🔥 Burnout Season is Upon Us
Why women feel burnout so acutely, and how you can find relief.
I’m writing this from the only place I care to be right now: my bed.
Whenever I’ve managed to get through some big life event, some push to the finish—a deadline, the school year, sometimes simply Friday at 5:00 PM—most of the time I’m not filled with the exhilarated energy of an athlete who just won a game. I look like a marathoner collapsing across the finish line: proud, maybe, but anyone can see the push has definitely taken its toll on me.
Field trips. Kids’ sports. Big work projects. Book deadlines. So many book things. Parenting. PARENTING. PARENTING. Endless appointments. School projects. Meetings. Tasks. Laundry (gracious). Camp forms. An endless work to-do list. Did I mention parenting?
And I know you’re just as tired as I am, too. Because you’ve got your own big and small things you’re juggling right now.
Tax season. End of school year activities. Covering for a co-worker. A boss going through some stuff and taking it out on your team. The emotional labor of Mother’s Day. Caring for kids—maybe a new baby…
Juggling logistics. Juggling emotions. At the end of the day (or at the end of a long season of pushing through, because how many of us have told ourselves, Just one more day, one more week, one more month and it’ll be FINE...) no wonder we just want to crash.
And we need that crash—we need to rest.
But what happens when crashing is the only way we know how to deal with our lives?
If all we have to look forward to is crashing . . . when are we actually living? And finding joy?
If you just laughed bitterly at me, I get it. There have been so many seasons when it would’ve taken all of me not to just roll my eyes at someone asking me where I’m finding joy.
But . . . I don’t think it’s good for us to live in that place for long. Because if our lives look like cycles of waiting for the next time we can crash and check out of everything . . . maybe something’s up. Maybe we’re burned out.
And here’s a (not so hot) take: I think the burnout many of us are feeling is a burnout that’s especially felt by women.