Recently (only a few months into practice) I decided to decrease my work hours 2ndary to some increased stress at work. he stress was multifactorial and which I hope to have ameliorated the source of much of the stress, but a little extra time away seemed good for my psyche.
On the flipside a good friend of mine is picking up every extra shift physically possible and working into weekends and nights, but somehow still fitting in shopping trips and new exercise classes. All this and my ever looming debt begins to make me wonder: am I just lazy?
Is it overwork and burnout or laziness that's preventing me from getting through my workday properly? Am I really this mentally stressed after seeing so many patients that I can't do dinner or am I just too lazy to cook?
I don't know the answer to that. I don't know if I want to know the answer to that.
A related train of thought I've been having - would I be willing to trade some of these hours for a more physically active and less mentally demanding job? One where I'm not constantly worried about the effect of a new medication on someone's kidney function that's been on edge but who needs this medication so that they don't have a stroke and die but who also isn't sure if they really had a stroke and don't want the medication and why am I forcing them to take medications? Oh and they have this weird new bilateral numbness that may or may not be a pinched cervical nerve or cervical stenosis that may or may not need an urgent MRI or just general physiotherapy.
I think my blood pressure went up 30 mmHg just writing that.
I'm reasonably sure it would only take me a few hours of general labour work like drywalling or something before I scream with complaints of back pain and repetition boredom, but after a particularly mental taxing day and my pedometer only reading 1000 steps, I can't help but wish for something different.
My partner thinks taking up gardening would be good for me. I say we're entering dead of winter in Canada and we don't have room for a Christmas tree this year because plants have already taken every available surface in our house...
But I digress. I'm taking some time away to do less work so that I don't spend all my monetary earnings on therapy. I've been trying to pick up my slack cooking again in this time. Believe it or not I used to cook elaborate meals to relax. You'd never know it by my instant ramen lunches.
Lacking the drive to actually cook proper meals, I've taken to a cooking challenge I've seen some people do.
So there's a game called Stardew Valley and it's all my fantasy impossible farmer/country living come to life. Having actually lived in a seaside small town, I can safely say the game is quite unrealistic in many aspects, mainly the part where people like outsides who move in...but that's beside the point.
One part of the gameplay is cooking. It's not a huge part. You collect recipes, you collect ingredients, you hit cook, and you sell/eat/gift the dishes. But it has plenty of interesting enough foods that I'm keen to play around with them. Namely a bun, aptly named "strange bun" that includes some fish yet looks suspiciously like a meringue based dessert.
I've started off easy.
