Third time running

This morning, I came across a post by Lea-Sophie Cramer on her burnout experience, and I immediately started drafting a comment, drawing up on my own experience with burnout. As I am a woman of many words, and unable to keep it "klipp und klar," by the time I was finished with my "comment", LinkedIn kindly warned me that my comment is far too long. In fact, it was even too long as a post, so I resort to posting my experience and my thoughts on burnout as an article, here:

It is important to talk about the other side of the medallion.?

The first time I experienced burnout, I didn’t even have the name for my state of exhaustion. It was my then-counsellor who named it burnout, a condition I wasn’t familiar with, despite my dabbling in psychology studies. Back then, I worked incessantly, juggling a full-time, demanding job and the family. I didn’t realise how deep I was in until my father died and, instead of being there in my home country for the funeral, I sat in my office in Bonn, teeth crunched, stiff smile on my lips, eyes red from crying, thinking I was keeping it together but resembling more a pressure cooking pot, ready to explode.?

At some stage, shortly afterwards, I couldn’t any longer and I was written off sick. Therapy sessions ensued, not particularly helpful and, as I later realised, not confidential either - my then employer received regular reports on my mental health state. Incidentally, the same counsellor said to me in one of the sessions: "Why do you even want to work? Why getting stressed out about the work? You have a husband who’s earning well, you don’t have to, or need to work. Stay at home with your kids, don’t stress out about the work."

After about two months, I reached the point where it was either going down that dark path, into an abyss, or up, into the light. I chose light. I told myself “Listen you... You survived a war, this little thing called burnout will not get you down. You have your kids and your doting, loving husband to live for, enough of this moping around.”

So I went back to work. But, apparently, this was unheard of, and definitely not a welcome sight. No one has ever done it, returned to work full-time, no one has beaten this mystical burnout before, and I was certainly not expected to return to work any time soon. And if, then at reduced working hours. As they didn’t know what to do with me, they ignored me. The job I was doing single-handedly before I went down was being done by a team of fifteen (?!), and my expertise was not requested. My colleagues were instructed not to speak to me, about anything, my phoenix-like rising from the burnout was stigmatised. I remember colleagues stopping me on empty stairwells, asking quietly about burnout, feeling burnt out themselves but afraid of consequences.

Eventually, I got tired of fighting the system and changed departments but in the end, they got me on a technicality and I was mobbed out.?

That first burnout was a pivotal experience.

My second burnout came almost ten years later, when circumstances were completely different but the trigger was the same. Some ten years after that first burnout, I found myself a single mum of two kids (and one dog), working full-time in a fast-paced, cut-throat competitive job, juggling family and work, and dealing with the passing of my mum. But this time, I recognised the signs of a burnout. I knew I was deep in the shit but I couldn’t stop the wheels turning. Slowing down was not an option, not then, not now, not ever. What saved me was Covid, as perverse as it sounds. March saw us going into that first lockdown, with working hours reduced by eighty percent, down to merely twenty. My body and my mind recuperated, and in the midst of all the fear, the dying, the sickness in the world, I felt grateful for having had to slow down.?

I wasn’t so grateful when, at the end of 2020, I got the virus and was so sick that I actually should’ve been hospitalised. What kept me from going to the hospital was the thought of my children: who was going to take care of them, also both sick with Covid, quarantined at home (with only the dog around)? I willed myself to get over it, my only thought my children. (With my mum gone the year before, and with the father of my children being out of the picture completely, the three of us (four if you count Leon the dog ??) are completely on our own, with no family here in Germany. Or anywhere else as a matter-of-fact.)?

It took two weeks of cortisol inhaling before I could breathe normally again.?

I thought I was okay, I thought to myself I had a lucky escape there. But I wasn’t okay. Memory lapses, blackouts, excruciating bone pains, exhaustion, brain fog… I didn’t understand what was going on with me, and I was scared shitless. I was written off sick and basically stayed written off sick for the best part of the last year, with the diagnosis “long Covid”, a condition that even now remains a big unknown to the medical world, not to mention the rest of the society. Long Covid is treated as a mental illness, the stigma around it even worse than around depression or burnout.?

Last year was the worst and the best year. I’ve never slept so much in my life before (mainly thanks to the “happy pills” - super strong painkillers I was fed in copious amounts as no one knew how better to deal with all the symptoms of long Covid), and never before in my life have I had the luxury of just being with myself. It was a curse and a blessing at the same time ;-)

Towards the end of the year, the health insurance company got antsy and started pressuring me gently into either going down that dark path again (rehabilitation, therapy, counselling, more happy pills, registering as mentally disabled), or into getting off of my butt and going back to work.?

I had to re-think my direction and as a result, I resigned from my full-time job and took up a part-time job that was meant to be both sedentary and mobile, with shorter working hours, less commuting, less driving.?

But of course, cutting down the working hours meant a pay cut too. I’m sure some of you will agree: teenagers are expensive! Ageing dogs are expensive. A hundred-year-old houses are expensive. Life in general has become more expensive. So I took on a second paid job (on freelance basis), which nowadays sees me working two jobs to make ends meet (and they never do ??), plus my projects from before: my artist management agency, and as of this month, the series of concerts in my own garden.?

Perhaps it’s due to the fact that, this time, I am painfully aware that I am deeply buried in my third burnout, or perhaps due to the fact that I am monumentally failing to fulfil my financial obligations, that I continue on this crazy path, not budging, not standing down, not giving up, not slowing down. For years, my mantra was “All is well. If it’s not well, it is not the end.” I do wonder though… It feels like I am in a racing car with no breaks, and the song that keeps playing in my mind goes: “The world was on fire and no one could save me but you…”

Burnout has perhaps become a trendy word because celebrities started talking openly about it, but burnout, chronic stress, depression, they have been a constant companion to so many people from all walks of life, small, insignificant, unknown people trying to make ends meet, doing their damnedest best they can every single day.

To me, too.