Going Back To The Life That Burned You Out

Burnout doesn’t just exhaust you. It changes what you’re willing to ignore.

Photo by Mina Rad on Unsplash

I was made redundant last year but am going back to corporate soon. And to be honest, I'm freaking out about it.

A career break was a god send. I needed time to decompress and recover from the space I'd been in. After burnout, after grief, after health problems.

Now, after months of trying to build something different here and in my business, the bills are a reality hard to ignore.

It's ramping up my anxiety. Not because I don’t know how to do the job. I do. Well, part of my brain knows I can, but the “redundancy part” still has lingering imposter syndrome and wants to run and hide.

I’ve spent years being the responsible one, the person who gets things done, holds things together, takes on more when things start falling apart.

It's a lovely signature of my past burnouts. But I'm anxious about more than not being able to do the job.

I'm worried about burning out again.

Burnout creates fractures only you can see

Burnout has a way of changing how clearly you see the life you were living before. Because it reshapes reality with this veneer of illness, disappointment and overwhelm.

I remember the long hours, the crap sleep, the nervousness around office politics. Trying to be all things to all people, even if they were unreasonable. They were senior to me and what they said, goes.

Having time to myself over the past few months has been life-affirming. There's a reason all the business and entrepreneur coaches talk about creating a “freedom business”.

It's because so many of us are sick and tired of the daily grind, values misalignment and exhaustion doing things that rarely move the needle on what matters.

Freedom gives you relief from certain types of fckery, the snarky client, the useless internal teams or lazy project manager who can't get the basics right.

And frustratingly, the people who burn out aren’t the careless ones.

It's the responsible ones. The ones who go over and above, see all the connections, care about what they're doing (too much), and keep going when something inside is asking them to stop.

Responsibility is a strength, but it's a fast way to slowly abandon ourselves.

Knowing my proclivities towards this, I'm always nervous going into a new role or job. I hear the burnout siren’s call and head straight for those coastal rocks.

Silly me, darn it.

What's different about resisting burnout this time?

I know something now that I didn’t understand as well before.

Burnout doesn’t always start with work or workload. Sometimes it starts with loss.

• The loss of a parent.

• The loss of a version of yourself.

• The loss of a life that once made sense.

• The loss of connection and support.

When loss happens, responsible people do the same thing: we keep going. We keep functioning. We take care of everyone else and try to make the world stable again.

And sometimes the way we cope with grief is by pushing it down and carrying on, until even the body eventually refuses to keep living like that.

Burnout happens when the part of you that knows something is wrong finally stops cooperating.

It's internal mutiny to get you to pay attention to your poor choices and actually wake up.

Come on kiddo. Get with the programme.

Through feeling detached, emotionally detached, unable to connect to the life you've created, burnout forces a kind of clarity.

You start to see the difference between keeping a life functioning and actually living it.

I went from feeling important I'd signed a cost-saving deal working late into the evening, to enjoying a new glaze on a pot I'd created from scratch.

Both can be satisfactory, but once you’ve seen that difference, it’s hard to pretend you didn’t. Or that you prefer one over the other.

So the question I’m sitting with now isn’t whether I can go back.

Of course I can, and I've done it before. The real question is something else entirely:

Can I return without disappearing inside that life again?

Applying the real lesson after burnout

Maybe the real work after burnout isn’t escaping the world that burned us out. With the pace and cost of modern life, it's hard to escape fully.

And I'm still playing the lottery to speed that process up. One can hope.

Instead, it’s learning how to stay in it without abandoning ourselves again.

I've realised loss fractures who we are. We lose a part of ourselves and that's when other things crumble without even realising until it's too late.

Our health, relationships, values, life legacy and focus.

I’m still figuring out what the next phase looks like. This Substack and my coaching/ training business are part of that questioning and exploration.

And I'm not the only one struggling to navigate it.

But I know this much after being inspired by an Aussie movie gem back in the day, Strictly Ballroom.

I’m not willing to live my life half lived anymore, and neither should you.

P.S. If you’ve ever had to return to something that once burned you out, I'm curious: what did you do differently the second time?