After a week of gorgeous sunny weather, blue skies, warmth, the rain has arrived. Yesterday was cloudy, and even though I knew I should try and get outside as soon as the sun came out, I couldn’t. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I spent much of Monday in bed.

I am a “bedseeker.” That is what mental health professionals call this coping mechanism. As a teenager, I was a night owl; I hated getting out of bed in the morning for school. As soon as we got the internet in my house, I would stay up all night, then sleep all morning. I even had a 12-hour shift job that let me continue this schedule on days I started work at 7pm. My bed is my comfort.

When I started taking brain medication, I noticed my sleep schedule changing. I no longer struggled to get out of bed after waking. Now, I could actually get up when I woke up. But that’s changed over the last year, back to old habits, and with quarantine, it’s only grown worse.

I work today. We’ve rearranged our classrooms to allow for “social distancing.” Instead of my half-moon setup with a desk-width between the students and me, my boss moved my classes into the biggest room, where each of us gets a whole table to ourselves. The kids thought it was great fun.

I’m only working today and Friday. It’s good and fine; I know that I’ll be OK, financially, because I know I can always ask my parents for help. But it means a lot more time by myself, in my house. Quarantine is not so different from everyday for me. I don’t have people to meet up with, even if we were allowed. All my friends live faraway. And I miss having local support now, more than ever.

I watch the two sisters I teach, who live across the street, playing outside, inside their fence. They ride their bikes in a big circle on the driveway, the little one following behind the big one. At least they have each other.

I don’t know if I’m going to do anymore baking on YouTube right now. For one, wow, that’s a lot of dishes to wash–my absolute least favourite chore (if anyone wants to date me, they have to be willing to wash the dishes; I’ll do the cooking). For another, it’s one more thing, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do that. I’ve been recovering from burnout since September–though I wasn’t willing to call it burnout until this year. It’s a hard word to own when I work part-time and have no responsibilities outside of myself.

My burnout is wholly related to how hard I’ve worked for the past 10 years to build an independent life for myself. It is, I believe, a particularly millennial experience (and why I identify more with the latter generation today, when I once identified with the previous). I keep trying to make a living on my own, and nothing has worked yet. Baking on YouTube was me trying again, without even thinking about it, trying a new thing with the hope of monetising it, spreading myself too thin once again.

In my post on the 15th, I wrote You can follow me here, with RSS, you can see photos and videos on Instagram, and you can stay up-to-date through email. And then almost immediately, I created another space to update, to maintain, to post. I don’t need more; I need a lot less.

My brain likes to remind me of all the things I “should” be doing. I “should” be trying harder. I “should” be where everyone else is. I “should” be writing more. That last one? It’s not only the most common refrain, but the oldest, too.

When I started this post, when I needed to write something in the TITLE space, I heard in my head that first lyric from “Eli’s Coming” by Three Dog Night, which I will always remember from the SPORTS NIGHT episode from the same name. Dan always thought Eli was a bad situation coming (Casey explains, however, that Eli is an inveterate womaniser). The song opens with a low organ and a mournful call.

Eli’s always been coming, and now he’s here.