In healing from PTSD, it’s difficult to gauge one’s mental capacity. A PTSD brain is one requiring recovery from shock, or overload.
I sold my two motorized bikes when I had to move. There was no place to store them, and I was too busy to ride daily. I started riding electric scooters, rented via scootnetworks.com, a service that offers battery-powered scooters on a ride-by-ride basis. The cost to travel via Scoot Networks was going to be less than paying for a garage for my scooter. So, I sold my Honda Metropolitan, named Pinto Bean, and joined Scoot Networks.
Soon after, I decided to apply for a part-time job, only ten hours a week. This would be in addition to my full-time job. I got hired, thanks to my skills and M1 license. The job entails lifting heavy batteries and replacing dead ones in scoots around the city. The benefits for me for having this job is multi-fold:
- Riding scooters with tweaked motors that give it extra low-end torque
- Exercise including lifting
- Getting paid working with something I enjoy
In my first week, I ended up working nearly 20 hours. Which means I worked about 60 hours total with my full-time job. Scoot is short-staffed for replacing dead batteries, and I felt obsessed about getting these glories on the road.
After my first week, my brain is fried. I’ve been sleeping well, though; so well that I haven’t even woken up in the middle of the night all week. I can’t remember the last time I slept so well. But my mind is not laden in the way a healthy brain is when tired or exhausted. I can sense my executive function slipping. My forehead feels like it has a weight inside. And I’m having a hard time remembering things, even long-term memories. It’s as if I’ve over-fired the neurons that had replaced the burned out PTSD pathways. So, now (hypothetically) I’ve got burned neurons and more burned neurons. At one point toward the end of the week, I had a sharp pain in my forehead that throbbed several times and stopped, and then came back a few more times and stopped again.
I don’t know if the pain in my head, or the feeling of weight has anything to do with PTSD. But I’ve never felt like this before. It seems not long ago that I worked 80 hours in a week and still had energy and time to spend with friends.
I know that 20 hours extra work per week is too much. I will scale back to the intended 10 hours, hope more people come onboard to recharge these little red electric scooters, and give my brain some recovery time.