This morning, I went to an "EDI Roundtable" event on the subject of neurodiversity and, allegedly, how we make the university a more neuroinclusive place.

The event was in a very new lecture theatre in one of the colleges. It was (a) incredibly steeply raked, so that the top of the theatre felt absolutely vertiginous; (b) weirdly lit, with fairly bright ceiling lights and windows at the top of the walls, meaning that the level where the speakers were was dimmer than the space above the top of the screen; and (c) horrendously echoey. The chairs were also really uncomfortable, there wasn't enough legroom even for a shortarse like me, and the foldout desk things were so close to the seats that mine was actually touching my stomach while I was sitting with my back against the backrest of the chair. And I am a very average size 16-18ish. Rarely have I been in a room that was that much of a sensory nightmare.

Of the four solo speakers, one (an academic colleague of mine) was neurodivergent. The others were: a Professor of Autism Research (not bad, apart from making me feel uncomfortably like a research subject and not a person); a GP (ok); a political philosopher who appeared to know nothing about neurodivergence and care less, opined that he didn't like the term "neurodivergent" because it implied a "neurotypical" and he thought everyone should just do as they would be done by and it would all be fine, and made a stupid joke about rejection sensitive dysphoria ("that's why I don't submit to peer reviewed journals any more") which made me want to throw things. All three neurotypical speakers came across very much as if they were addressing a default neurotypical audience, rather than a neurodiverse audience. And then there was a panel discussion with three neurodivergent people (two students and a student support worker), all of whom seemed incredibly ill at ease and at least two of whose microphones were not picking up their voices well.

I do think that the cause of improving neuroinclusion would have been better served by giving space to more neurodivergent voices. And the two-hour event used up all of today's spoons.

In the last week, I have:

- been to the cinema (Paddington in Peru, clearly Not As Good As Paddington 2 but very enjoyable nonetheless)

- been for a walk (4.8 miles on a bright chilly day)

- been swimming, twice (first time since September, but we are trying hard to get back into it, and succeeded in not talking ourselves out of it yesterday because the air temperature was barely above freezing, which was absolutely the right decision because it was brilliant. And we have agreed a standing swimming date at 11am on Saturdays.)

- finished knitting a cardigan

- moved two of the belt loops on a pair of trousers I finished last month because I hadn't got the placement quite right, and also added belt loops to the softshell trousers I made a couple of years ago which are the perfect trousers for winter swimming tips except that the fabric was too heavy for the elastic so they tended to fall down. And now they won't, and that was worth the slightly fiddly sewing in deeply awkward fabric, and if I can only manage two hours of sewing in a day rather than a really long sewing session, so what? Very few of my me-made clothes are anywhere near wearing out, so sewing slowly is probably a good thing.

If I can keep swimming every Saturday (or even most Saturdays), and get in a couple of hours of sewing every weekend, that will already be a big improvement on most of last year. And I want to use my Fridays off for some tiny adventures, starting small but just trying to get my confidence about going places and doing things up again, because otherwise I'm just going to spend the rest of my life sitting at home feeling like something is missing and resenting T for having his own life and not wanting to do the same things I want to do. The thing I really want to do is to get on a train and go to the seaside and walk along a beach and eat fish and chips looking out over the water, and maybe even swim, but I think I probably need to start smaller; go somewhere different for a walk, maybe, or go to another town and potter round shops and cafes, or find an interesting exhibition to visit. Suggestions welcome, though I don't necessarily promise to take them.

I am reading one of the (many) books about autism I've acquired in the last couple of years, trying to work out whether I can see myself in them enough to justify identiying myself as autistic instead of just weird and a bit useless. (Answer; yes, definitely.)

Picking this one up, I wondered vaguely if "books about autism" has now become a special interest. And then I remembered how, at the age of seven or eight, I was so obsessed with reading Doctor Spock's Book of Baby and Child Care (trying to work out what I was meant to be like) that my mother ended up hiding it from me. And then later, when I started to work out that I wasn't straight, I tried to find myself in queer fiction (of which not much was available in the local library, and none of it was terribly helpful, because I had no idea I was looking for ace rep and even if I had done, I don't think there was a lot of it about in the 80s).

Later on, I mostly tried to learn how to interpret and interact with other people from books, but I've always been trying to find myself there, too.

