Burnout as Portal

WHEN BREAKING DOWN IS BREAKING THROUGH

What if burnout isn't the end? What if it's the beginning? What if burnout is a portal — a doorway your soul opens when you refuse to listen any other way?

We've been taught to fear burnout. To see it as a failure. As a weakness. As something to avoid at all costs.

I gained more weight. Suddenly had injuries all the time. Exhausted and irritable. Probably not fun to work with sometimes.

And all I did was eat more cupcakes, take more Advil, see more doctors, drink more coffee, and make more excuses for my behavior.

Until my mind pulled the plug.

The mind is the most powerful part of the body. So much so that it will help you override physical illness and keep going. But when the mind determines that you're incapable of listening to yourself and sitting down?

It will sit you down somehow, someway.

Depression. Anxiety. Some other mental health challenge that demands your attention and forces you to have a seat.

I was on the burnout hamster wheel. Pouring everything I had into work that wasn't quite me. In spaces that didn't get me. With people who didn't speak my language. With the baggage of race, class, and gender weighing me down.

The burnout weather system. All the conditions to make a tornado.

I was contorting to over-perform excellence. Believing, as I was taught to believe, that excellence was currency. A proof point of capability. And worse – of worth.

When you experience professional rejection for any reason, it chips away at worth, at value, at enough-ness. A design that keeps many of us plugging away in broken systems because we ourselves are broken.

Whatever childhood wounds or cultural imprints drive us to excel are the wounds that make it hard to see that this shadow dance is even happening.

Until burnout. Until there's a physical SOS. A flare sent up by the body. The mind is signaling that you are out of whack.

In hindsight, having come to the other side, I realize my mind was carrying the truth I refused to hear.

Years of therapy talking about the stress of each day until I realized everything on the surface was the eruption of what lay beneath.

The child who wasn't listened to and feared abandonment. The teen who survived by being hypervigilant and over-giving. The young adult told that growing up in poverty had sealed her fate. The Black woman scarred in white spaces. The larger body shamed for the trauma it revealed. The soul that inherited ancestral angst and generational pain.

It read something like this: I did it, I made it, I won it, I achieved it, now love me, validate me, tell me who I am. I am empty. Repeat.

I believed that if I just worked harder, stayed quieter, got skinnier, and kept myself together, I'd be...[you can fill in the blank here with what you thought the outcome would be]

But when my mind broke, it forced me to wrestle with the cycle I was in. And more importantly, why I was in it.

Much of the time we are cycling, and it's not until a rupture that we awaken. We fear these moments — the disruption to our curated lives, the stigma of what it means to pause and say: I'm not okay AND I'm not happy.

It's hard to sit with that. To take responsibility for your own happiness. To un-victimize yourself. To un-villainize the people around you.

But here's what I discovered: I wasn't alone in this reckoning.

Shortly after my return to work, COVID struck. Charles Darwin's survival of the fittest played out in real time.

COVID was the first collective reckoning. The current political climate suggests another is on the horizon.

Post-COVID permitted me to wear workout clothes to work. Pearl earrings got tossed for large gold hoops and occasionally plastic fake gold door knockers. If you know, you know.

I was coming back online. Not for more performance. For discovering who I was and what I wanted out of this life. A personal seeing of something you can't unsee. You don't have all the steps figured out, but you know it's different.

The pandemic afforded all of us the space to really rest. To start questioning old belief systems and ways of being that didn't lead to any real happiness or well-being.

Success does not equal alignment. That feeling of being in tune and in the right orchestra. That's really what we're all searching for: Getting our personal compass to match the arrow for true north.

My burnout wasn't my failure. It was my awakening. The portal that forced me to stop running long enough to see what I was running from. And more importantly, what I was running toward–wholeness.

Burnout became the teacher I didn't know I needed. The intervention my soul orchestrated when gentle nudges weren't enough. It said: Stop. Listen. There's another way. And for the first time in my life, I did.

Live: understanding that breakdown can be a breakthrough.

Give: yourself permission to see burnout as information.

Trust: that your body and mind are trying to save you.

Be: willing to let the old system collapse.

Honor: the portal that burnout opens.