sunday edition | state of the union

burnout, quitting my job, and what I'm doing next.

It’s time for an extremely personal sunday update in more of an essay format. We’re talking about burnout, quitting my job without a plan, and what I’m doing next.

There was a stereotype of the perfect student at my small, historically women’s liberal arts college. It was a little bit funny, and a little bit sad, the way the best satires are, rooted in a painful truth people don’t wish to recognize about themselves and their communities.

A Wendy Wellesley was That Girl. She always got A’s, was always weeks ahead on reading for her double major and quirky, niche minor. She had a prestigious internship, and more volunteer hours for obscure causes than one could count. She was always in charge of several on campus organizations, often on an athletic team. She was well rounded, upbeat, and endlessly, gratingly successful with several dashes of self-deprecating humility. Behind a highly polished veneer was an all consuming work ethic and drive, but no visible signs of striving beyond humble-brags about lack of sleep and credit hours.

I was not that girl.

Don’t get me wrong, even then I was always doing The Most. But it never came easily. I am the girl who worked endlessly to be That Girl, but who never quite hit my stride. I double majored. I rowed. I worked multiple work study jobs, collected internships like infinity stones, was president of my society. On paper, I was a certified Wendy. In real life I was playing whack-a-mole attempting to balance all my responsibilities with any semblance of sanity.

To quote the great T.Swift: I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try.

And over the last decade and change, so much of my personal and professional striving has been focused on making the struggle seem effortless, and concealing the very real work it is to be the girl who is doing it all. in concert with my semi-professional career as a creator, it also became finding a way to neatly package up the process and making it something both beautiful and aspirational.

I have often been told “I don’t know how you do it”. My longstanding, jokey response (humor as a deflection!) is that I’m a lot like a duck – calm and collected on the surface, frantic chaos underneath as you paddle like hell to stay afloat.

For the nearly ten years since I graduated, this has been my M.O. I worked doggedly in pursuit of a place in my desired phd. program, and was devastated when I was deferred. I threw myself into a career pivot, desperate to prove myself and make up for “lost time” in the real world from my stint in academia. I drank the passion job kool-aid. I internalized the importance of doing work that “matters”.

And over the last six years I have climbed the ladder without stopping, collecting promotions and responsibilities and raises, doing work I loved at a socially conscious organization. I earned a reputation for putting my head down and getting shit done - the one who could be called upon to finish the job, the right way, no matter the time or effort required. I was regularly pulled in as a fixer - to pull teams into shape, and repair rocky relationships with clients by delivering quality work, on time and under budget.

I danced dangerously close to frenetic burnout several times from 2019 to 2022, but always managed to schedule a major vacation just in time to put it off (nothing like backpacking Mt. Kilimanjaro to forget about your work stress).

By the time my husband and I decided to start growing our family, I managed three anchor accounts, responsible for nearly $3M annual revenue. It never occurred to me that I would not return to work after having a child; I could not fathom my identity without my own ambition, and I could not imagine personal, professional satisfaction without ongoing achievement as a demonstration of my own intelligence, capability, and ambition.

After the birth of my first child in 2022, I took advantage of my company’s leave policy, but dutifully returned to work 4.5 months later. The experience decimated my ambition for the corporate world, exacerbated my (already fairly significant) anxiety, and induced postpartum depression. It took and took and took, until I had nothing left to give, and then it asked for more.

The beat for beat details of what happened aren’t really important, but the gist is this: I was as successful as I was prior to having kids because I had internalized for years that working hard was a core part of my identity. I believed that the accomplishments I collected in return for my time was worth it, and I was supported and celebrated because I always went above and beyond, even at the expense of my time, my stress and my boundaries.

When I became a mother, and my time and my body and my schedule ceased to be my own, these accomplishments started to lose their luster. Not because I no longer valued them, but because the cost to achieve them, and the endurance required to tolerate an increasingly unsupportive environment was not equivalent to their worth in the grand scheme of the rest of my life.

I lasted 18 months and in October of last year, I hit a breaking point. I quit my job without a plan for what to do next.

I assumed that I would take a few weeks off, and aimed to return to a full time role by early January. But as the dust has settled and I reflected on my experiences it has become abundantly clear that the emotional exhaustion, the inability to focus, the loss of motivation and poor physical health weren’t just one off things - they were signs and symptoms of pretty severe burnout.

Within a few weeks of my last day, I got hit with severe pneumonia, likely caused by the “let down effect”, when prolonged periods of stress leave your immune system vulnerable to infection. A stunning example of “if you don’t let your body rest, it will make you”.

And over the past few months, I have spent a lot of time thinking and reflecting on my experiences and what it is that I want “next” to look like. I went through several rounds of interviews for several roles I was interested in, but couldn’t shake the lingering doubts that any of them would be meaningfully different from the one I had just left. As I reviewed job offers, perks and benefits and weighed them against the cost of child care, the changes to our schedule and the thought of restarting the cycle all over again made me physically ill.

Eventually, In mid-January I made a decision that I won’t be going back to a full time role, at least for now.