On the verge of burnout, accepting imperfection saved me
Watching Hitchcock’s Psycho, it dawned on me: I had a problem. Do you know the scene in which Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, is changing her clothes and running late to a meeting with her lover? I do too, but for all the wrong reasons. Instead of watching it, I was obsessively looking at the clock, fretting over how behind schedule she was.
You see, for me, productivity rules supreme.
My favourite question is “What time is it?”, followed by my brain going into overdrive, calculating the minutes left to finish a given task and the remaining items on my to-do list. “Me time” gets the same treatment, making the experience anything but relaxing. Have you ever tried self-care on a timer?
Not surprisingly, this relentless pursuit of productivity and workaholism spelled trouble. And, in the fall of 2018, trouble turned to breakdown.
The scenario may sound familiar. Leading several high-stake projects, coupled with taxing business trips and an unmanageable workload, brought the wolf of burnout to my door. Add to the mix my “good girl’s” need for validation, heavy emotional investment, and a vicious cycle of perfectionism and unmet self-imposed expectations. When breaking point came, it was messy and uncomfortable to watch. One day at work, I just cried for 20 minutes in front of my team, first because of tiredness and desperation, then because of the shame of tearing up in front of colleagues, and finally upon realizing that crying enlarges my nose, bloats my face and reddens my eyes.
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That day I felt like a lonely failure, a statistical anomaly among my calm and collected peers. But the more I researched, the more I found my experience mirroring other people’s lives.
Take Rhiân, talking to the BBC: “I don’t remember the last time I relaxed. Honestly? I don’t know how to. Every time I try to read a book or watch TV, I think about what I have to do next, or my ‘to-do’ list flashes before my eyes. I feel guilty because I know that I could be cleaning my flat, or be at the gym (…).”
And Brian Porrell, featured in a Boston Globe article, who “as soon as he awakes (…) checks his e-mail, sometimes firing off a message before he gets out of bed. He makes calls during his commute (…), spends 10 to 12 hours at the office and out visiting clients, and keeps his phone by his side at night, checking work e-mails (..).”
Or Liz Tucker, whose burnout led her to retrain as a health and wellbeing counsellor: “I’d start work at 7am and often wouldn’t finish until 8pm the following day, 36 hours later. The year I burned out, I drove over 100,000 miles. (..) it all began to fall apart. I started feeling really tired and very lethargic. One Sunday night, I went to bed early because I felt like I was getting a bit of a cold. When I woke on Monday, I simply couldn’t get out of bed. I could move my fingers, head and feet, but I had no energy in my arms and legs.”
All these stories personalize the “many people [who] cite work as the cause of, or trigger for mental health problems, whether they are referring to the relentless out-of-hours drive for productivity, or the insecurity of the gig-economy and zero-hours contracts,” as Louise Chunn writes in The Guardian.
Chief among those linking work with burnout are millennials, namely people born between 1981 and 1996. Contrary to popular culture, their experiences consist less of lattes and avocado on toast, and more of job insecurity, soaring house prices, an endless stream of internships and side hustles, as well as delayed marriages and delayed families. In response, and “in a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible,” writes Anne Helen Petersen in what became a reference article on How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.
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Typically Millennial or not, my breakdown was a blessing in disguise. Once tears had evaporated, two epiphanies flashed:
a) I should stop taking myself so seriously and start focusing on the things I could control; and
b) I could do with a lesson in accepting imperfection and practicing self-care.
This second realization took me to cooking and drawing, the natural playground for flirting with imperfection. At that time, my cooking came in three flavours: burnt, overboiled or in flames. Drawing was even more painful to contemplate. Lacking any sense of proportion, symmetry or perspective, my drawings had been the object of derision among art teachers and colleagues in school.
Yet, every weekend, I became both a woman possessed and at peace: searching for recipes, dreaming ingredients, washing, peeling, rinsing, chopping, squeezing, boiling, frying, eating. I tamed mushrooms and broccoli, my fiends; dolled-up plain cauliflower and rice with parmigiana, garlic and ginger; turned slippery salmon into buttery goodness; and caramelized eye-stabbing onions into submission.
Each cooking session emptied and filled me. Out went my inbox, my deadlines, my projects. In came new textures, colourful dishes, and the accidental delicious meal. A day’s work crammed into pots and pans that held no judgement, gave no “strategic input,” and required no “follow-up by teleconference.”
Empowered by cooking, I turned to drawing. Uncertain lines, like the faltering first steps of a toddler, followed. A lemon in the shape of a coffee bean, a tea saucer resembling a frying pan, an armchair mistaken for a giant apple were my achievements. Then came more confident strokes: cartoonish faces of women, a cupboard one could recognize as such, and a portrait of Virginia Woolf with a 50 percent accuracy rate. I was going places.
Days at work became more manageable. The workload hadn’t changed; the pressure didn’t relent; the people weren’t any nicer. I changed. I was healing, detaching, caring for myself. Watches lingered on my dressing table, unconsulted; vacations got planned; and daring out-of-office messages of “I’m busy with important work” sent unapologetically into the world.
I survived. No, I thrived. This year, following that dark Fall, has been my most successful yet.
As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest. Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, writes: “If you recognize that work and rest are two sides of the same coin, than you can get more from rest by getting better at it and by giving it a place in your life you’ll stand a better chance of living the life you want, you’ll be able to do your job, and your life’s work, better.”
12 months on from my breakdown, I take this advice to heart. Sundays are still for cooking. Meat is my next frontier, forever squeamish about touching it. Drawing, though more irregular, still gives me enormous joy.