Frank
There’s a particular kind of afternoon where the house starts pressing in. Monitors still on. Server rack fan still humming. My brain just going and going and going. No reason required. I just know the look when it shows up.
Oakley starts circling before I’ve even stood up.
It’s Not About Nature or Wellness or Any of That
Let me be straight with y’all. I’m not writing this because I found some clarity about mindfulness or read an article about fresh air. I’m writing it because I spent probably ten solid years treating “going outside” like a reward I hadn’t earned yet.
That was dumb.
The work isn’t going anywhere. The tickets will still be there. The Exchange queue doesn’t empty itself while you walk around the yard, but it also doesn’t get shorter if you sit in that chair grinding your teeth for another forty-five minutes after you’ve already hit the wall.
I didn’t get that for a long time. I thought pushing through the noise was the right move. Get it done, then rest. Except the noise would build and build, and I’d wind up at my desk at nine o’clock at night staring at PowerShell output, not retaining any of it. Three hours of being “present” at a computer without actually doing anything useful.
That pisses me off to think about, honestly. All that wasted time.
If I’d known at 45 what I know now at 55, I would have stepped outside at the first sign of that ceiling dropping. Not as a reward. Not as a scheduled break. As a literal pressure valve.
The Inside Gets Loud in Ways That Aren’t About Volume
Here’s the thing I wish someone had explained to me years ago, in plain language.
Sensory overload doesn’t always mean you’re hearing too much. Sometimes it means your brain has been processing too many inputs simultaneously, for too many hours, and it just fills up. The stack overflows. And when that happens, the most logical-seeming response is to bear down harder, try to focus more.
That’s exactly the wrong answer. That’s like trying to drain a bathtub by turning the faucet up higher.
I didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD and autism until I was well into adulthood. Which means I spent most of my life thinking I was just bad at handling stress. Lazy when I couldn’t push through. Broken when a perfectly quiet room still felt overwhelming after a certain point in the day. Turns out there was a reason for all of that. Turns out “the inside getting loud” is a real, describable thing with real, describable causes. I just didn’t have the vocabulary for it.
What I had instead was the instinct to go outside. Not because I was smart about it. Because sometimes you don’t have a better option and the woods behind your property are right there.
I grew up in Middle Georgia. Lakeside Drive. You went outside. That was the activity. Nobody handed you a coping strategy, you just lived in a place where the outside was always available, and it worked, and you never thought too hard about why.
Turns out it works because it interrupts the loop. That’s it. No mysticism. You walk out, the air is different, the light is different, Oakley is doing something stupid with a frisbee, and your brain, which was locked into a cycle it couldn’t escape on its own, just shifts gears. Not because nature healed you. Because the pattern broke.
What I Actually Do, Versus What I Used to Do
Old Frank, say 2018 or so, would sit in that chair until he was so fried he couldn’t function. Then feel guilty about not getting enough done. Then sit there longer to make up for it. Then finally give up in a worse mood than when he started.
That guy got nothing out of his evenings. Running on empty and pouring the empty back in.
What I do now is simpler and stupider and it works better:
- When I notice the inside getting loud, I stop. I don’t negotiate with myself about finishing the task.
- I go outside. Usually with Oakley. Sometimes with nothing but my phone face-down in my pocket.
- I stay out long enough for the pressure to drop. That’s usually fifteen to twenty minutes. Sometimes longer if I need it.
- I come back in and decide whether to pick back up or call it.
That last part matters. Sometimes the walk tells me I’m done for the night. And that’s fine. The work will be there tomorrow, and tomorrow-Frank will be in better shape to handle it than tonight-Frank is right now.
The thing I wasted years on was treating that decision like weakness. Like admitting I couldn’t hack it. Seventeen years into a career managing complex Exchange environments and enterprise AD infrastructure, I still sometimes have to remind myself that the guy who takes a twenty-minute reset and finishes the job cleanly is doing better work than the guy who white-knuckles it through four hours of diminishing returns.
Advice sounds easy until you’ve tested it. I tested this one enough times to be sure.
Flash Used to Be the Reason I’d Go
I had a Miniature Dachshund named Flash for sixteen years. He passed in December, right before Christmas, and I still haven’t completely sorted out how I feel about that. Sixteen years is a long relationship. He was just there, every single day, for most of my adult life in this house. Every morning he’d meet me in the kitchen while I fixed my coffee and I would say “Come on Flash, lets go clock in!” and he would click-clack his tiny Frito feet back to the office and lay on his blanket. When 4PM hit, “Come on Flash, time to clock out” and he would trot right up to the living room, waiting on me to sit down so he could claim his spot in my lap.
Flash was the one who’d look at me from across the room when I’d been at the desk too long. He didn’t circle like Oakley does. He’d just stare at me with that look that communicated, without any ambiguity whatsoever, that this was ridiculous and he had better plans for the next thirty minutes.
He was usually right.
Oakley has his own version of it. Less patient, more athletic, significantly louder about it. But the function is the same. The dog doesn’t care what’s in the ticket queue. The dog cares that it’s a reasonable evening in Jones County, Georgia, and there are smells out there that haven’t been investigated yet.
Sometimes that’s exactly the right priority.
Here’s What I’d Tell Myself
If I could sit down with 50-year-old Frank and give him one piece of advice that had nothing to do with tech stacks or music production or fitness goals, it would be this:
The inside is going to get loud. That’s not a flaw in you. It’s not a sign you need to work harder or rest harder or fix something fundamentally wrong with yourself. It’s a signal. Treat it like one.
You don’t have to understand exactly why it happens. You don’t need a diagnosis, or a plan, or a routine with a name. You just need to recognize the signal and respond to it before it turns into a full shutdown.
Go outside. Take the dog. Leave the phone inside if you can stand it. Give your brain fifteen minutes where nothing is demanding anything from it.
Then come back in and decide what’s actually worth finishing.
That’s it. The whole thing. I spent a lot of years making it more complicated than that.
I don’t recommend it.
