Burnout is Grief

I got severely burned out in my previous career, twice. Here are a few things I learned:

Burnout takes as long to get out of as it took to get into. Simply taking a vacation isn’t enough. This is an inconvenient truth.
Burnout is a lot like depression in that it becomes extremely difficult to find joy or see the good in things. This erodes hope that the burnout can ever end.
Burnout comes with a lot of anger. Anger means your boundaries are being violated. Getting clear on what your boundaries are is the first step to getting free.

I burned out in a career where I had a boss and a management structure; that last point about boundaries hits differently when you’re indie, since very often you’re violating your own boundaries with yourself in service to your work, and that can trigger a lot of self-hate in addition to the depression and anger.

I’ve come to think of burnout as grief for the loss of the life you wanted. It follows the famous Kubler-Ross model pretty well:

Denial: I’m not burned out, I’m just engaged, or busy, or a little extra tired right now.
Anger: Everyone is stupid, every problem is the worst, why can’t anyone just leave me the hell alone.
Bargaining: If I can just get through this week, this month, this year, this release, this campaign, things will get better again.
Depression: I am so tired and I don’t want to do anything at all. There is no hope. This is just my life now.
Acceptance: I have to quit this job, this project, this pattern, this career. I need to make a significant, meaningful change to get out of this.

I’m still recovering from my second burnout, but I’m far enough into recovery that I recognized I needed to shift my focus away from that career and into a fundamentally different situation. A big part of my experience of burnout was losing patience with everyone, even people I love, even when they weren’t doing anything wrong. And a big part of my recovery is coming from building a community separate and apart from the work that burned me out in the first place.