Starting Again, Part 2: Burnout Rage as a Clarifier

A series outlining a career gone bad (and the eventual changes made to begin setting it right)

This is part two of an ongoing series on career misery and changing direction. To read part one, click here.

I had always prided myself on being someone who wasn’t a workaholic. I didn’t bring work stress home or run through my task list in the shower. I never stayed awake at night plotting out projects and most days, I refused to open my inbox until I logged on at work. My job had me fully during working hours but beyond that, because I was so miserable, it was almost as if work didn’t even exist. 

All of that changed in 2022.

A number of hard decisions, wild growth, and process upgrades at the PR firm led to a season of increased workloads, immense stress, and long hours. I gave in to the demand and soon I wasn’t just thinking about work in the shower but also on my daily walks, while cooking, during time spent with loved ones, and even while trying to read.

Every day was a race against the clock, against the deadlines, against my own capacity to do more, more, and yet more. Still I felt behind, often was behind. Although nothing about my job was anywhere near a life-and-death situation, my body read it as such. I felt wound up in a fight-or-flight pattern I couldn’t break, much less breathe or meditate my way out of. 

Work was everywhere and in everything and although I hated it, I couldn’t bear the thought of doing less and letting anything or anyone fall through my gaps. 

During the most intense time of that year, my depression billowed so large, the only way I knew to cope was by sleeping—so much sleep, at all hours of the day. Even though I frequently jolted awake in a panic about something I forgot or couldn’t afford to forget, I couldn’t stop sleeping. 

In the mornings after J left for work, I napped before I logged on for mine. I ate while I worked so I could nap again during lunch. Sometimes after work, I napped some more. In the evenings, I started falling asleep at 8:30, then 8, soon 7, and sometimes as early as 6. It felt like no amount of sleep could ever root out the depletion of both energy and joy I felt all the way to my center. 

I didn’t have a name for what I was experiencing until I sat down at the end of the year to do my annual review, a personal journaling tradition I look forward to every year to help me wrap up the old and prepare for the new. Just a few questions in, I realized I couldn’t recall anything but work. Every happy moment, every hard moment, every sad moment, every memorable moment—the whole of it centered on work. 

Although I felt the intensity of the year while in it, I didn’t realize just how bad it had been until that exact moment. I didn’t realize how completely I had gone and done the thing I swore never to do—become a workaholic—and in doing so, in drifting so far from my true self, I had finally fully burned out. 

As I sat there in late December, feeling the weight of an entire year gone with no immediate recollections save those of work, something tipped over in me. Rage bloomed in my belly, flew up my throat, and into my head until I felt I might be consumed by it. I was so angry, angrier than I’d ever been. 

That rage, surprised as I was by its appearance, clarified things for me. 

I had lived with work unhappiness for years, lived with it as it turned to sadness and then a numbing depression. But even that hadn’t been enough to motivate me toward a career change beyond just moving to a new company. For years I had told myself that sacrificing happiness and fulfillment at work for a reliable paycheck was necessary (and for some years, it truly was). I told myself that there wasn’t another way, that this was simply what it meant to be an adult who had to work and pay bills.

Sitting there that December, I saw, really saw, just how much I was losing by buying into that myth and how much I’d continue to lose if I kept working just for a paycheck. For the first time, my desire to be happy and healthy became greater than my desire for traditional financial stability so I made a vow to myself. I vowed to never repeat a year like 2022 and that if 2023 required it from me again, I’d finally quit. 

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Rage at others is powerful but rage at the self is much more painful and urgent.

I wanted someone to blame for my lost year—for all my lost years—but burnout forced me to face myself. It forced me to own my choices and accept that just as I was the only one who had put myself on this work path so to was I the only one who could remove myself from it.

In that way, my burnout rage also resurrected my curiosity. I wanted to know how I ended up on this career path in the first place, why I wasn’t happy even though I was writing, and why the hell I stayed so long when I knew somewhere deep in myself, likely from the very beginning, that it wasn’t what I wanted. 

I spent the first few months of 2023 tracing back through the years and my many roles to see if I could find even just a single thread of happiness or fulfillment anywhere. It wasn’t until I arrived at one of my college jobs where I worked as a section editor of the university’s newspaper that I finally found a memory of professional fulfillment and happiness. 

It was the one job where writing had never felt like work. The memories still sang to me—the rush of weekly production nights, the excitement of uncovering a story and landing a good interview, the joy of collaborating with other writers, the honor of holding people’s experiences and putting them into words. It was what I thought I’d spend my life doing, what I had planned for in high school after learning about investigative journalism and war reporting. I wanted to be on the front lines, telling the stories no one else was telling about the conflicts we merely glanced at from afar. Working at the newspaper in college confirmed that it was the work I was meant to do but it only took two simple opinion editorials that I wrote with conviction and earnest faith in readers to turn my path. Each one caused its own small uproar and it was enough to make me question whether I’d be able to withstand the much larger vitriol that so many investigative journalists face with every piece they publish. 

I grew afraid and backed away. I turned down an opportunity to travel to D.C. for a semester to deepen my journalism skills and instead let one marketing internship lead to another which eventually led to a marketing job and then a slew more of the same. 

At the time it all felt so inconsequential, hardly life-altering in any way. I was still writing even if the context in which I was doing so was now completely different. I couldn’t imagine that it mattered that much; I just thought I was protecting myself. Yet that small fear from those two op-eds initiated a pivot that took me into a career path that spit me out here—miserable, enraged, and confused.  

Understanding the genesis of the outcome I was living turned some of the rage into grief and I wondered again if I was too late, if I had missed my chance. The same fear that had influenced a pivot in college was back and taunting me anytime I thought about opting out of the career I had spent so many years building. It wasn’t the type of fear that warns of danger ahead or a threat to avoid but instead was one mired in the what-if—a simple fear of the unknown and the risk that comes from leaping toward it. 

And yet, the clarity from my burnout rage refused to fade.

One evening, sitting on the back porch of a friend’s house, waiting for peach cobbler and ice cream, my friend’s husband said something to me that quieted the fear for the first time and made room for imagination to begin plotting a new path.

Next week: the simple thing he told me that shifted everything. 

To keep reading, click here for part three.