I have been back at work a week, and it has been OK. I started with a couple of shorter days and have been trying to stick to finishing at 5, and I don't feel too tired. I'm only working Monday and Tuesday next week, and then I'll be on leave until 4 January. Everyone seems to be very glad to have me back, though actually, things appear to have gone along pretty well without me.

I had to write a brief biography for a leadership course I'll be doing next year (leadership? Me? I don't know what they can be thinking) and ended with "I identify as queer, neurodivergent and a feminist and this fundamentally shapes my approach to work and life". Which felt...brave, but good.

I have also spent much of the week with an epic book hangover from finishing Victoria Goddard's At the Feet of the Sun, which is, basically, the epic ace romance of my dreams. And then I looked at the fic, and got annoyed that so many people seemed to think that the canon ace romance should develop into the characters having sex, and I got annoyed and ended up writing my own fic, in which they do not have sex. And I may have just outed myself as someone who prefers balance sheets to sex.

This is how today went:

8:05 arrive at office. Unpack bag, switch on computer, make tea.
8:20 sit at desk with tea. Read emails.
8:45 decide I should probably stop ignoring the emails telling me my password is about to expire. Spend ten minutes trying to think of a new password that conforms to the rules but that I can also (a) remember and (b) type.
9:00 multiple apps pop up notifications saying I need to log in again. Try new password. New password refuses to work. Give up and go to buy coffee.
9:15 get back with coffee. Drink coffee. Log in to multiple apps with new password which now works.
9:30 ring someone for brief chat about potential temp.
9:45 go to say hello to team. Spend 15 minutes talking to new office manager about various things.
10:10 stop on the way back from saying hello to team to ask most vulnerable colleague if she wants people to wear masks in in-person meeting. Spend 15 minutes catching up about various things.
10:30 regular senior staff meeting.
11:30 go and make more tea
11:40 sit down and start working through email. Remember I need to read papers for meeting at 2. Skim-read papers while also keeping an eye on inbox.
12:45 go and have lunch. Manage brief walk in parks.
1:45 get back from lunch. Answer teams message.
2:00 committee meeting.
3:15 committee meeting ends, teams call with another person who was in the meeting because we had arranged to talk afterwards.
3:30 look at email.
3:45 realise I need a wee. Decide to make tea while I'm up.
4:00 get back to desk with tea, contemplate actual work that needs to be done. Also contemplate state of utter exhaustion which I have already reached.
4:10 person turns up wanting a quick word about something. By the time they go, tea is cold.
4:30 drink cold tea. Have several parallel teams message conversations about various things while trying to write an email.
4:45 send email. Start reviewing documents which have to be submitted by tomorrow.
5:15 submit documents. Write and send another email. Start reading papers for meeting tomorrow morning.
5:30 person sticks head round door to say goodbye and catch up quickly on stuff that's happened today.
5:35 go back to meeting papers.
6:10 finish skim reading 153 pages of meeting papers for 10am tomorrow. Realise I'm not going to catch 6:20 bus. Spend 20 minutes on email.
6:30 stagger out of door and in direction of bus stop.

And this is not actually an atypical day...

The Lake District was lovely. We did a fair amount of walking, including a couple of reasonably strenuous if not terribly long (5-6 mile) walks and a guided walk with alpacas, I swam in Loweswater and Buttermere, read books and admired the views.

Being at home feels odd, like I've forgotten how to live here in the space of a week. (Being on holiday properly for the first time in two and a half years also felt very odd to start with, so I'm sure it'll pass.)

I think I do feel much less tired, and properly relaxed for the first time in ages.

Also, I have come to the conclusion that if I want to avoid burning out again, I need two things: first, I need to stop trying to be responsible for everything and start making my staff take some of that on, and secondly, I need to feel like I have someone who has my back can help me work through problems. The first one is doable, for values of doable which involve consciously changing the way I manage and getting people who have got quite comfortable with the way things have been to accept that; the second is more difficult, when I currently have a part-time interim line manager who I only see once a month (and missed this month's, as it was the week before last when I was off sick), and my new head of department, as far as I can tell, basically thinks I am the person who solves the problems. (I assume that at some point I will have a new permanent line manager, but I'm not sure they've even advertised the post yet, so I have no idea when that might be.)

I spent yesterday alternating dozing and reading. This seemed to do me enough good that by today I felt moderately human again and managed to find enough energy to finish the trousers I started last weekend.



(I'm very pleased with these trousers. I used the Lander Pants pattern I used to make a pair of yellow cords over the Christmas break, but with the legs narrowed following the pattern for the 100 Acts of Sewing Pants No 1, and the result may be my perfect trousers.)

