You can do anything but you can't do everything
An AuDHDer's attempt to do all the things (while still recovering from burnout)
I think I first heard this phrase in an Ali Abdaal video. It was true then and it’s still true now, but as time goes on it feels more and more relevant.
When I first heard this phrase I was trying to figure out how to juggle things alongside uni (something I was really bad at) and what I wanted to do afterwards. Whenever I try and do too many things I end up dropping the ball on all but like two of them
Before going to university in 2021, I had a high end body piercing business with an online body jewellery store. It not only survived the pandemic, but because I already had an established e-commerce store it actually thrived. Despite that, it wasn’t long after getting my own studio that I decided to close my business. There were many reasons for this, but one of the main ones was that I felt trapped and unable to explore other things. I didn’t have time to pursue other projects without overwhelming myself or letting something else slip.
Similarly, there were a few career professional career pathways in psychology that interested me, but ultimately I couldn’t follow them all. Not only that, but they are intense. There is a lot of training and further education that I’d have to do, and I would ultimately end up in a career that would likely use up most of my energy and leave me coming home wanting to do nothing in my downtime.
That kind of intensity and focus on one thing doesn’t fulfil me for long, if at all. I have spent most of my adult life changing career focuses and the longest sole focus was when I was piercing. It was completely unrelated to anything else I’d done before, but it also benefited the most from the broad range of experience I’d accumulated. I was piercing, but I was also doing digital marketing, web design, content creation and social media management – the only difference was I was doing all those things for myself. It kept things varied and interesting – until it stopped being enough.
It was hard to explore the other things I wanted to do because the business heavily dominated my time. Even in lockdown when I wasn’t piercing, I would spend most of my day packing orders and dreading the postal run that came after that. I was making the most money I’d ever made in my adult life, but it just wasn’t enough. I wanted to work on other projects, but the thing keeping me afloat had started to feel more like an anchor. I had other reasons for closing my business, but this was one of the big ones. After all, if I am not good at juggling multiple focuses, how would I cope when I started uni?
In hindsight, I realise I should have just hired people. I could have hired someone to pack orders. I could have hired someone to pierce. But hiring people takes training (and trust). After 5 years I knew my customers well and I think it was a big part of what made them buy from me. I tried to go above and beyond with customer service (and it reflected in my testimonials), knowing that a customer who keeps coming back was worth more than what I might spend fixing minor issues. Plus I had never hired anyone before. There were other things I could have done to free myself up more too. I could have pierced less days. I was already bookings only and I would block days from my calendar when I needed more downtime. I could have done many less drastic things. But I was impulsive and impatient and to me it was all or nothing and I chose nothing.
For the next 3 years, I still didn’t really have time to do the things I wanted to do. I was already in autistic burnout when I closed my business and I stayed that way for most of my first year of uni. Throughout my degree, uni was pretty much all I could manage. I’d pick up other things in the summers, but when the academic year rolled around I knew that my focus was already not where I needed it to be and I couldn’t afford to split it. I have no idea how people who worked while studying managed it because I couldn’t. I wasn’t in burnout the whole time, but I was never really recovered from burnout either. When I started to think I was getting there, my mum died and it was like a whole different type of functioning. Part of me was more functional, determined not to let my grades slip or end up like I had been before – it felt kind of like masking, but not quite the same. The other part of me was either a mess or dissociated. My attention being split in those early weeks after my mum died was one of the most overwhelming times of my life – and that’s before you even get into the emotions. I am just talking about balancing uni with the practical matters and funeral planning. My feelings felt like a whole other split that I was mostly trying to put off until I finished my degree.
And then I finished. I grieved. I wrote. I tried to do all the things I’d been saying I’d do once I finished uni. I did my driving theory. I went on holiday. I tried to publish my paper. I tried to create content. But I did them all one at a time, constantly overwhelmed by the amount of other things I hadn’t got to yet. I don’t think I have fully recovered from my initial autistic burnout. I am not in the pit of it anymore, but I am not back to my normal level of functioning. I don’t have the same demands I used to have on my life when I was piercing or studying, yet I still somehow don’t have the energy to do fairly routine things. Popping to tesco or even going anywhere still fills me with far more dread than it ever used to. I’ve never got back to the feeling of recovering that I had before my mum died, but I have come close at times.
In many ways it feels like progressive overload. I started to be able to lift the blanket of burnout I was under, but now there’s a grief blanket on top – and boy is it weighted. We can all carry heavy things and some days I do feel like the weight is lifting – or rather like I’m lifting it – but as we know we can only carry heavy things for so long, and the longer you carry them beyond what is reasonable for you the more you’ll start to lose form and do damage far worse than not lifting the weight that burdens you at all. But sometimes you might do it anyway because the weight being lifted feels so freeing, even if you will pay for that freedom by being imprisoned under it for much longer when you put it down. You have to slowly build the muscle to lift heavy things, but moderation doesn’t always come easy when you’ve been starved. After all this time it feels like that muscle will never grow and let me lift it longer safely let alone comfortably. Sometimes it feels like the lifting I have to do to just keep going does enough damage to stop it growing. How can I lift it over my head if picking it up just to be able to move forward is wrecking me?
