including gravity, air molecules, and the faint buzzing the fridge makes when it cycles on. Put them together and you get a creature who tries to lie down but shoots back up like a startled vampire because her hoodie collar brushed her neck and now she is furious about textiles.
I will sit on the couch thinking, wow I am so tired, maybe I should rest. Then my foot twitches because my sock seam dared to exist. Then the ceiling feels too bright. Then the room feels too echoey. Then a single crumb on the table sends my soul spiraling into another dimension. Suddenly I am pacing the kitchen like a ghost who died mid anxiety attack.
It is not cute. It is not aesthetic. It is feral.
My brain essentially becomes a smoke alarm with no battery, screeching intermittently about problems that do not exist. At the same time, I am so fried that stringing together a full adult thought feels like trying to solve advanced physics while underwater.
People assume burnout makes you slow. But actually, burnout makes me move like a haunted Roomba, drifting aimlessly while whispering what was I doing under my breath every fourteen seconds.
Meanwhile, overstimulation makes me want to peel my own skin off because the air feels too loud.
This combo should be studied in a lab. Or maybe exterminated.
Hyperfocus tries to intervene, like hey queen, want to suddenly reorganize your entire digital archive for no reason? And because my brain is a menace, I say yes. Next thing I know I have been hunched over a computer for three hours, alive only through caffeine and spite, and now my spine is shaped like a shrimp.
But the real chaos comes when someone speaks to me. Because I am too burnt out to respond coherently, but too overstimulated to let the sound of their voice go unpunished. So I just kind of stare at them.
Do I need rest? Probably. Can I rest? Absolutely not. The second I sit still my brain starts playing every bad decision I have ever made in holographic detail.
Do I need quiet? Yes. Will my brain provide quiet? No, because my brain is currently screaming about that thing I forgot to do in 2014.
At this point, I would describe my nervous system as a raccoon in a cardboard box. Tired. Confused. Hissing. Unable to be perceived.
And honestly, the more it happens, the more I realize there is no solution. No cure. No enlightened path. There is only acceptance. Not the gentle, inspirational kind. The feral kind where you fling yourself onto the couch like a fainting goat and decide to simply exist until the feelings stop doing parkour.
