I am writing the final chapters of a book on burnout – one that applies the healing modalities I studied in grad school to a very real problem. Though there’s a chapter that describes the high-level of that experience for me, I keep returning to the idea that I need to write a blog post that is a tad deeper, a tad more vulnerable.
This is a complicated subject. It’s complicated because there are people who I still care about who were part of the problems that arose. It’s complicated because no one person’s experience of burnout is going to be the same as anyone else’s. It’s complicated because there were so many variables at play in my situation. I can only begin to explain them in this form. I will need to make poetry and interpretive dance and some artistic garden sculptures for the rest of it.
But, as I still get messages asking me to consult, as I still get recruiters asking me to work for new companies, as I still have daily reasons to reconsider my actions and my path, it’s worth writing about anyway. (I got a recruiter call today, and I had to reassess all of this all over again.)
I started feeling truly burned out at work in 2015-2016. I had a chronic illness flare triggered by work stress in January 2017. (In fall of 2017 I started grad school as a passion project.) I changed jobs several times over the next 6 years, including a few years of freelancing. Professionally, this culminated in October 2023, when I left the digital marketing and organic search optimization fields.
I won’t say “forever” at the end of that last sentence. But right now, it feels that way.
The Definition of Burnout – Stress Associated with Chronic Overwork
The stress associated with chronic overwork includes symptoms of cynicism, disconnection from work, and a feeling of helplessness. There’s a lack of satisfaction and a lack of motivation. It looks and feels a lot like depression, but isolated to work and work-related things. Severe cases of burnout take 1-2 years to fully recover from (not one 4-day weekend).
By the time my arthritis flare knocked me flat on my back in 2017, I was working too many hours, I had no work-life balance, I felt like I couldn’t do any single part of my job fully or well because I had too much on my plate.
Though I did continue to get raises and promotions, recognition for my work, and experience career growth through the past six or seven years of my career, I was sobbing almost every night after logging off. I described my work as “soul-killing” in my journals. It had been drained of all meaning for me. The increasing levels of workload, responsibility, and pressure were something I couldn’t continue to bear.
Like most people these days, quitting my job simply wasn’t an option.
I looked for sources of meaning in other places. I really loved developing junior members of the team, mentoring and training others became the place where there was a little life amid the ongoing devastation. Being a part of a team was another source of meaning that helped me keep working through the burnout.
I asserted better boundaries with employers, and I worked few hours. I worked remotely, and gave myself time for self-care with chronic illness.
I never stopped being burned out on the work itself. I just found other ways to make it bearable. As I grew into management roles, I was able to delegate more of the SEO work, and allow myself to spend more time with managing. That was a place I found it a little easier to breathe from within.
Then, two things happened concurrently in late 2022 / early 2023 – I was super heads-down on writing my dissertation, and there were a bunch of layoffs at work.
The dissertation may feel like a non-sequitur but trust me it was not. That work – writing daily on a project I felt super passionate about – was what fed me. It was what kept me getting up every morning. And the place I worked continually booked meetings over the writing block I’d set aside for that project. It was an ongoing boundary violation, which is infuriating. It was also the intrusion of a thing I was very burned out on into the thing that fed me and lit me up from the inside, which is a far more egregious violation.
The layoffs meant that a swath of people who were my teammates and colleagues were gone, my team was stressed out, and I was back to doing more of the daily SEO work, rather than leading. This took me out of the space where I’d carved out a little bit of meaning and satisfaction and pushed me right back into the burned-out emotional wasteland I’d been tiptoeing around for the previous six years.
At a powerful retreat in Taos, I was finally able to process all of the buried anger and rage about these ongoing boundary violations and to begin to grieve the sense of loss. By then, I began planning to leave the field.
The Definition of Autistic Burnout – Permanent Loss of Skills
Autistic burnout and professional burnout can happen simultaneously. In fact, as diagnostic criteria are better defined, and more conversations are happening about neurodivergence, a lot of people my age are discovering their own Autism and ADHD. Unfortunately, it’s not an unusual case for autistic burnout experience to be what leads a person to that diagnosis at midlife.
Autistic burnout is described as a permanent change after a series of meltdowns and a period of prolonged stress. It may include a loss of coping skills, skill regression, thought and intelligence changes, and heightened sensory sensitivity. Autistic burnout generally takes three or more years to recover from, and often there are profound differences long after that.
The arthritis flare in 2017 had an interesting side-effect when it comes to my autistic burnout – it forced me to work from home. I’ve been a remote-only worker since January 2017 as a result. Working from home suddenly put me in control of sensory experiences I’d had no say in at the cube farm. The harsh lighting was no more. The interruptions and background noises I couldn’t filter out were all gone. By suddenly experiencing sensory relief I was able to see what a huge amount of stress the office had caused. (A lot of neurodivergent folks had this same revelation in 2020.)
It is tangled up with the rest of the burnout, the arthritis, and the autism, but I can definitely attest to a change in brain function at that time. I thought it was “pain brain” and brain fog. But my whole way of being in the world was shifting, and there wasn’t much I could do about it.
I still have heightened sensory sensitivity, and I likely will continue to do so. I haven’t taken a shower with the lights on in a very long time. My neighbors even comment on how dark my house is at night when I’m home reading under a single task light. I wear ear protection – depending on what I’m doing, I wear noise-canceling headphones, over-ear guards (like the kind you wear at the shooting range), or Loop earplugs that filter sound, but allow me to hear conversations.
I still have heightened support needs – in particular, my morning routine is required to help me stay sane and a little agile throughout the day. My ability to gracefully cope with change hinges upon my having the time and space to journal and plan my day each morning. (Again, when my morning blocks were being booked over by work, it was also eating into this critical time of my day. I even tried communicating these blocks as an ADA need. It didn’t work.)
I’ve lost much of my ability to mask as a result of autistic burnout. I can still do it, when I must, but it’s a huge energy drain. I will collapse in exhaustion afterward, or I’ll be very short and crabby with everyone around me until I can.
Between the changes autistic burnout has created in my brain and the reduced energy levels of chronic autoimmune arthritis, I’m not certain I will ever be physically able to return to full-time work.
What’s on the Other Side of Burnout
The book I’m writing is tentatively entitled Beyond Burnout Recovery – and it’s building on depth psychology and positive psychology theories to get to that stage of thriving on the other side of burnout. I’m going to be spooling up a website, a newsletter, and all that jazz as the process gets a little further down the road. (See, I’m still doing digital marketing, I’m just doing it for myself!)
The book includes a lot of my lessons learned. One example is the importance of letting go and grieving the life that existed before and realizing that it will never be the same again. I see a number of my colleagues do exactly what I did for so many years – limp along from vacation to vacation, scrapping together ways to make their jobs tolerable without truly addressing the devastation the burnout left behind them. One of the major recommendations I make in the book is to take the time to grieve once the anger has passed. That time also allows you to create a little space to see what will grow in its place.
As you know from my YouTube Vlog and a few of my more recent blog posts, this portion of my own recovery has been about discovery and growth. I’ve still been working every day. Not as many hours as a full-time job, but every day nonetheless. I’ve got several writing projects that are in the waiting phases of being brought to life. I have more classes at Morbid Anatomy that I’ll be kicking off in the coming months.
For now, my business cards read the same tagline as this website: “Mythologist, Storyteller, and Consultant.” I am certainly those things.