Mental Health Day

I decided I needed a mental health day tomorrow from work. Every once in a while I feel I need to get a day to be by myself and to break up the turmoil of work, sleep, work, sleep, and more sleep. Not that I work many days, 12 hour shifts, gives me about a half of the month off, but I tend to need more. I used to not take days off that often, but the last couple of years, I have been told that I need to take more time off and more time for myself and family. Last year I used over 200 hours time off, and that barely brought me under the limit of the hours I could carry over. With the 12 hour shifts and the time off I only worked approx 165 days last year. That leaves 200 days, with not much to show for it.

This year I am really trying to hold back and not use that much time. I was told once again a while ago, that I need to take time for myself. People are worried that I'm not away from the office to much and afraid that I'm either going to quit or get burned out. 6 months ago, I'd say I was near my ending point, where I thought about quitting and going to school full time, but would leave my family in dire straights and unable to survive. I've put in applications in so many places and have passed up on some pretty terrific jobs, but I don't want to go back to the bottom of the totem pole. Honestly I love my job, I don't see myself doing anything else and have made peace about staying where I'm at. But I know I need to take time for myself. I need to leave this place every so often and not worry about things as much as I do.

We can carry 320 hours of PTO to the following year. I usually tend to keep it around that, but last year I got down to 290ish. That's the lowest I like it to get to. It is my insurance, if anything ever happened to me or my family, I have enough hours built up to survive financially. I have 360 hours now PTO plus about 600+ hours of sick time. I have enough built up I could leave for 6 months and still come back with some time saved up.