Background: I’ve been in burnout at some level for 10 years. Chronic the whole time, sometimes also what I would describe as semi-acute to acute for many periods as well.

My current situation is that I won’t have a place to live in about a month, and I need to raise my income, but I can’t predict or guarantee that my brain will actually be functional enough to work. (I do tech stuff… right now I’m a web monkey but I’m trained as a software engineer, haven’t written nontrivial code in several years tho)

In my case I’m worried that getting a job and then losing it because my brain went on strike for a few weeks/months could potentially kick off a blockbuster depressive episode. I get those lonnnnnnng slowwwwww deep shutdown, lose 50 IQ points as you stare into the deadlights depressions. One more of those could quite literally kill me. That said, my med stack works and my mood is controlled better now than at any point in my life, so, I need to worry about this less.

My current income is thru gig work and I want to increase that rather than get a “job,” but here it’s the same problem, if I land a client and my brain goes AWOL, it’s going to be a problem. I have put a ton of work into my hardware+software stack though, and self-host nearly all my own shit, which is a big advantage when you’re permanently overwhelmed, because you save big bucks on hosting bills, and the open source upgrade treadmill is a lot slower than with corporate software.

Anyway, enough about me. Anybody want to share stories or tips?