I recently spoke at a conference on wellbeing. For the first time, I said publicly that I had experienced burnout myself.
I hadn’t opened up the subject before then for several reasons:
– My belief that some things are best left in personal space;
– My belief that people would immediately comment back and forth;
– My assumption that no one cares how I feel, that the expectation is that you’re there, you do what you have to do, you don’t complain too much.
Part of my homeschooling has involved holding on tight, getting up when I fall, when I’m sick, and keep going.
When I had that really hard time, the pressure I was putting on myself was very high. It lasted a long time, I had states that manifested physically quite often. Until one day, when the doctor from the ambulance I was calling said, “This time you didn’t last until the evening, you called us sooner.”
It was like the virtual slap that brought me to reality. Once I came to my senses, I put things in order. I postponed what I could, prioritized what was urgent, dropped some actions, and accepted that I didn’t have to be that prize-winning student all my life. That it’s okay to get tired, to give up, to change my mind.
My lessons:
– If I don’t take care of myself, no one else will;
– Just as I accept that others get tired, and need breaks, I accept that I’m still human, and need moments to relax;
– It’s important to set limits: to turn off the laptop, to stop thinking so much about saving those who don’t want to be saved, to invest differently in people, to choose them differently;
– To leave the past where it belongs, to stop haunting it;
– To be more sparing with my time: to give it sparingly, it’s a resource I don’t want to waste anymore;
– It’s okay to change my mind; it’s even better than staying stuck in a decision that hurts me.
We talk a lot about wellness but forget to implement it. In order to have energy, to be able to do whatever we set out to do, it’s good to implement the advice of the flight attendants on board airplanes: “put on your oxygen mask before helping others!”