Hardest part of burning out is not the burnout.
It’s the fact that you can’t just burn out, recover and continue as you did before the burnout. You have to change your whole life, so you don’t burn yourself out again. You have to make your world smaller. You have to remove unnecessary noise. You have to take down the big structures you’ve built trying to pretend you can live this life beyond the limits of your energy. Beyond your own limits. You have to accept that you just absolutely can’t do everything people expect from you. You yourself are included in those people. You, most likely, are the worst of them all.
And even worse, you can’t do all the things you WANT to do. Because even fun things take energy.
I say you, but I mean me. Second-person self-narration is my way of abstracting this from myself. I don’t want to admit that it’s me who burnt herself out. It’s me who is tired and can’t handle… life. It’s me who is tired all the time.
I want to forget that it is in fact me.
Like Emily Autumn sings in her song ‘Opheliac‘.
Maybe it’s time to remember it is in fact me who has lived in debt. Not financially. (Well, that too, because mortgage and student loans are debt, but socially acceptable. I digress.) I’ve been loaning energy from my future self and now I have to pay back that debt, with interest I didn’t agree to.
“She speaks in the third person
So she can forget that she’s me“
– Emily Autumn
I have been in a cycle of burnout, full time work and another burnout, and the time between burnouts gets shorter and my life gets smaller. I’m in contact with fewer people, I do less, I go to fewer places. Public transport and shopping centres exhaust me and I avoid them. I take weeks or months to answer messages. I forget things I promised to do, I forget people I love.
The amount of energy I have to give is less after each burnout. And somehow I’ve still tried to give more than I have. It has taken me four burnouts and in total several years of sick-leave to learn that I, in fact, can not keep going like this. I can’t just go back to full time work after burning out hoping that this time it’s different. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein goes “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” There is no proof he ever said it, but we’ve all heard the quote. However, that’s not insanity. It’s stupidity. Stupidity is burning out, resting the minimum amount of time and then going back to doing the same thing again, expecting not to burn out.
I have been stupid. Somewhere back in my mind I still have the same stupid thought.
In the past few years, I have scheduled time to recover. I know I have a busy week ahead, so I schedule time to recover. However, recently I had a thought. What if I just say no? What if I organise my life so that I don’t have to schedule time to recover? What if I just say no to things, even fun things, if I know that week is too much?
It’s hard to stop when there is so much to do. And ironically, that is exactly when you need to stop. You need to stop at the very latest when it feels like you can’t. Preferably well before you get to that point. There I go again. That’s when I need to stop.
I often wonder how people do it all. Am I just weaker than others? Why can’t I do as much as others do? How do others do it all without burning themselves out? The truth is, a lot of people are on the verge of burning out. So many people I know have been burnt out. I don’t have an answer for that. Maybe others are better at relaxing when they don’t do everything I see them doing? Maybe others ask for help when they need it? Because that’s what I struggle with in the big picture.
I have listened to so many self-help books and gone to therapy. I’ve tried medication and meditation. I’ve looked for the cure from outside. Someone to fix me, someone to heal me, someone to tell me what to do. When I went to therapy, my wish was that he would tell me what I should do. I was so tired and I kept doing, which led me to the cycle of burnout.
I asked for it.
Without knowing it, I asked for the burnout. I asked for someone or something to tell me to stop. I asked for the burnout. I asked for something to force me to slow down. I don’t know if I believe in manifestation, but I think I manifested a burnout. And maybe the cure for burnout is to burn the fuck out. Burn it all. Burn all the responsibilities, the bridges and all the projects that you’ve promised to do but don’t have the time and energy to do.
It’s still a process. I’m writing this after a week of too much. I’m writing this after a week where I let out an animalistic yell in the car because everything was just too much. But from now on I’ll change and take care of me and won’t schedule too much and take care of my body and mind… and here I am, making it into a to do-list rather than stopping to ask what do I really need? It’s a process and I’m not gonna be ready anytime soon.