Burnout is real.

And for a while, I was right in the middle of it without fully knowing it.

The signs were there, looking back. The joy I used to get from finishing a hard project, that quiet sense of satisfaction after solving a difficult problem, was gone. In its place was a kind of dull emptiness. Questions started creeping in: “Is this all there is?” and “What exactly am I doing this for?”

And then my sleep went sideways. I would lie awake for hours, and if I did manage to fall asleep, I would be wide awake again by three in the morning with no chance of going back to rest. I would start every day already running on empty.

At first I told myself it was seasonal — maybe just a slow recovery from the Christmas break. But it did not go away. I knew I had to do something about it if I wanted to find my way back to myself.

It took a visit to a clinical psychologist to help me put words to what I was going through. And I want to be clear about something: I do not like being told what to do. What she did, and what I appreciated most about her, was that she helped me look at my own situation more clearly. She did not hand me a prescription for life. She helped me see the questions I had been carrying around and understand what was actually sitting underneath all of them.

The short answer was this: Everything had changed, and I had not moved with it.

At work, my team had grown into a genuinely capable group of professionals. They had figured out how to handle the problems that came their way. They did not need me stepping in the way I used to. The wider organization had also found its footing again — the CEO even said the swagger was back — and the constant rallying and cheerleading I used to do when morale dipped was no longer something people were looking for.

On the personal side, we had to let go of our dog, Sky, because she was in pain and it was the kindest thing we could do for her. My sisters flew back to the United States after spending three weeks with us during the holidays and I had been missing the times that we spent together over the holidays.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, it hit me that I am on “season 51” of my life on earth, which brought its own set of thoughts about the next chapter, about retirement in the next ten to fifteen years, and about what I need to build between now and then.

Change was everywhere around me. And instead of moving with it, I stayed still. I was holding on to the way things used to be, to routines and roles and moments that had already run their course. That gap between where I was standing and where life had already moved to — that is what wore me down. That is what became the burnout.

What pulled me forward was the realization that I had to shift. Not dramatically, not overnight, but deliberately.

I had to look at all the changes that had happened, acknowledge them honestly, and accept that they were not going away. I had to sit with the question of what still matters to me — what values I actually want to build my days around, and which ones I had simply been holding onto out of habit.

And I had to learn to treat the hard questions not as problems to be solved quickly, but as guideposts. The philosopher Rainier Maria Rilke wrote about living the questions — and that framing has stayed with me. You do not always need the answer right now. Sometimes living inside the question with honesty and patience is the whole point.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainier Maria Rilke
(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/717-be-patient-toward-all-that-is-unsolved-in-your-heart)

I will not pretend that I am fully out of it. There are still questions sitting quietly at the back of my mind, and some days are harder than others. But I am getting my footing back, steadily. The days feel lighter. The challenges feel interesting again rather than heavy. And I feel more present with the people around me, which matters more to me than I sometimes let on.

I am not back to full form yet. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And I know it is not an oncoming train.