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 love my kids and I am completely empty.
Both of those things are true. I don't know how to say one without it cancelling the other, but they sit in me at the same time, every day, and I have stopped trying to make them resolve. The love is real. The empty is real. They are not in a fight.
If this is you — if you are a parent and you are running on nothing and the love hasn't gone anywhere but the you underneath it has — please know that there is nothing wrong with you. Parenting is a job that asks more than a person has, and most of the people doing it are also working other jobs, and most of them did not have the help their own parents had, and the answer to the question why am I so tired is usually because what you are doing is genuinely too much.
Tonight, do less than you think you should. The kids will not remember the dishes.
— from a stranger in the same kitchen