Burnout Blessings: How 'killing it' was killing me

My burnout didn’t appear as a fully fledged monster overnight.

It inhabited my body like a creeping vine over a long period of coping with high stress and a penchant for taking on too much responsibility. As a person living with PTSD, I was used to my nervous system malfunctioning. I was used to ignoring how my internal self felt, buttoning that shirt right up and leading the way through difficult terrain. Until one day, my body was in a long-term crisis I couldn’t find my way out of.

My burnout increased with every innocent decision I made: deciding to skip lunch because I had too many emails to get through, working late into the night to mask my ADHD difficulties, and my hard-to-break habit of always being ‘on the go’. I was on the go in every facet of my life. With every decision I made to push through the next project, bounce back from a mental breakdown in a matter of hours, and squeeze in time for another relationship I couldn’t carry, the weight on my back grew heavier.

I had grown up with a single mother, with her, myself and my siblings escaping domestic abuse as a child. The pain was acute, and the shadows we ran away from reared their heads constantly. We were always busy. If I ask myself what story my nervous system held, it would tell you about being used to high level crises, addiction to overwork, distraction and numbing. Just because I appeared to bear the weight well, didn't make the emotional and physical baggage any less heavy to carry. 

Rest was not in my vocabulary. But ‘Girlboss’ was. ‘Putting work before my mental health’ was. ‘Succeed or die trying’ was. I was a young person in my twenties and “killing it”, taking on leadership position after leadership position. I was praised for how much I was juggling, and the grace with which I carried my ugly pains. I sought out the praise that made me feel exceptional. People didn’t realise that the burnout was killing me. Neither did I. When I started to finally acknowledge my levels of fatigue, it was only after they had metastasized into the sort of extreme behaviours I wasn’t able to run away from. I had piles of shame, a leaking short-term memory, constant suicidal ideation, substance addictions I failed to hide or recover from, and the reality of one memorable week when I tried my hardest to get out of bed each morning and barely left the covers. 

Functional burnout is one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through. My burnout didn’t have an “end date”, and it still doesn’t. I kept waiting for someone to tell me that it had gone too far, and to tell me what to do about it. I’d take online test after online test that would tell me the same thing: I was seriously burnt out. Then I’d ignore the advice and keep going as I had been. I don’t necessarily see burnout as a clean-cut phase that someone suddenly enters or exits anymore. It’s the cumulative byproduct of what happens when we continue to ignore our bodies and downplay our needs. We enact behaviours geared towards over-productivity, dislocation and individualism – away from rest, intuition and collective trust. It’s the false belief that there’s no human cost to capitalism.

For the last six months, I’ve been intentionally working to recover from burnout. My burnout doesn't have an overnight cure. There was no quick fix where I stopped for just long enough that I could go back to my previous baseline. Rather, the recovery process has meant creating an entirely new relationship with my nervous system. It’s asked me to change the way I live my life, so that I don’t short circuit from running out of all the spoons in the house. It has meant making huge decisions like stepping away from fulltime work, changing my environment, relinquishing responsibilities, and accepting that my ‘normal’ will look entirely different than what it used to.

As I have had to relearn how to listen deeply to myself and advocate for myself, understanding the reasons I burnt out in the first place has put me on an entirely new pathway. The pathway has no shortcuts: every small step and misstep moves me in the direction where I occupy this life and my disabilities fully. I see my burnout now as a blessing in disguise. It was my body desperately asking me to recognise my own humanness in a colonial-capitalist world that seeks to deny the fact we have a right to freely exist. 

The blessings that have sprung from recognising my burnout were all found the hard way, but I’m changed by the journey. I’m so thankful for what burnout has caused me to confront, what it has asked me to reforge my relationships with. In drawing a new map for how to live my life, I’ve had to accommodate my humanness in every decision. I’ve had to centre my wellbeing and rest when I think about how mahi, obligations and relationships are going to work for me, not the other way around. Capitalism is constantly forcing us to fit our unruly bodies into the unnatural shape of a cog in the system. With its foot on our neck, we’re very used to things working in this direction, with so many of ourselves already sent into chronic pain, unrest and early deaths. Recovering from burnout is such a privilege, but it’s one where I remember truly that rest is resistance. From my viewpoint on this nonlinear journey, I know I will never actively sacrifice my wellbeing for a profit line again. 

Nowadays I try to wake up when my body tells me to. I sink into rest and ask my body to teach and to lead me. I listen to my pain when it cries out in throbs and aches. I rewrite my to-do lists when they’re three pages too ambitious, which is almost always. Acknowledging my workaholism has forced me to recognise that I’m not a superhero. I’m not invincible, and I pray to never again believe that I need to be. Instead of gritting my teeth and stuffing it all deep down, I acknowledge my fatigue and my pain as valuable sensations. It’s my right to ‘malfunction’. It’s my right to have disabilities that require accommodations. As it was my ancestors too, and those who aren’t afforded the same options.

Day by day, I reclaim this life as my own. I claim my sorrows, I claim my joys. I get up for a stretch, instead of running to my computer first thing in the morning. I take a step outside, take a deep breath, touch my body, find something joyful. Keep whittling my goals into something achievable. Resisting and recovering from burnout has seen me sacrifice a lot of niceties, but it is still a privilege. It is a privilege that more of us should continue with, as we fight to liberate the rest of the working class from capitalism. It is a privilege to reclaim our time on earth and the community that has been stolen from us, but one we must all endeavour with.

Hence here I am again today, staying on the slow train. Unlearning perfectionism, mistake by mistake, the idea that I can do everything, the rush of an alarm clock. Every day I breathe a new breath and remember: life is so much more sacred than working all of the time. Rest is not earned, it is required. Being busy is over glorified. I dream of simple rituals and activities. I imagine us all, as strong as ocean currents together. Colonial empires fall around us as the whole of society heals and rebraids our nervous systems. We have collective strength in our resistance. We put on our own oxygen masks first, but we never abandon the other person. We sit under trees and learn from our elders. We fill each other’s cups when we are exhausted, instead of planting bandaids over broken bones. We all get there together, eventually, in our own time.

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