there was a day last week — after four weeks of feeling deadened within — that i thought — perhaps i’m getting my energy, and my confidence, and pleasure (!) in the work, back. It was one of those madcap days with strings of meetings, with barely any breaks between (during which one desperately tries to rush out some other work), and full of interruptions with the phone ringing and email chiming with urgent requests for research and information and opinions, and bosses and colleagues banging in and out of your room, and papers flying as you go, and no food just thirty continuous cups of tea as I go and go and go — 

 — I couldn’t live like that for a prolonged period — but for short periods — the adrenaline rush, the thrill of problem-solving (for the first time in ages I felt I could attack a problem again, did not fear it even though I knew nothing about the issue before I looked up the statute — feeling the writing — in irregular spurts - start to come again — 

but by the following day it had gone again. one thinks of it as burnout — anyone in my place is — but it is also something that feels like recklessness, although reckless is too strong, too energetic, too willed a word — this is more a kind of being washed by the tide towards danger and doing nothing to stop myself. I’m starting to fear I’d lose my job if I go on like this.