In Ailing Victorian Orphan Mode

It turns out that after the onsite meeting I did very little at all, because I developed a migraine headache by the end of the lunch hour.

I excused myself from my voice coaching session, drooped miserably at the round table in the stifling heat — the windows weren't open due to the street noise intermittently — and was eager for the meeting to end. Then I cycled home as well as I could even though I was a little worried about falling off the bike or not having enough strength. (But the fresh air was good: the headache and nausea dissipated after a while.) Then I had a nap because I was exhausted.

On Wednesday I took the afternoon off as the migraine returned and I felt like a tight band was pressing on my forehead. Fortunately I was not too sick to finish listening to an audiobook, which is pretty much the most useful thing I could do at the time. That said, that was also the day where my skirt was due to be picked up at the tailor's, so I tottered to the bank and then to the tailor's in the smothering heat (the humidity must have been the killer, as the thermometer was only at 25° or 26° Centigrade), feeling rather sleep-walky.

Since then I've been wavering back and forth between mildly migraine-y and feeling pretty fine.

I've been a pitiful object in general. Today I aired to my kindly concerned team lead colleagues how alone I've felt since one colleague I worked with very closely is out sick due to anxiety, and the other was on holiday for two weeks. And I was briefly on the verge of tears when J. was at the hospital today for what was supposed to be a small operation to fix a stomach issue, and I gradually became nervous at the lack of updates, not because it was really that dramatic but because I've just been that fragile. (And also feeling strong urges to overshare, which really explains this entire blog post.)

The team leads and I also agreed about the toughness of the zeitgeist in the past two quarters. The industry I'm in is battered by a confluence of adversary forces: supply chain crisis, inflation leading to lower advertising revenue, war leading to hardship for colleagues and also leading to lower advertising revenue as the Russian market is debarred and certain types of advertising (e.g. computer war games) now look insensitive, stock overvaluation per my uncle Pu, and slow hiring due to intense market competition for technological jobs, ...

From my lowly perspective, this means that pressure is high to perform, but we don't have the people-power to do it: when colleagues leave, their positions stay empty far longer. We miss them, and those of us who remain need to work harder to stay level with the previous output. If we need to expand, only certain positions in our whole team will even be put on any website to advertise for hiring.

That said, one of my management superiors has made it their mission keep expectations reasonable; so they're currently the Atlas holding up the Earth. And my direct manager has emphasized over and over again not to do overtime.

From a cool-headed, microeconomic vantage point, too, we've been told that this is an excellent opportunity to re-focus on the essential outcomes of our work and figure out ways to make processes more efficient. So we will rise like a phoenix from the ashes when the winds of the market turn in our favour, etc., etc. (Which is sometimes reassuring, sometimes not, depending on my frame of mind at the time.)

Either way, I can still wipe up my tears with Euro bills, so I'm not really the demographic that requires much concern.

That said, the past week feels especially useless as I ended up not dropping off any food or hygiene donations; so the capitalist circus that gives me the opportunity to redistribute the wealth, doesn't even currently feel productive in this minor way.