Burnout

“#1, try to be happier,” and other bullshit suggestions

Photo by ennif pendahl on Unsplash

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Hey all. Today’s post discusses suicidality as a part of the broader topic. Please take care of yourselves and one another. I care about you.¹

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This is the end of the third week of my dedicated time off for writing a memoir. And I would just love to tell you how that’s going, but I’m saving that for later. Instead, I figured it was time to admit the truth about my current state of mind.

I didn’t just take this time to write a memoir.

I took it because I really needed to have a mental/emotional breakdown several months ago, and I literally had to schedule time to engage in that breakdown. I think this says something incredibly important about me – about hustle and work culture – about capitalism – even about privilege. Just how screwed up are our priorities when we know that we are breaking, when we know that we cannot go on, and we force ourselves to do it anyway?

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For background, I have a full-time day job working for a large employer in the area. It’s a government job, and my specific role is heavy in computer analytics and end user support (sort of a UX job), but I’m not in IT. I’ve been with this employer for a long, long time, I’m represented by a strong union, and as a government employee I have a lot of great benefits, not the least of which is job security. In the course of the last two years I have been the lead on a major application upgrade project. It’s taken its toll.

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Week after week, day after grueling day, I worked and I spent brain matter and I talked until I was hoarse (which happens a lot easier after going through rapid vocal changes on testosterone). I dreamed about work. I thought about it when I sat down to eat breakfast. I arranged my personal and family calendar around it. I said no to dinners with friends, I pushed aside opportunities knowing how exhausted I was from my work, and I engineered everything around being able to continue.

Work was never an eight-hour day during that upgrade. My calendar has built-in notifications for exercise and lunch, and I let those slip more often than I remembered to take that time for myself. Each time it happened I would justify it with a shrug and a “tomorrow I’ll do better.”²

As the project progressed, I found myself in so many meetings that my regular work began to suffer. The answer? Pour on more hours. Work later. And the stakes were (and still are) very high. I was tasked with making high-level decisions on behalf of a very large portion of the company, often with little to no support (and please don’t ask about recognition or appreciation because you already know the answer). When I asked for help I was ignored (and later punished).

Toward the end, when go-live was just around the corner, I stepped up my work and added more hours, teaching classes about the soon-to-be application launch, putting myself center stage to train and inform folks throughout the largest workgroup. I allowed myself to be a target for their disgruntled feelings, for their reservations, for the irritating inconvenience of learning a new system.

I was not thanked for my role. I was not congratulated when the launch was a success. And to be honest, there were a lot of problems. There still are. The day-to-day work of my small workgroup now involves a tremendous amount of manual checks and data inspections, and the burden of time and energy is gnawing away at all of us.

Maybe you have never done this. Maybe you have never chipped away at parts of yourself for a paycheck. Maybe you found a way to survive without the right hourly wage and the benefits, but I have not. I am chained to it, to the security and regularity, to the knowledge that starting over would be harder than selling myself short by staying. I have touched on this from time to time here, but let me be blunt – my day job is slowly killing me. I hate it. It’s destroying me. It is a corruptive, toxic fluid, and it’s impossible for me to get the taste of it out of my mouth.

Over the last 26 months I have been the lead on a huge upgrade project for work, which happened to overlap some of the most difficult times in my gender transition, which also happened to coincide with some incredibly challenging stuff in my personal and family life. It felt reminiscent to several years ago when I was working full time, attending grad school full time, and raising a family full time. I mean, I don’t know how you spend your thirty hours a day, but mine didn’t include enough sleep. And when I finished grad school and suddenly had time to sleep and eat and breathe and look around at the world, I vowed to never do it again.

Here I am doing it again, just not with school as the excuse.

I am the exact shape and color of burnout.

My edges are browned and brittle. I am dry and rough against your hands. Those suggestions you have about meditation or yoga or “taking a little me time” are already drumming up resentment. I can’t stop. I can’t walk away. I can’t let go. This isn’t the sort of thing I can rehydrate or massage away.

This is day sixteen of my time off, and look how bitter I still am. No wonder I needed a break.

When we spend more than forty hours a week giving everything we have to a job, it can be hard to save energy and laughter and creativity for ourselves and the ones we love. I’m not the first person to struggle with this. And burnout is a huge problem in the workforce. In fact, a friend of mine in a similar job attended a seminar on burnout recently. She shared some insights with me about what she learned. As she read through this list of items you could do to fight burnout (like it’s a forest fire or something), I listened and tried to hold back my reaction.

