Today, it has been one year since my body decided to stop.
I like to think about the good things first. How I am getting better - how I can now sleep for eight hours in a night without waking up to nameless horrors; how I can now walk, run, bike without my body giving in; how I no longer feel so dizzy the only solution is to lay down and try to get some rest.
Being able to eat has become a point of gratitude.
Being able to work, even a little bit, has become a privilege.
Everything I have read about burnout, they always talk about feelings. They talk about lack of motivation, losing optimism and no longer feeling happy. They talk about anxiety and depression, the feeling of being cornered with nowhere to go. The deep feeling of hopelessness.
Nobody told me that burnout could be, more than anything, a physical experience.
That emotional side of things? I am there now, one year after my body stopped. I am trying to learn to talk about my feelings and actually be vulnerable with them, as opposed to putting the words out and not even expecting to be heard. I am trying to rely on people I care about and who care about me.
But before I could even get to the point most people talk about, there was the physical side of things. So when I think back to it now, I mostly think about that. The raw experience of being reduced to nothingness.
The impossibility of sleeping
One year ago I could not sleep for more than two hours in a row. I would stay up late, tossing and turning in my bed, not looking at the clock because I knew it would be too much and the alarm would ring too soon, marking a spot where I would have to head to work.
On most days I fell asleep around 3 a.m. and woke up at 5 — all refreshed and ready to go. I did not feel tired, no. As soon as my eyes were open, my mind was racing and my blood was pumping with adrenaline.
Looking back, this should have been a very, very intense warning sign. I thought it was just a little bit of stress; after all, I could still take a 2-hour nap after work and feel refreshed for evening.
That ability to nap more or less disappeared as my summer vacation started. My resting pulse was over 100 all the time, and being able to sleep two consecutive hours in a row became a luxury. Most of the sleep I got I had in increments varying from 30 minutes to that magical two hours.
Most of my sleep ended up in a panic attack strong enough to jerk me awake.
My transition from summer vacation to sick leave did not bring much change to this. For the first month of my sick leave, around August, I did nothing aside from lay in bed and try to sleep, save for bathroom breaks and the extremely occasional eating. I was trying to sleep, because I knew being able to sleep was the first step in getting better.
If this sounds like dream come true for you, let it be made clear it was not that for me. Perhaps it could have been, if I would have been able to do anything else than literally just lie down. Watching series? Too stimulating, immediate panic attack. Playing games? Tiredness-induced mind fog made this impossible. My body and mind were too tired to do anything else than lay down very still, and too tired to sleep.
So I stared at the ceiling, a lot. Trapped inside the nightmares, anxiety and any other horror my own head was providing me with.
It did not help this happened in the middle of a global pandemic. Or that my father had passed out in the autumn and I had not gotten the time to grieve or address the extremely strong emotional response I had to it. On an ordinary day, I rather like it in my own head.
But back then, I hated it. One of the reasons for it was the second physical experience for me…
Too weak to do anything
I have always done some form of exercise in my life. As a child I lived in the middle of nowhere, so I spent a lot of my days running around, climbing trees, swimming, rowing, fishing, testing the limits of my body any way I could.
This has always been a method of stress management for me. Whenever anything inside my head would get too much, I would go out and run it off. In the teenage years, “running it off” turned into “punching it into a bag”, which turned out to be an excellent way of blowing off some steam.
Having always exercised a lot, I do think I have always been pretty fit. It helped that my short height gave me a complex of always wanting to prove myself, always wanting to be stronger than I appeared, always wanting to show that anything you can do, I can do too.
I have never been on extended bedrest.
Now my body was so feeble I could not walk around the block without being sweaty and exhausted.
I was terrified of this development. I saw several doctors, but nothing seemed to be physically wrong. Ultimately it was decreed that this was in all likelihood just how burnout was going to be for me; a terrible, terribly physical ordeal.
On my more lucid moments, I tried reading articles about burnout. Everyone talked about anxiety, depression and feeling lost. All those emotions were familiar to me, too, but what I wanted more than anything was to read any kind of experiences from other people who were as physically affected as I was.
Other than brief mentions of terrible headaches, high pulse and blood pressure, and nausea, I drew blank.
I felt as if my only tool to cope and process feelings of anxiety had been taken away from me. Advice such as ‘go out and walk in the sunlight’ rang hollow and empty for me. I would, god damn it, if I could. I would walk, run in the sun, if my body was not letting me down like this.
I felt anger and resentment towards my physical self.
And, at the same time, I was forced to take a look at my life, and how I had been living it for the past ten years. My body had been through a lot because of me, and each time it had emerged victorious: strong, beautiful, capable.
I hated having to admit that perhaps I had a hand in my body giving in. That perhaps this was a result of more than just one measly pandemic and one stressful period in my life.
But that is a topic for another day. Instead, the third thing I want to mention is eating.
No to nourishment
I really struggled with eating. By this, I don’t mean that eating gave me anxiety, or that I wanted to lose weight, or that I felt guilt over eating. I mean the opposite.
I mean the feeling of having to force food down your throat because it’s evening and you haven’t eaten anything that day.
I mean eating three spoonfuls of food and your body informing you that this is enough, this is all we are going to eat. The sensation of feeling full after those three spoonfuls.
I mean not feeling hungry at all, and not feeling peckish at all. Not feeling like putting anything in your mouth because your body doesn’t want it.
I mean the feeling of food catching in your throat because your body outright rejects it. The lack of hunger. The anger you feel at your digestive system for refusing to accept something it needs.
A complete, extensive loss of appetite in every single regard.
I wanted to eat. My body didn’t agree.
This did not alleviate my anxiety nor did it make me feel better. Just like sleeping, eating is a rather fundamental thing to do if you are alive and wish to stay that way.
Again, I was informed by a doctor that having digestive problems or stomach pains was a pretty standard burnout symptom, and as somatic tests had been clear, I was given the permission not to worry unless I would end up losing a lot of weight.
It came close to the threshold where I would have been subjected to even further examinations. Close, but not quite there. In hindsight it does make sense; my body wasn’t doing anything that would have required energy. I was just laying still and trying to sleep.
My body wasn’t able to sleep, eat or move. It felt like the ultimate betrayal.
The first time I was able to sleep magnificent six hours during one night was in November, six months after this all began. That was six months with abysmal amounts of sleep, barely enough nutrition and half of it spent laying down on bedrest.
The first time I was able to take a long walk was in January. I remember taking few careful jogging steps and thanking whatever gods exist that I would still be able to run. Even if just a little bit, I would still be able to do it.
My sense of hunger still hasn’t returned, but I was able to eat more or less normal-sized meals in December.
And that was only the start of the recovery.
A friend and mentor of mine said I should not try to hurry the process, and that I should only try to even hope I would feel some semblance of normal at summer — and not a single moment sooner. Looking at my current state, he was right.
I don’t still feel the way I was, and I acknowledge the possibility I may never go back to the way things were before.
But I am getting better.
