Letters for burnout
Burnout does not always announce itself. Sometimes it shows up as not caring about things you used to love, or being unable to start anything, or crying in the car for no reason. Sometimes it is a Sunday-night dread that has stretched into Tuesday afternoon. Sometimes it is the realisation that you have been running on caffeine and adrenaline so long you cannot remember the last time you were not tired. It can come from a job, from caregiving, from parenting an under-five, from medical training, from postpartum, from any role where the demand has been unrelenting and the recovery has not. Letters in this theme are written by people who hit that wall and slowly came out the other side. They are not productivity advice and they are not self-care in the influencer sense. They are recognition that running on empty is real and that it takes real time.
I burnt out in my mid-thirties and didn't recognise it for almost a year.
I thought I was tired. I thought I had a flu I couldn't shake. I thought my memory was going. I went to the doctor about my heart twice. The thing nobody tells you about real burnout — not busy week burnout, the structural kind — is that it does not feel like burnout from the inside. It feels like illness. Like something is broken in your body that the GP can't find.
If you are in this — if you are exhausted in a way that doesn't match how much you are doing, foggy in a way that scares you, unable to do basic things you used to do without thinking — please don't dismiss it. It is not just stress. It is your nervous system telling you, in the only language it has, that something has to change.
I am not going to tell you what. You know already, somewhere underneath. But please listen to it. The body keeps escalating until you do.