I went away for Christmas and I came back feeling different. Not better, just different. I was desperate to have some semblance of normality, some feeling of functioning or even just fulfillment. When I came back, I was determined to improve my health and fitness and for a while that was my focus. Not long after that, I started putting out content again after not publishing a whole lot for the last 3 years. A couple of weeks later, I started to learn to drive. I was already trying to learn to draw. And I’m trying to improve my Spanish. But it all comes at a cost. I am exhausted – and that’s despite trying to sleep more. In some ways it feels like I’m getting somewhere, because I did that thing, but in many other ways I feel like I am going backwards. For example, I have made progress on my goal to lose fat (mostly by eating less biscuits), but generally my eating is worse and more stressful than it had been in a long time. Today I feel ill in a way I can’t quite describe. Yet I feel some sense of needing to do something with my time and rest not being worthy. I feel unable to validate needing to live a low-demand lifestyle because I am not in burnout and I am not ill. I feel like I need to have something to show for my time, not so much to others but just for myself and for my self-worth. Not always in a capitalistic way, but even just in a ‘I did this fun thing I enjoy’ way. What return am I getting on the days I am spending on this planet?
There is so much I want to do and I am juggling so much while there is still so much more I want to be able to juggle, used to be able to juggle, but I can’t seem to do it without everything falling down. Yet I know there are people out there managing to juggle more than I would ever dream of, either by choice or by circumstance.
This state of limbo between burnout and normality where I can do more than I could at my worst but not what I could before it all almost feels worse than my worst. It’s like a grey area. I don’t know what the rules are. There is so much I want to do, but just like anyone I can only do so much at once – and that is much less than I am comfortable with.
The phrase you can do anything but you can’t do everything resonated with me outside of these specific circumstances. I have always wanted to pursue a wide range of things – that’s how this story started. It’s how my career has been so varied. Another term I got from an Ali Abdaal video is being a specialised generalist – a jack of all trades, master of some. I have all these interests and skillsets but some are deeper than others. I presented it at uni as the “Ayshing On The Cake”
With my current energy levels it’s easy to see I’m doing too much and I should tone things down. I’m just not convinced toning it down solves the problem completely. I’m not sure anything does. There will always be more things that get added to the list of things I want to do and I am afraid if I don’t do things now when I have the time (even if I don’t have the energy), I will never do them. When I feel better, if I feel better, there will be a whole list of things I’ve told myself I’ll do when I have the energy that I’ll need to work through and I will have the same overwhelm then. And what if I never feel better and then there’s even more stuff I never got to do because I put it off? And say I did tone it down for now and just focus on driving and content? Driving will end eventually when I have a license, but even within creating content, it feels like I am spread too thin over different types of content and overwhelming myself because I am not good at focusing on multiple things at once but I am not committed enough to just want to focus on one thing – my ADHD needs variety or I just become bored and disengaged.
Having less energy or capacity hasn’t reduced how much I want to do, but it has made me think about my priorities. If I am doing too much, what are the things that I definitely don’t want to stop doing? Would I rather be able to have one big and two small focuses for the rest of the year or would I rather make rest a focus for the next quarter and have the capacity for one big and three small, or two medium ones for the 6 months after that? What if I accept that I can’t do everything (at once) and instead plan to do everything eventually? What things can be done at lower intensities on an ongoing basis and still have a cumulative effect?
I watched a video the other day which talked about picking up hobbies one at a time (which is what I am trying to do) and having seasons like sports. I have often wished I could keep up with multiple things like we did with subjects in school and wished I could impose such structure on myself, but real life isn’t like that and I want the pleasure I derive from things to be what drives me to do them, not a schedule. I think seasons might work if they’re flexible enough, the way I’m focusing more intensely on drawing now because I’m doing a drawing course, but that doesn’t mean I will never draw in its off-season – it just means it won’t be such a big focus. Implementing this, of course, is easier said than done.
I think for me there is also a need to find a balance between the you can do anything but you can’t do everything (regular edition) and you can do anything but you can’t do everything (disability edition). I need to remember that ADLs and other regular life stuff will take up a chunk of my capacity and figure out how to maintain some semblance of eating meals and paying bills while still using some of the energy I have right now for things that bring me joy. I saw something about doing everything at 70%, so maybe I’ll try that. I have a particularly bad habit of not wanting to do cleaning tasks unless I’m cleaning the room top to bottom and I think the 70% trick could really help me there.
This post is so far from what I came here to write (nor what I wanted to write), but it definitely helped me muddle through some of the shit in my head. I would edit it into what I thought I’d write, but I feel like it would ruin it. If you relate in any way it would be great to hear from you. I feel like the low energy of being in burnout limbo (or even full burnout) is probably not unlike the experience of living with some chronic conditions, but I acknowledge that for me it will at least end (or at least I hope it will). I know the experience of spending more energy than you have to do something you want to do even though you know you’ll pay for it heavily later is one my mum would relate to, I just wish I’d been able to relate/understand/empathise like this when it was her doing it.
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