Burnout Is Not a Buzzword (It's a Full-Body Experience With a Side of Existential Dread)
Burnout isn’t just exhaustion — it’s the slow erosion of your sense of self, dressed up as productivity. It creeps in quietly, camouflaged as dedication, until one day you realize you’re running on autopilot, performing your own life like a role you never auditioned for. At first, I thought I was just tired. Tired from working hard, tired from caring too much, tired from trying to be all the things for all the people. But tired has a cure — sleep, a break, a weekend off. Burnout, on the other hand, is more like grief. Grief for your energy, for your creativity, for the version of you who used to feel fully alive.
It shows up not just in your mind, but in your body. You forget words mid-sentence, stare blankly at screens, start five things and finish none, and then blame yourself for the chaos you can’t quite explain. You might cry for no reason, or feel nothing at all. You might fantasize about quitting everything — not because you’re reckless, but because you’re desperate for stillness. You might smile through conversations and meetings while a quiet voice in your head whispers: “I don’t care about any of this anymore.” And you might start to wonder: Is something wrong with me?
No. There’s nothing wrong with you — but something is deeply wrong with the way we’re expected to live. Somewhere along the way, we began to confuse burnout with ambition, overwork with worthiness, constant output with value. And we got so good at ignoring ourselves that even rest started to feel like a guilty pleasure instead of a right.
Recovering from burnout isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t come with a milestone moment or a before-and-after photo. It starts with silence, discomfort, and small acts of rebellion: saying no when you're expected to say yes, choosing rest over guilt, asking “what do I need?” without apologizing for the answer. It’s not a straight line — some days you’ll feel like yourself again, and other days you’ll question everything. That’s okay.
If you’re here, reading this, and feeling that familiar heaviness in your chest — like your brain is buffering but never quite loading — you’re not alone. You’re not lazy, dramatic, or ungrateful. You’re human. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to stop managing the symptoms and start reclaiming the parts of you that never should’ve been sacrificed in the first place.
