In my last post I described this as a sort of anniversary of my body stopping.
I took some time to actually try and figure out which words to use; “one year since my burnout” makes burnout sound like a car crash, and “one year since my burnout started” acknowledges everything from the starting point but ignores what has been on the background.
There are several other points in my life I could also attribute to the “start” of my burnout, or at least which have contributed to the end result.
The History
In 2014 I was between jobs and extremely exhausted emotionally. I had my first minor burnout on a job straight after that; bad chemistry issues between me and the co-workers, I was not a good match there, and despite staying for only three months, I felt hopeless and jaded after the experience.
In 2016 I had just started at a new school and constantly felt I was falling short on everything. My art skills were not good enough, and whenever I was doing something else than art, I just felt like I was not existing in the right way. It was difficult for me to click with people, and I compensated for it by overworking.
I do not blame the challenging school environment for my troubles, and I am glad I did ultimately find people I am still in touch with — my people, so to speak. But school definitely was one of the factors that affected me.
In 2018 I had just returned from an exchange trip to Nagoya, Japan. While the exchange had been a dream of mine for the longest time, I ended up spending majority of that exchange alone at a dorm as the only female exchange student, which had a pretty devastating effect on my stress levels.
I wish I didn’t have to be the only female student there. Perhaps if there had been one other person to spend time with, I would not have had a total breakdown once I returned home. Don’t get me wrong; the guys on the exchange were amazing, but they were at a whole another part of the city.
It makes a difference. And it specifically makes a difference when you are in a country where you don’t speak the language, and there is a million little things making you uncertain and insecure every day.
I hesitate to talk about the role of that in my burnout, because I am worried I’m coming across as ungrateful. Maybe I should not have been allowed to go on that exchange; maybe someone else would have been a better match, maybe someone else would have deserved it more.
But it was me on that exchange. And once I returned, I broke down.
The Physical Side, Once Again
If I had to go back and say where did my physical symptoms start, it would be that summer of 2018. I had returned from an exchange which was not entirely a pleasant experience for me, I had a lot of responsibility at an auxiliary company I was a part of at the time, I was wrapping up my thesis and trying to recover from an abusive relationship.
Just like in 2021, I stopped being able to eat or sleep in 2018. The physical side was not the defining aspect, but it definitely was there; not being able to sleep made me highly, extremely emotional, and not being able to eat made me constantly anxious and scared.
To this day I consider it a moderate miracle I managed to graduate on time, with decent grades, and above everything — alive.
I wish I didn’t have to write down that part, but at that time I genuinely felt I did not deserve to be alive, and that people around me would have rather seen me dead. Not the immediate people I worked with, thankfully, and not the close friends I mentioned, but possibly people outside that.
I felt like I did not fit in, I felt broken, I felt like a failure, and that I had wasted the time of everyone around me even by applying to the school or wanting to study, when I wasn’t talented already by the time of entrance. I wanted to get better, but I always felt like I should have been much better to begin with.
The physical side was hard, but I was mostly struggling with my inner demons. I would not have minded not being able to sleep or eat as much if I was not crying all the time, for one.
It took graduating and leaving school, bringing down the company, and working at a job which didn’t have anything to do with creating arts or developing software for me to feel moderately okay again, as well as some incredible support from my nearest and dearest. I was doing physically okay, even when I was very much still reeling from the emotional damage. I wasn’t happy.
But here’s the thing: for me, as long as I am physically okay, I can keep going. I can keep exercising, I can keep blowing off steam, I can keep finding purpose in just running until I feel better.
So that’s what I did. I moved cities, I started kickboxing, I biked around the city as I mended my shattered psyche and broken sense of self.
But I wasn’t okay. I had barely recovered physically, but my mental health was still in tatters.
The sad part about all this is realizing that part only when I started writing this down. Perhaps, if I had recognized it earlier for what it was — that my moderate burnout had still been far from complete recovery — perhaps things would be different now. I don’t know, and I can’t know.
The Journey
In a way it can be said that the seeds of my burnout were planted 8 years ago. I had a minor burnout back then, but I do feel that ultimately I managed to recover from it.
In another way one could say that my current burnout is just a sequelae of the moderate one I had in 2018, 4 years ago. Looking back to it now, I recognize that I was suffering from a moderate burnout, and that I never fully recovered from that.
The exact starting date of the burnout is not important. What I feel is important, however, is the understanding that I have been in some stage of burnout for 8 years — never fully recovering, never fully healing, never taking enough time to properly get over it.
That journey led me to finally having a major, very severe burnout, the kind that shut down my body and forced me to stop.
I have had a lot of time to process these thoughts (bedrest does that to a person). There is one very serious conclusion I have drawn: this journey has to end. This time, I will have to take time to properly recover, to properly heal, and to never go back to this again.
Most of my life, I have struggled with feeling I am never good enough. Now, I find that I actually don’t care anymore. With this burnout, I put my actual life on the line in an attempt to be good enough, and in the eyes of many, I did not make the cut.
But I am still here. I want to get better. I want to believe it’s not too late.
My burnout was a journey.
Now, I hope I’m on a journey to heal, instead.
