I’ve seen this pattern before. Work tightens - end-of-year reviews, auditors wanting receipts on every decision, the odd mathematics of pursuing a promotion while doing the current job and creating space for whoever inherits it. Half-hour blocks stacked into a grid where each one demands a different mental model.

And when that ends, I don’t rest. I add more.

I’m a jack of all trades. I collect competencies the way some people collect stamps. I’ve built a car-sized cardboard Viking ship and ridden it down the slopes at Jack Frost. I learned standup and performed across state lines. When something catches my interest, I don’t sample it - I develop infrastructure around it until I’m competent.

So now, while work runs hot, I’m also writing a novel. Designing a game system. Building tools that might turn into a business. Learning chords I haven’t touched in years. Not sequentially - concurrently. Each one its own cognitive load, its own failure modes, its own clock.

The stress I’m reaching for is different from the stress I’m given. Work stress is mechanical: procedural, negotiated, dependent on other people’s calendars. The stress I’m choosing is creative: self-directed, make-or-break in my own hands, with failure loops I control. It pays in tangible artifacts - things I can point to that didn’t exist before.

It isn’t rest. It’s a different gear. The kind of exhaustion where your legs hurt because you actually went somewhere.

The amp crackles. The heat press smells like vinyl and regret. I’m making my life hard again, and I’m not entirely sure why I like that.