#1, try to be happier.

#2, take breaks.

#3, focus on self-care.

There was more to the list, but I had to stop her. I was twitching to get my words out. Number one, in particular? Hell, that’s victim shaming. We are not unhappy because of ourselves, because of something we have done, because of who or what we are. We’re unhappy because our employers use and abuse us, they make unreasonable demands, and then they force us to complete online courses in “how to manage burnout” that tell us to “be happier.” That’s the workplace equivalent of telling your spouse to “calm down,” and I challenge you to try that at home (once appropriately dressed in steel-plated armor, of course).

Maybe you’re feeling burnt out, too, and maybe you need to hear this just like I do. Burnout is not your fault. Burnout happens to employees when our managers fail us. It happens to people who are good at our jobs most often because we care (in whatever way makes sense to us), but our caring takes on an obsessive hue because we are often the only ones who do care. And if we don’t carry that burden, who will?

Stepping away from the workplace for my own mental, emotional, and physical health was a really hard thing to do. I worry about my coworkers now carrying the load with one less person. I worry about all the little ways I’ll likely be held accountable for this absence when I return.

I do not, however, have to worry about my employment being secure and waiting for me when I return. My time is covered and paid for, the inbox full of emails will wait for me, and my work life will resume as it was when I head back in another few weeks. I’m acknowledging a tremendous privilege for these things, but please note, I worked hard to have the ability to do this, and it didn’t happen without sacrifice. Both things can be true.

We can’t all walk away from burnout.

And we should not assume the blame for it happening to us. I’ve got nothing else fancy to add here, like a solution, like a fix for when you do find yourself in burnout. Maybe just, hang in there, baby.

Mental health is such a tricky beast. It strikes and bites at your heels when you don’t have time to be chased and dragged down by depression, anger, resentment, or suicidality. I had a job to do, and I kept going for it, all the while feeling very clearly that my life wasn’t worth holding onto. When I needed to care for myself most, I completely failed. Right around the worst of it, another author wrote a lengthy post about suicide, about how you’d be stupid to give up on life, so don’t be stupid, and holy shit that post drove a knife through my belly. I reached out to him and tried to explain that his words could be the kind of thing to drive a soul right off the edge if they were already standing at that precipice. Luckily I was three inches back.

But what if I hadn’t been?

You’re staring back at me in this moment, maybe seeing a picture of me in your mind, and I probably look confident, full of smiles, joking about something irreverent. And I can assure you, I looked just like that when I was ready to give up.

This is the cost of burnout.

Burnout almost killed me, and no one knew.

Being burnt out was not my fault.

Being burnt out is not your fault.

Burnout doesn’t come for you when the world is an easy place to live in. It shows up when you’re already tapped out financially. It comes when you haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in months. It comes when your family is being the assholes you have always known them to be. It comes when your self-confidence bottoms out. It comes when your blood labs come back all wrong. It comes when you’re trying desperately to support a friend through their own hardship. It comes when everyone else in the world needs you, and none of them know just how much of that you are carrying.

I haven’t let go of all of my burdens. None of us can really do that. But if you are able, stepping away from even one of those burdens can bring relief. It can bring clarity. It can show you that you still have a heart beating, that you still know how to fall in love with afternoon sunlight, and that you are more than the heavy things you carry around everywhere.

Healing is a long, slow process. I’m working on mine, and I’m a long way from better. But every day that I let myself acknowledge why I’m here and why I need this time, I do get a little closer.

Burnout almost killed me, and no one knew.

Being burnt out was not my fault.

Being burnt out is not your fault.

If you are in crisis, you are not alone. Asking for help can be hard, but sometimes that’s the only way we make it through the hard stuff. 988 is a nationwide resource you can call in the United States if you are suicidal or in emotional distress.

If you are transgender, or if someone you love is transgender, understand that using traditional police and fire services to respond to emotional crises and suicidality can endanger that trans person’s life, freedom, and access to vital healthcare. Please consider reaching out to translifeline.org instead. You can call them at 877-565-8860.

Your trans friend,

Robin

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1. I typically don’t call out things as “trigger warnings,” though I know it’s prevalent. The world is full of things we do and do not expect, and I trust you to have the agency to read or not read anything I send out.

2. Note that my wording here, accurate and true as it is, demonstrates that I fully believed it was my problem that I could not better manage my schedule and my time.