There's a moment when the rope you've been gripping, tight, determined, maybe even a little desperate, starts to slip through your hands. Not because you want it to, but because it's fraying. Because you're fraying.
And so things begin to unravel.
At first, it's subtle. A dropped ball here, a missed email there. You tell yourself it's just a phase. You'll bounce back. You always do. But something feels different this time. Not heavier, exactly, but hollower. Like the thing you built your identity on, your job, your discipline, your sense of being the one who holds it all together, no longer fits.
That was me.
Burnt out.
Not just tired. Soul-deep weary.
I walked away from a job I once poured myself into. A role built on structure, accountability, and being the calm in the storm. But what happens when the storm moves inside of you? When the calm cracks and suddenly you're the one who can't keep up? When you can't even hold yourself accountable, let alone anyone else?
It's a strange kind of grief, leaving a version of yourself behind. Not because it didn't serve you once, but because it no longer does. I didn't leave with a grand plan. I left because staying felt like lying. And I'd been lying for too long. Smiling through the fatigue, nodding through misalignment, convincing myself that burnout was just a badge of honor I hadn't yet earned.
But here's the part I'm still sitting with:
I'm not proud of what I avoided.
I know I took the easier way out.
- Better starts with honesty. I can't grow if I'm lying to myself. I have to name the patterns, like avoiding hard conversations, like abandoning myself to keep the peace, people pleasing...Accountability isn't punishment. It's alignment.
- better is boring. It's not grand gestures or sudden reinventions. It's a small choices. Getting up when I said I would. Following through on the thing I promised myself. Forgiving myself when I don't and trying again.
- Better requires grief. I have to let go of the identity I tied to "being good at my job." To being the strong one. The fixer. I'm not broken without those titles. I'm just...different now.
- Better isn't linear. I will fail and will backslide. I'll ghost my own goals. I'll have days where brushing my teeth feels like a win. That doesn't mean I've failed. It means I'm human.
- Better needs vision, but not clarity. I don't need to know what the end looks like. I just need to know what aligned feels like. Peaceful. Clean. Honest. Whole.