I had been at my job for two weeks when my mum was rushed to hospital.
I was working in a demanding area of law and I had just come off the back of several years of scrabbling to try and qualify, to try and keep my head above water. Working multiple extra jobs in order to pay the bills whilst I went through the rigmarole of training and qualifying.
I arrived at this new job thinking that it was a fresh start.
I had moved to an amazing firm with a fantastic reputation for the work I did, with people I could really work well with and looked up to. I thought ‘this is it, everything is going to be better from here’.
And then I got that call.
My mum had been rushed to hospital late on the Sunday evening and I didn’t know what to do.
For context, my mum lived 100 miles away from me in the town I grew up in. I had long since moved to Bristol and I was commuting to Cardiff every day, which was 2-3 hours’ round trip every day.
The sensible, normal thing to do in these situations, I imagine, would be to immediately down tools and head to your home town to see your parent, your only surviving parent, in hospital. But there was something different about me.
I struggled, really badly, with imposter syndrome. I had arrived at this amazing firm full of brilliant people and I did not think I fit in. At all. (I’ll leave it up to your interpretation whether I fit in or not but for the purposes of this story it is entirely irrelevant, because I didn’t think I fit in and, as a result, I fell into the old pattern of overworking and trying to prove myself, again and again.
The next morning, having heard from the hospital that my mum was in and they were running tests, I went to work. 40 miles in the opposite direction from my mum.
I sent an email to my boss and asked if I could take the next morning off work, apologising for taking holiday so early in my employment but that something had cropped up. He asked if everything was OK and I told him what had happened.
He thought I was crazy, by the way. He demanded I go home and I brushed it off.
Later that day, I was trying to make arrangements, trying to speak to the hospital to find out what was going on with my mum, trying to speak to family members, trying to see who could take my mum’s dog (now my dog). Trying to keep everything straight.
I was exhausted; as you can imagine, after that 11pm phone call I hadn’t much slept, and I was hungry to boot. But I was frantically dialling and speaking to people to try and keep the wheels turning and I worked on the fifth floor; going downstairs for food would have meant getting in the lift, the call dropping and having to work my way through every member of staff on duty in the hospital once again.
I thought ‘it’s fine, I can multitask, I’ll take the stairs’.
Have you every tried walking down a spiral staircase, in heels, whilst on a call to a treating consultant, whilst dizzy with hunger and chronically exhausted?
Me neither. I ended up surfing down two flights of them.
Landing with a resounding ‘plop’ on the marble floor of the building’ foyer, with what felt like hundreds of people milling in and out on the lunch break, staring at me.
I had seriously tumbled. I had zebra stripe bruises on my legs for weeks, I had cut my leg, hand and arm open and my phone went flying across the floor. One of the security guards asked if I was ok and I gave a shaky smile, got up and walked it off. I walked outside and burst into tears on the street. I avoided going to a first aider because I was embarrassed; everyone knew I was clumsy after a similar event two weeks beforehand, starting my first day at work falling down the stairs at the train station. I spent most of the afternoon cleaning blood off my desk with blueroll, my hands shaking whilst I tried to type emails and my mind 150 miles away in the hospital of my hometown.
Since leaving law my natural clumsiness has eased like you wouldn’t believe. My reputation for causing myself accidental harm was legendary; I could fall over whilst standing competely still. I walked into walls, tripped over boxes, spilled coffee on myself, on an almost daily basis. My nickname was Calamity Jane and I conducted random gravity checks constantly.. And yet now I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve tripped or fallen.
Looking back I know now that I didn’t fall down the stairs that day because I was naturally clumsy or exhausted, which I definitely was, but because I was in my head.
I was thinking and focusing on all the things I had to do, planning and mapping and organising things that I had to do and who I had to speak to and the running to do list in my head that never seemed to stop, that had nothing to do with what was in front of me and paying absolutely no attention to where I was and whether there were actual steps where I was placing my feet.
I had been so sure that this was going to be my time.
I had paid my dues.
Done the hard work.
Surely my life was going to get easier now.
I had earned it, hadn’t I?
It was my time.
Instead I had a parent in the hospital, a dog to retrieve, and I didn’t make a single part of it easier on myself.
I spent most of that day running into meeting rooms trying to have conversations with family members, doctors, my mum and I didn’t stop.
