A personal tale of burnout (with pictures of me at various points of exhaustion*)
I did not wake up one day and discover I was experiencing burnout like one wakes up and has food poisoning. No, I woke up about hundreds of days in a row, with slightly more anxiety, exhaustion, physical health problems than the day before. With a slightly shorter fuse. With more common place brief and terrifying moments of, while in transit, forgetting where I was going and why.
Working in the nonprofit sector, the longest job contract I had was 18 months. Gotta love the grant life. So when the natural time to shift to a new assignment would arise, or when I finished a semester or (finally) completed my thesis, the stress level would lower to a simmer, to again be built up as I overexerted myself in my new adventure. Look at me in that "just about to embark on a beautiful adventure" simmer.
Some days would be totally fine. I "knew" I was a hard worker and I could just get through this if I kept pushing. I was in a constant high state of stress because of my various jobs and school responsibilities that always circled around the idea of "making the world a better place**", and even the hours I was not working my brain was still on. I constantly was trying to make sure I was doing enough. There were days I felt like I couldn't get out of bed. Most of the time, I was able to push through. There were days where I'd find my brain literally freezing and my voice stopping mid-conversation, as if my mind was trying to catch up with a body on autopilot. Below, picture of me on a "good day". But look at the exhaustion in my eyes.
And then I arrived at the place where I couldn't get out of bed. I was on track to use a year's worth of sick days in a month. I literally didn't want to do anything and didn't have the energy to. My health had reached a point where I couldn't keep working.*** See pic below for moment, while visiting Endor, I realized I needed to take a sabbatical. The smile does not reach my eyes. And I didn't meet any ewoks.
I moved home and spent two full months resting. Not working at all, barely even going for fun activities. Sleeping and recharging. That would have been a nightmare for pre-burnout me. Nothing to do?? No projects? But burnout me was so tired that it came as a big relief. I didn't even get bored. I needed the rest so much that the lack of something to do (other than "get healthy") did not bore me.
That is my journey with burnout (though there is a bit more to it that I will talk about tomorrow). Because of my experience, I want to help people avoid getting to this point. There were hundreds of days of opportunity for me to seek help with work-life balance, to learn from others about how to leave work at work. The warning signs were clear-- but because of my stubbornness, work-til-you-drop mentality, and myths that I fed myself (and less often, others fed to me) about "focusing on my career" and "the impossibility of balance at this stage" and "the importance of the work over the importance of my health" I ignored them.
That was really stupid of me. I was completely out of commission for two months (the two months following the election, no less!). And then there are the months of ramping back up, getting into the swing of being busy-ish again, and finding jobs. From a strictly utilitarian perspective, this whole ordeal really messed up my productivity. If I had cut back sooner, it wouldn't have come to this. But I didn't. In some ways I'm glad, because having this time of introspection has allowed me to reflect on what I want to do with my life and this experience has inspired me to help others to avoid reaching this point. But it was pretty miserable at the time.
My working definition of Activist Burnout is overwork in the field of political or social activism for a cause one strongly believes in over time that incapacitates the activist. The “over time” part is what truly separates burnout from compassion fatigue or any trauma induced issue (which we will be the focus of tomorrow's post).
I believe that as people become more engaged in social and political movements (while, of course, still having to keep up with their responsibilities like jobs, relationships, kids, mortgages) we will be creating a hot zone for a burnout epidemic if, as a movement, we do not focus on self-care. So you can add that to your list of things to be worried about (ha). Awareness is the first step down any difficult path. So my first goal is to increase awareness (and remove stigma behind) burnout. No small task, but one we can enter into together.
footnotes!
*the pictures are supposed to illustrate my increasing exhaustion, but I don't take very many selfies, let alone "I am so miserable and tired" selfies, so they may not be the best examples.
**I've now adjusted that tag line to "Helping to build a more just and equitable world", if anyone was wondering.
**Luckily, at this point, I had a very supportive boss who supported my decision to resign for my own health, and helped me finish out the 2016 get out the vote campaign that I really wanted to see through.