I am still tired enough that I'm really not looking forward to having to get up at 5:45 tomorrow morning, and am quite worried about my ability to make it through five days of work. (I really prefer working in the office - I struggle to focus on work at home - but commuting just feels exhausting right now.) I am looking at booking a week off as soon as I can (and maybe even booking a Real Holiday, possibly in the Lake District, and have started looking at cottages and the potential for not-too-strenuous walks for people who are badly out of practice, especially with hills), but we've still got three weeks of term left so realistically that's not going to be for another month yet.

I am currently feeling exactly as exhausted as I did a few weeks ago, just before collapsing with what tests suggested wasn't actually covid.

I also have the same on and off headaches, brain fog and general malaise. Last lateral flow test was this morning, and was negative (though I have had more contact with people this week than I have done since pre-Omicron this week - half an hour or so unmasked at a coffee morning to remember the former colleague who was killed last week, an hour and a half unmasked in an in-person meeting yesterday, and someone I had a masked meeting with yesterday morning's spouse has just tested positive).

Do I have covid this time? Do I have something else? Am I actually just suffering from Proper Burnout and am back at collapse point after rallying briefly due to sick leave? (I have been managing to stick to 40-hour-ish weeks, though this is awful for my ability to actually keep on top of my inbox and probably doesn't really work well with my tendency to struggle to actually get down to anything major until all of my meetings are out of the way.)

Meanwhile I am stockpiling lateral flow tests in anticipation of the government deciding to stop providing them, and have been being vocal in meetings about thinking that it would be a jolly good idea if the university strongly encouraged people not to come to work with covid, or indeed any kind of infectious illnesses, even if self-isolation is no longer a legal requirement. (I got quite irate with the chair of the health measures advisory group who said we couldn't tell people they had to stay at home, and pointed out that actually, if we employ them, we bloody well can.)

I am working from home tomorrow, and find myself idly thinking that maybe if Storm Eunice knocks out our wifi so I can't make any of my meetings it would be quite nice, really.

I woke up yesterday feeling utterly depressed, and dragged myself out for a walk in the hope that being outside would reset my brain a bit.



The light was amazing, and being outside definitely helped, but it turned out to be a bit more walking than I was really up to; the last mile home was a struggle and I spent the afternoon slumped on the sofa watching Encanto (which is utterly charming) and then attempting the 2012 film of Les Misérables (which I gave up after an hour, because if you're going to film a musical, you really need to cast people who can actually sing, and then have them sing, rather than just kind of muttering their way through it, and one Good Tune in an hour is not enough to keep me watching a saga of misery and deprivation) while reading Sandman.

Today I did the Big Garden Birdwatch, during which, as is traditional, I saw far fewer birds than I would normally do in any given hour. And then I decided to invest my remaining spoons for the day on tackling two weeks' worth of ironing (I never used to iron things, but it turns out that me-made clothes in 100% cotton need it), despite the fact that I have been wearing the same dungarees and cardigan on seven of the last nine days (and on one of the other two I didn't actually get out of pyjamas) before returning to the sofa and watching Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga on nineveh_uk's recommendation.

I am tired, and sad that it is Sunday evening already. I'm going to work from home tomorrow because I don't want to try to go to the office and find out that the journey has wiped me out before I even start (and I'm not particularly keen to spend more time on the bus to minimise walking, given the end of the mask mandate last week), but I still feel pretty gloomy about the prospect.

Lateral flow tests still negative. I also ordered a postal PCR test yesterday after I found myself wondering if my expensive Dorset Cereals muesli always tasted like sawdust and I'd never noticed it, but I'm not actually expecting it to come back positive.

I didn't get up until about 4pm yesterday, after spending most of the day dozing. At about 10am the postman rang the doorbell with a parcel of fabric, which T brought upstairs and put next to me on the bed, where it lay until about 1pm when I finally managed to summon the energy to open it.

Today when T brought another parcel of fabric upstairs I opened it straight away, and was able to get up at lunchtime and sit on the sofa without a quilt over me. I am taking this as a sign that things are moving in the direction, though I have a tightness around the chest which I didn't have yesterday.

I'm not sure whether I should try to work from home tomorrow or take another day off. At the moment doing almost anything at all seems to leave me feeling wiped out, so maybe I should take another day even if that feels like indulgence rather than risk tiring myself out by trying to work?