CLH Words

The world demands burnout and trauma. The society we built means that almost everyone will experience some type of trauma at one point, and be burnt out, often perpetually. Capitalism means and white supremacy ensure it. I have been thinking a lot about this lately as I have been fighting burnout for months now.

               For me, burnout isn’t just being stressed. It feels like depression, a constant weight that pushes down on me at all times. Burnout always sneaks up on me. It doesn’t happen all at once. I have a week that is just a little too much. One too many days in a row where I cannot relax and bam, I am burnt out.

               Yet, I do not get over burn out simply by moving past it. Two months ago I had two weeks that were simply too much. A couple major life events (no need to get into in this essay), a few too many appointments and work events and here I am. But, I am well past all of that. I am back to my normal schedule. I have been for over a month now. But I am still burnt out. Burn out doesn’t slow down. It snowballs. I reach a state where even my normal everyday stress doesn’t go away but simply adds on to the pile of stress. Relaxing doesn’t take away from the stress, it simply just doesn’t add any to it. Long after the events that caused it pass, burnout still carries on.

               Trauma is the same way. I am no longer in (most of) the situation that caused my trauma. Those are long gone. Yet, I still feel the weight of them. It’s taken me years to unpack and get over my trauma. Just like with burn out, simply resting does not heal trauma. It demands work.

               Trauma and burnout take effort to heal from. I need to devote time and energy to addressing them properly or I will continue to feel their weight against me. Yet, in our society we are not given this time. Life goes on. I still have to go to work, clean the house, live my life. Capitalism doesn’t let me take a break to heal from the wounds it inflicts. I have to find that time myself.

               We live in a world that causes trauma and burnout but refuses to give us the space to heal. This is not even beginning to touch on the fact that healing is not something that should be done alone. Healing is a group effort. Community care will always enable selfcare. Yet those things do not come easy, as they have been stolen from us. We must chose to allow ourselves the space to heal. We must look at each other and see that we are all hurt and help each other to heal. We need to acknowledge that the way we are living now is harmful and work to change that.

               This is what I have been thinking about as I pull myself out of burnout. Society says that I should be ashamed to be burnt out, that I should hide my trauma from the world. I know that is not how to survive. Healing takes time and energy. That is work that I must do, that we all must do. And I know that once we do that work, or even as we do it, we can work to build a world that doesn’t demand us to hurt.