Fieldnotes #10
On knowing what you need, and the cost of saying it out loud.
I know more clearly than ever what environments I work best in.
Years of working from home recalibrated something. The quiet, the control, the absence of constant background input — it turns out these aren’t preferences. They’re conditions. For a neurodivergent brain, the difference between the two only becomes obvious when they’re removed.
Return to office has removed them. The commute is a tax — financially, physically, mentally — before the day has even started. The office itself is sensory overload dressed up as collaboration. I manage it, because that’s what you do. But managing it has a cost, and the cost is accumulating in ways I’m starting to recognise as early burnout.
The irony isn’t lost on me. I spend my working life reducing unnecessary noise in systems — stripping out the friction, the clutter, the things that make simple tasks harder than they need to be. Turns out I need the same things for myself. Saying so feels riskier than it should.
The antidote, this month, has been the site.
I’ve been rebuilding gbbns.co from the ground up — new design, new CSS architecture, proper token system, the works. It’s the kind of work that asks exactly the right amount of me. Considered, deliberate, entirely on my own terms. No meetings. No open-plan noise. Just the problem and the craft.
It’s also reminded me what it feels like to work well. That’s useful information, even if I’m not sure yet what to do with it.
I’ve also been reading. Finished Abroad in Japan by Chris Broad, currently working through Vagabond: A Hiker’s Homage to Rural Spain by Mark Eveleigh. This sounds like a small thing. For me, right now, it isn’t — reading for pleasure is one of the first things that goes when things get hard, and one of the last things that comes back. It’s back.