That evening I left work and got the train home. I went into my house, changed out of my work clothes and into jeans, grabbed a sandwich and headed out of the road, driving more than 2 hours to reach my home town. I picked my mum’s dog up at nearly 9pm, took him for a brief walk and headed to my friend’s house.
There, she handed me a coffee. She had bought coffee especially for me, she never drank the stuff, and had put four heaped spoons of instant coffee in the mug. After all, I had been awake for 15 hours and still had a long journey in front of me.
I set out just before 11pm and made it home just after 1am. I had nearly fallen asleep behind the wheel on the motorway but I had made it, in one piece, with Jasper in the backseat. I had been up since before 6am and had barely slept 3 hours teh night before. I was strung out and stressed out. I took the dog out for a walk and headed to bed.
The next morning I was awake by 8am, walked Jasper again and headed off to Cardiff to carry on with my working week.
I never made it easier on myself.
I refused to ask for help.
I struggled almost alone and cried.
I fully bore the burden of taking care of everything and everyone by myself because, to admit that I might have needed support, I thought was failure.
I thought I should have been able to do it by myself.
Do you know what I know, six years later?
How fucking wrong I was.
It’s not reasonable or normal or expected to care for a parent who has been rushed to hospital and never take time off work. Everyone would have understood if I had taken time off work to deal with that.
If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with how little I thought of myself and how little I thought other people would think of me.
If I hadn’t believed that I had well and truly snuck my way in.
If I hadn’t been so exhausted from years of overworking and feeling ‘less than’, I would have taken that time off.
I certainly wouldn’t have been going to work on four hours’ sleep, driving cross country, picking up a giant beast of a dog, and trying to hold it all together in a way that absolutely no-one except me expected me to.
Looking back, I’m horrified at the pressure that I put myself under.
In reflection, it’s amazing that I kept going as long as I did. It w as 18 months after that that I fully broke down, realised how burned out I was and started making changes.
I was so busy covering my life in sticking plasters, hoping no-one would see the damage underneath.
I was burned out and chronically exhausted, chronically depleted.
It was as a result of the exhaustion and fear and worry and doubt that I felt so terrible about myself, that I constantly berated and belittled myself and felt that absolutely nothing I did was good enough.
At that stage I had no real understanding of the effect of burnout on my mental health; that when you live your life exhausted and frayed, of course your mind is affected, of course you are strung out by exhaustion and fear and adrenaline and act accordingly. Over-acting, over-performing, trying to prove yourself because you never once feel safe.
I compartmentalised and assumed that I wasn’t good enough, had to make myself good enough and prove myself and somehow had to do that by being less than I was; less empathetic, less caring, less available.
I treated myself in a way that I would treat no other person on the face of this planet and it horrifies me that I could be so cruel, so demanding, so inhumane towards myself.
I share this, not so that people can feel sorry for me or pity me that drama that seemed to endlessly befall me.
I share this because last week I seemed to go from phone call to phone call with new clients who chronically underestimated the impact that stress, overwork, trauma had on them and who failed to give themselves enough support, enough opportunity, enough benefit of the doubt.
This is a problem I see more and more of, not less. The neddless feedback loop that imposter syndrome begets burnut which creates exhaustion and negativity which feeds the imposter syndrome beast. It is a death-spiral that so many of us seem committed to flying down until we crash at the bottom, whenever that might be.
I believe that we all deserve better than that.
I believe that we can live lives and create careers that support and empower us, not lead us into fear and struggle, endless worry and doubt.
I believe that you deserve more support, compassion, empathy, options and choice than you are allowing yourself.
You were not meant to suffocate under the weight of responsibility you have taken on.
Give yourself the support that you would give to your client, your friend, your loved one, living the life you are living right now and ask yourself, what do you think that you are achieving by doing it alone?
I can guarantee to you, that you are proving nothing.
PS It is for people like us that I am writing Burnout The User’s Guide.
For the people who take on too much.
Who do too much.
Who ask too little.
Who take care of themselves last.
Who never feel good enough to ask for support.
And who feel so desperately alone as a result.
This is the boots on the ground burnout book; what it means to feel burned out, to live your life exhausted, and how to create real and meaningful change no matter where you are on that burnout spectrum.
I wrote this for you.
I wrote this for Leah of five years ago.
I’m making final edits this week before hitting publish and I’m inviting you to pre-order your copy now and receive additional workshops and bonuses as my gift to you.
Because you deserve the extra support.
Pre-order your copy of Burnout: The User’s Guide by clicking here.