On burnout

If it feels like heartache you might be too late

Do you know how you sometimes sit on your own foot, or maybe cross-legged, and your foot gets numb? Maybe it’s the nature of my executive dysfunction, but more often than not, I don’t bother moving my foot at all. I linger in the limbo for a while, even when I know I’m only making it worse, before shaking my leg and allowing the bloodflow back into my limb. Because the actual pain of reclaiming my foot, the pins and needles, is way worse than the chokehold. Ironically, recovery is what really hurts.

I learnt during the past months that burnout is just the same.

I promised myself I was leaving my former employer just a year ago. I had been through a couple years of sinus waves of disbelief and reconciliation, just like in cheap romantic novels. I was in a very complex situation, a toxic mix of wanting to see the good and the bad for the sake of growth and learning, of wanting to fix the world for many amazing people who I love dearly, trying to change a rotten system that was in love with itself. I wasn’t raised to be a quitter, and thus for a long time quitting seemed like failure, disloyalty and cowardy. So I gave it everything I had to build and ship the best possible thing, in the best possible way, and making it an opportunity for everyone’s success, but at some point I just realised that that kind of effort was never asked of me, or even wanted. Yes, I felt appreciated by many peers, but results-wise, it just felt pointless. So I left and it felt like heartache, and that’s how I know I did it way too late.

I also wanted to test myself against higher stantards. I wanted to find a new role on my own, no referrals, doing technical interviews and everything, because I felt I had a gendered reputation and even people that appreciated me held too many assumptions around the kind of work I was good at. I started accepting invitations to participate in talks and other events, even though they cost my health so much, because I thought that kind of external validation was necessary.

Anyways, in the blink of an eye I found a fantastic place, exciting project, and I thought I would never look back.

But the truth is that, as down as I had been feeling, I only gauged the actual amount of harm done as I onboarded on my new role. It was a mix of frustration, anger, solitude and the heavy digestion of it all. I had gotten used to navigating projects whose code and behavior I felt more or less familiar with, small scaled, where I always knew what door to knock, and had a deep understanding of the business. That’s normal to feel after nearly 6 years at the same place. But I also started comparing experiences, and that made me angry, and that felt like being hit once again. In the past I had been mocked for my standards, my rigidness, my writings, my rawness, my high expectations… and pretty much my brain wiring, and only now was I finding out that I was feeling ashamed of “traits” that were “skills” at a proper place. I was mad at myself, mostly, for having normalised behaviors that no employer shoud permit. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t so hungry for growth when not feeling threatened 24x7. I was relieved to confirm that engineering managers out there do not manage 4, 5 or even 6 teams at a time, and that what looks like a stretch assignment, if outscaled, is just a recipe for failure, because in such a setting you will never do the job well. And that’s specially painful for someone who wants to put the human in the center, or someone that needs to do the thing right, black or white.

So I think it all just blew me up. I’ve spent a good 8 months dedicated to that new role -where I feel very appreciated and heard, have a fantastic team, and an inmense potential for learning- but outside of the role demands, I’ve been pretty much incapable to read, grow, network, or post on my small stupid blog. I’ve felt a knot in my throat every time an idea for a post came to my mind. I haven’t finished a single technical book. I have declined every invitation to events or conferences. I have been clinically sick. Eventually, I disconnected from social media because I couldn’t keep with discussions, news, and the anxiety that I was feeling from just being in the world.

I’ve focused in working with my therapist on that burnout, and understanding my conditions, and how they interact with my work setting. Trying to build some higiene and guardrails instead of wiping my back day and night. I finally got my certificate of disability, and it also forced me to discuss internally if my career should ever be in the spotlight, at least the way it has been until now -no adaptions, just rawdogging it, trying to fit and play the part of someone who’s “100% able”, whatever that might mean. I’ve been trying to be honest with myself about what kind of price do I want to pay for living on extra credits I don’t really have, and for how long is it going to work. I’ve been telling myself “no, you can’t do that”, “no, you can’t go there”, “no, you need to stop for today”, and damn, it hurts. Am I a quitter now? I’ve rebelled against myself lots of times, and I’ve tasted the sour flavor of that mistake in my own health.

How am I feeling today? I think I’m still scratching the dirt in the surface. I’m certainly many miles closer to myself than I was one year ago, because I’m starting to allow myself to be that person. Quirky, rigid, raw and a bit hyper. Someone who needs to say “no” often to preserve their health, who needs more rest than normal, but who also has big bursts of energy and can suddenly deliver 5x in one day- but then needs to stop and refill.

If you want a KPI, I’ve read 21 books in the last 8 weeks and none of them was related to tech or management. This summer I’ve delightfully fallen into any monotropic rabbit hole I’ve felt like, I have created music with a gen AI, I’ve attained a very deep tan while floating like an otter in the pool, and I have penned this post in a violent episode of inspiration on a Sunday morning. These are very me things and I don’t think I’ve been at that place since, easily, 2010.

So cheers to me.