This month marks one year of this newsletter! I started my Substack to hold myself accountable for my creative practice and as exposure therapy for Having Other People Witness My Writing. In some ways, I’ve held to my word (I did show up here sometimes, talked about creativity a bit), in other ways, I haven’t (lack of consistency, no idea what this newsletter is about?). Thank you for being here and for reading. And to the folks who subscribed who don’t know me IRL—Who are you?? Where did you come from? Hi! You rock!
one big colossal falling apart
Last year, around this time, I wrote about my word of the year:
“most years i try to think of a “theme” for the new year, instead of a traditional new year’s resolution. it’s usually a word or intention i want to bring with me - some in the past have been: balance, slowness, rebuild. inspired by my lord god almighty Sam Reich, this year will be “begin”.”
I stand by Sam Reich as a substitute for an organized god, though it’s interesting that BEGIN was my intention for the year given that most of my personal life felt like one big colossal falling apart: my year was punctuated by a burnout-induced collapse that unraveled my tightly wound life.
Burnout has been defined as “a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment caused by chronic work stress” [1]. I have never experienced something so quiet and insidious. Burnout starts slow and relies on many years of self-neglect to manifest. It counts on you repeatedly pressing go when your body is screaming stop. And despite my best efforts at self-awareness, healing, and finding balance, it showed up at my door. Rather, one day I looked around and realized it had been here for years.
For those unfamiliar, here are the stages you visit on the descent into burnout:
I have long been stress-addicted, so neglecting to listen to my body’s many signals when I was overworked and underslept was an easy trap for me to enter. Stages 1-2 felt good and started many years ago. I love a challenge, and being high-achieving at work fueled my self-esteem. Stages 3-6 came and went without me noticing. But when stages 7-9 arrived, things started to take a distressing turn. I became a shell of myself, grew increasingly irritable outside of work, and felt more than ever that I had to put all my energy into succeeding at my job.
Working a high-stress corporate job while burned out feels akin to being a chef in a restaurant working under impossible conditions. You do your best to train your staff and prepare for all possible outcomes, but you are always drowning. Every day, you wake up early to source ingredients and plan meals for demanding guests with highly specific needs. But when you arrive, the knives are dull, half the staff is gone, and the gas line is broken. You scramble to fix it, losing precious time, only for the guests to change every single one of their orders. Time is ticking as you run out to buy more ingredients, juggle cooking multiple recipes simultaneously, and barely deliver the meal before the guests leave unimpressed, convinced they never changed their orders in the first place. Exhausted, you stay late to reset the kitchen alone, feeling terrible about yourself. You wake up the next day to find the fridge broken—and what ingredients remain are spoiled. The restaurant owner calls and wants you to make tonight’s dinner using half the budget. And round and round it goes. By February of this year, I was well on my way to physical and mental collapse.
One night around this time, after a particularly harrowing month at work (it’s just temporary! I told myself, eyes bloodshot and glued to Slack at 10 pm), my partner asked me if I wanted a can of sparkling water or non-alcoholic beer. The simple request felt so immense, so dire, so completely overwhelming that after a long period of frozen fear, I hung my head in my hands and sobbed. Naturally, my partner was quite alarmed, and I felt humiliated. Why couldn’t I answer a simple question? Make a benign choice? It felt like answering the question would be so taxing I might pass out.
Still, I kept working, and sometimes I would spend multiple days glued to my computer screen in bed, only getting up to use the bathroom. The exhaustion was cellular: no matter how much I slept, burnout continued to drain my life force and wore me down to the point of not caring if I was going to be alive anymore. This apathy for my own life, combined with quickly emerging health issues, sent me into a breakdown (cue Stage 12!)—a turning point I’m grateful for because I simply couldn’t ignore it (but please people, don’t let it get to this point). What happened next was all because of immense privileges that I do not take for granted: I had the support and encouragement of my healthcare team. My partner and friends were generous, caring, patient, and gentle with me. I was able to take a leave of absence from my job, giving me time to regroup and ultimately make the best decision I could have: I quit.
And now I’m all better! Just kidding. Since I quit, I have not been “doing anything” except eat, sleep, repeat. I have felt physically terrible most of the time—I have lingering health issues from the stress I am still dealing with and will be for a while. In some ways, taking this forced break feels akin to being in my early twenties, when I felt listless, directionless, a bit awkward, and rode many emotional highs and lows. But 8 months after my body’s breakdown, 4 months after quitting my job, sleep is beginning to feel restful. My outlook on life feels one degree brighter. I am starting to belly laugh. Food tastes good. I look forward to seeing friends. I am silly again. I am more resilient. I am beginning to feel the seeds of creativity break open and can imagine new futures. And when it inevitably returns, I am lovingly able to walk myself off the cliff of despair.
Recently, my partner and I were joking about something and giggling. They turned to me and said “I’m glad you’re back. I missed you.” My heart broke. It summed up what had been glaring to them and less obvious to me: Burnout is quite a self-involved ailment. It had glazed over my eyes while I floated around our home like a ghost. I wasn’t present for a long time, and it was not just hard for me.
And so as I slowly climb my way out of the hole that burnout so graciously dug for me, I don’t have any lofty goals or intentions for the new year. But I want to participate in my own life. Feel the ground beneath my feet. Spend quality time with my chosen family. Be awake. Have space to show up for my community. And so my word for the new year will be PRESENCE. Maybe one day I’ll be burnout-free but until then, I will do my best to stay here, now. ♥
“Most of us have spent our whole lives being taught to believe everyone else's opinions about our bodies, rather than to believe what our own bodies are trying to tell us. For some of us, it's been so long since we listened to our bodies, we hardly know how to start understanding what they're trying to tell us, much less how to trust and believe what they're saying. To make matters worse, the more exhausted we are, the noisier the signal is, and the harder it is to hear the message.” ― Emily Nagoski, Burnout
1. Bianchi R, Schonfeld IS, Laurent E. Is it Time to Consider the "Burnout Syndrome" A Distinct Illness? Front Public Health. 2015
Current Passing Obsessions
Waxahatchee’s new Tiny Desk Concert 🎸
This weekend, I went to see the Keith Haring exhibit at MoPOP. Highly recommend it if you’re in Seattle (through March 23). 🌀
I got REALLY into crochet at the beginning of the month. I taught myself, then made 2 scarfs in a week. Put it down and haven’t thought about it since. 🧣🧣
I am currently listening to the audiobook of How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong and am loving it. It’s piqued my curiosity about alternate ways of living and is interrogating some of my learned scripts of individualism. An extremely pertinent quote that I have been mulling over:
“Accountability is also about recognizing and accepting that we are necessary and wanted. It’s understanding that when we neglect ourselves, don’t care for ourselves, or are not working to live as our best selves, we are devaluing the time, energy, and care that our loved ones offer us.”
This season of Survivor was riveting, I am so happy about the winner and I won’t spoil it for you if you watch it, but WOW! 🔥🍟🇮🇹🍝🥥
That’s all for now, thanks for being here,
<3333
Mmm, these insights are a gift. From Begin to Presence... a powerful shift <3