Re: Limit testing
October 2023. I was pushing hard at work to keep track of all the important projects. I was teaching twice a week, even though it felt like I was always working less than I should. I had agreed to create a website for a cause I believed in, so I worked on it in the interval between getting home (sometimes after tennis) and falling asleep with my laptop on.
What I was doing to myself wasn't new. As Valentine's Days so brilliantly describes, I was no stranger to limit testing. It had been part of my modus operandi ever since I could remember. Coming from a family that sold me the idea that anything is possible if you work hard enough, I recall juggling multiple extracurricular activities in high school while studying math for three hours a day, excelling in other subjects, and writing a book (lol).
I became a master at limit testing when I managed to be at the top of my class in college while running the college newspaper and learning to code (coding wasn't part of my syllabus). I thought I had reached my limit when I started working as a journalist, commuting four hours a day by train, with no set schedule and a boss who had no qualms about calling me during vacations to ask for work.
The problem with limit testing is that you often exceed it. You end up exhausted, almost destroyed, and even though you know everything is wrong and you're doing more harm than good, you secretly feel proud of what you've achieved. Like a marathoner who finishes the race with every muscle sore, you know you'll eventually recover and get back in the game.
That's what I thought until one year ago, out of nowhere, I thought I went blind.
Suddenly, the possibility of never being able to recover from your limit testing sets off an emergency alarm in your head. Because the difference between a marathon and this kind of limit testing is that this one can cause permanent damage (well, I guess a serious injury in a marathon can too, but the risk of serious injury in this kind of limit testing is much higher).
Now, every time I feel like I'm slipping back into any kind of limit testing—and it's so easy to fall back into it—I ask myself if it REALLY needs to be that way. And if I'm willing to accept any permanent damage that might result from it. Not sure it's working. But I'm trying.