by LATTE
They are here.
Two of them. Exactly what I said I needed. And I was right to need it. The math still works.
So I do not fully understand why it feels like this.
The shape of it changed
I thought the hard part was carrying everything alone.
I was right. It was hard.
But I had adapted to it. Found a rhythm. A system. A way of moving through the day that kept things from collapsing.
And now that is gone.
Not in a bad way. In a you built a workaround and now the workaround is the obstacle kind of way.
Because it turns out that two months of carrying everything alone does not just make you tired.
It makes you the infrastructure.
And infrastructure does not get a handover. Infrastructure just gets queried.
The new kind of heavy
It is not the tickets anymore.
That part is actually fine. The queue is distributed. Things move.
What nobody told me is that I would now also be the documentation.
Not the SharePoint documentation. Not the wiki. Not the written-down, properly-structured, version-controlled kind.
The living kind.
The hey Latte can you explain this kind. The hey Latte is this helpdesk or something else kind. The hey Latte I need five minutes kind while I am in the middle of an urgent ticket that genuinely cannot wait.
And I want to help. I do.
But I built all of this in my head. Over two months. In real time. While also running the whole thing alone.
Nobody asked me to write it down as I went. Nobody told me the handover would happen through me, in person, mid-sprint.
So now I sit here trying to explain something I never learned either. I just did it until I knew it.
And that is not a good foundation for teaching.
The part I did not expect
I thought I would feel relieved when they arrived.
And I do. I said that. I meant it.
But I also feel like I am failing.
Tickets I would have closed in ten minutes now take twice as long with questions I cannot always answer clearly. Processes I run on instinct are hard to articulate when someone is watching and waiting.
I catch myself thinking: I am so bad at this.
At explaining. At teaching. At making space for the questions when I still have fires to put out.
And then underneath that: I am not delivering like I was.
Which is not true. Objectively I know it is not true.
But exhaustion does not really care about objectivity.
Exhaustion just tells you what it sees.
And what it sees is: you used to handle this without blinking. Now you need two sets of eyes and you still feel behind.
That thought visits often.
What I come home to
Nothing.
Not nothing in a dramatic way. Just nothing in a depleted way.
I close the door and sit down and the version of me that sits down is whatever survived.
I do not write. I do not code. I do not reach out.
I just exist for a while until I can sleep and do it again.
And I know this is temporary. This phase of it. The onboarding, the adjusting, the teaching-by-doing.
But knowing something is temporary does not make you less tired while you are in it.
The thing that did help, a little
He is not gay.
I figured that out this week.
And I cannot fully explain why that helped, except that it closed something.
Not the feeling itself, maybe. But the what if of it. The low-level process that kept running in the background, wondering, looping back.
It was not going anywhere. I think part of me knew that.
But knowing it differently now, knowing it as a fact rather than an uncertainty, means I can stop spending memory on it.
And I have very little memory to spare right now.
So that counts as a small mercy.
Why I write this
Not because I know what to do with it.
I do not.
I am tired in a way that changes shape but does not go away. I am doing my best with a situation that was never designed for one person and is now, in a different way, still not quite designed right.
I am proud of what I built during those months. Quietly, privately proud. Even if no one will ever fully see how hard that was.
And I am trying to rebuild into something that has room for more than just me.
It is just slower than I expected. Harder in directions I did not plan for. Less clean than the version I imagined.
But here I am.
Still showing up. Still holding the thing together.
A little looser than before.
the queue changes shape. the weight is the same. you just learn to carry it differently.