It’s 2:30 pm and I’m crying: My Burnout Story (part 1)
Burnout gets talked about in all kinds of ways: the fluffy self-care tips (Baths! Nature walks! Breathing!) , the brain chemistry deep-dives, the big systemic critiques. All of that matters, and I can’t wait to talk about it, but today I want to get personal. Today, I want to share the piece of my story where burnout broke me down, and how I started clawing my way back.
And I do mean clawing. No matter what anyone tells you, getting out of burnout is not a picnic, it’s not a one-size-fits-all fix, and I firmly believe that a thousand nature walks and a gratitude journal won’t solve it. Keep doing the nice walks if you like them, but let’s not pretend they fix structural rot.
Now, let’s take a walk back in time to a summer day. The birds are chirping, the sun is streaming in through my windows, and I am seated at my desk, crying in front of my heavily-stickered laptop. It’s 2:30, and like some sort of extremely fucked-up clockwork, I’m crying, like I’ve been crying for about a month now. Same time, every day, sobbing out of sheer stress, breakdown, and frustration. I can’t even keep a consistent lunch hour, but I never miss my Crying Appointment.
I’m one of the last people left on my already deeply under-resourced team, but I’m trying to keep moving as if nothing’s changed, as if I alone can do the work of five people.
And while I’m crying, the inner drill sergeant in my head is barking orders. You don’t have time for this. Get it together. Crying isn’t going to help. The work is piling up while you sit here. You’re just making it worse. Stop it. STOP IT. It’s a feedback loop from hell: the more I break down, the louder the voice gets, the more convinced I am that I must be the problem.
By 3:15, the tears are gone. I blow my nose, take a shaky breath, and get back to work. I wiggle the trackpad to make sure my Slack dot is green, as if nothing happened. I work well past when I should stop, fighting the nonstop onslaught of work I should never have been doing alone. I order food, numb out with scrolling or games, and crash into bed. Rinse, repeat.
Now, some of you reading this will have immediately clocked that I was burned out. But I am tenacious (read: stubborn) and I kept trying to convince myself that one day it would get better. If I just worked harder, kept my head down, proved myself, surely The Powers-That-Be would notice and reward me with the resources I should have had all along.
Right?
…Right?
Yeah so that didn’t happen. And I wish I could tell you I woke up one day and was like, “ENOUGH! I KNOW WHAT I DESERVE AND IT’S NOT THIS!”.
I didn’t. Not by a long shot.
What did happen was that I offhandedly mentioned to a friend that I couldn’t seem to stop crying every day and I think maybe I hated my job? But maybe this is how all jobs are supposed to be? Hustle culture means working hard and secretly crying, right?
….Riiiiiight?
Oh my goodness, did I get treated to LOVING SHOUTING. I got told, in no uncertain terms, that I needed to leave that awful job, that under no circumstances did I deserve that misery. That was a wake up call. I had been so caught up in the misery of my role, stuck in the belief that I could work my way out of it somehow, that I couldn’t see what it was doing to me.
From that discussion, I picked up a phrase I now use as one of my guiding principles: no job is worth your mental health.
I needed to do something different.
To Be Continued….