Burst a vein, and die

Sometimes doing many things at a time can be exhausting. Like Vikram Seth puts it, you (metaphorically) "burst a vein and die", and find it hard to recover from that

One of my most favourite poems is something that was in my high school English textbook. It’s by Vikram Seth, and called “the frog and the nightingale”. When I first read it (as a schoolboy) I had assumed it’s a reference to the music industry, where the record labels (frogs) overwork musicians (artistes) until the latter “burst a vein, and die”.

Now the frog puffed up with rage.
"Brainless bird - you're on the stage -
Use your wits and follow fashion.
Puff your lungs out with your passion."
Trembling, terrified to fail,
Blind with tears, the nightingale
Heard him out in silence, tried,
Puffed up, burst a vein, and died.

I’m not really into poetry, and in the last 26 years, I’ve made no attempts at revising my narrative about this poem. Nevertheless, this last phrase “burst a vein, and died” has stayed with me. And I tend to abuse it, in many different contexts.

The most common context in which I use it (most likely silently, so even those of you who know me well are unlikely to have heard me use it) is in the context of getting overwhelmed.

There are times when I’m doing one thing, and another thing comes along. And then there is yet another. And soon I’m handling some 10 different things. I’m in a massive frenzy, managing all these multiple threads in my head, and switching contexts effectively to keep track of everything.

Soon there comes a point when I can’t handle it any more. In the best case I manage to gracefully wind down everything. In the worst case I abandon everything and “declare bankruptcy”. In either case, the moment I’ve managed to wind everything down there is the sense of calm.

In theory that is.

In practice, what happens after an intense period like this is that I continue to feel overwhelmed. The exhaustion from the period when I managed so many threads in my mind is so intense that I suddenly don’t want to do anything any more. There might be peace (either earned in a peaceful or abrupt manner), but I’m unable to enjoy it because my brain continues to spin. It’s like Newton’s first law - because my brain had been used to “spinning at a faster rate” for a period of time, it is unable to now slow down and be productive.

The other analogy I use to describe this mental state is a scene from Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle (from The Confusion (“book” 4, 5), I think). In that the ship is docked in Japan, with mercury in the hold. Soon, the people on the ship notice that the mercury is all vibrating at a particular rhythm. And then they realise the frequency matches that of the surrounding waves or something, and realise that if the mercury in the bottles continues to slosh around at the same rate, it might lead to some resonance with the waves and the ship might topple.

When I’ve been overwhelmed, the feeling I have is like that of mercury in a zillion bottles in my brain sloshing back and forth at a particular frequency. It can be quite disturbing, and even after I’ve “set things right” (reallocate the quantity of mercury across bottles in a random fashion to reduce resonance), that feeling of sloshing remains.

On a more serious and less allegorical note, what I’m getting at is that when I’m unexpectedly handling multiple things at a time (sometimes even two), it causes a kind of exhaustion that remains even after those things have been done. And it takes a long time to recover from that.

The effort made by my brain to continuously context switch is immense, and seemingly easy “multi tasks” can result in a massive expenditure of mental energy which can take a very long time to recover from.

Needless to say, I wrote this now after such a period of being overwhelmed when I was handling multiple things at a time, and I needed to do something to “cool off”, which was writing this!