It Ain’t Like The Movies

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Am I a phoenix being reborn from the ashes, or am I shooting star, slowly fizzling away?

Whenever I think about life, this is essentially where I come back to repeatedly.

Everyone loves a hero’s story. Writers throughout history have realised that a story is only interesting if there is failure. Nobody wants to listen to a story about someone who was always perfect throughout their life. No, instead, we are engrossed by stories where the protagonist fails. But when they fail, they do not give up. Through perseverance and overcome the grand challenge before them.

Unfortunately, life is not like the movies. If the current moment of my life is to be the moment preceding my rise, it unfortunately feels far less poetic, and certainly far more boring. Whereas Rocky seems to be able to grow in the space of a 5-minute montage, the experience in real life seems to take a whole lot longer.

And in the movies (at least in the Hollywood ones), we enter knowing that the hero will eventually win. Righteousness prevails even in the worst of situations. Thanos may have snapped half the population away, but the Avengers managed to turn back time, win the war and have the Happily Ever After.

Alas, real life has no such guarantees. Perhaps we cling to a hero’s story because it means avoiding the truth that not everybody succeeds in the end.

But maybe I’m not in a Hollywood film. Perhaps instead I am closer to the life depicted in French cinema, living out in depressing black and white. I recall watching a film from my University French Film studies course. Three hours of slow, tedious progression. The misery of social issues depicted were transmitted through the misery you felt sitting through the film.

Such films are filled with long, vacuous staring out the window. The ending inevitably miserable, with the protagonist dying from a mix of melancholy and a tragic romance.

The contrast couldn’t be bigger to Hollywood. Life is suffering, and we must be reminded of that. Hope is the fleeting moment between the harsh oppression of modern existence.

Perhaps I’m an anomaly. An Amélie that breaths fresh air. A quirky protagonist, that whilst misunderstood, can ultimately be charming in their own way. Despite sticking out like a sore thumb, they do eventually find their own happy final ending.

Perhaps movies are too short to really do justice to life journeys. My escapism tends more to be from video games. It’s a format that allows for longer format storytelling. I play as Henry, a blacksmith’s son in 15th century Bohemia. When war comes to my doorstep, I am feeble and have no choice but to run. I may be able to get my hands on a sword, but if I try and fight trained soldiers, I am completely outclassed and quickly slain.

I enter the service of a lord and through practice, slowly build up my skills. I slowly improve my competencies. What was once an impossible fight becomes manageable. Lowly fetch quests are replaced  by noble tasks. Over time, money and prestige follows. By the time of the game’s sequel Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, I am a squire, embroiling myself in a tale of kings fighting for the throne.

I sometimes wish that life was more like a video game. Progression is rewarding, and far fairer. I would have a better idea of what to do, and more fundamentally, working towards something would have a clear benefit.

In the video game, I level my swordsmanship by practice. The progression is clear, and I am rewarded with further perks and skills. The effort I put in is demonstrated to me as each battle gets progressively easier.

But in real life, I feel the path is inversed. When I try and improve my health, my body falls further into illness. The gym made me stronger, but also sicker. Rest made me heal, but also gain weight. Common wisdom doesn’t seem to apply.

In my career, I used to believe that it was broadly meritocratic. Yet the more skillful I became, the more I find myself at odds with the whole system.

Greater consciousness allows for greater skill. But what does one do when greater consciousness means seeing the faults of the system? The grand difficulty of consciousness is that once it is turned on, it can never really be turned off.

I cannot unsee what I have seen. For every inch of positives that I see in my previous career, I see the damage it does. I cannot ignore the ego driven leadership, the unethical practices and harmful approaches. How can I dedicate myself as noble as working on a ‘good cause’ when, on reflection, I think it may actually be doing more harm than good?

 How can I genuinely believe in an organisation which is vocal on issues it cares about, but blatantly ignores the atrocities in Palestine? That to me is not the path of righteousness.

Real life is unfortunately far more complex and messy than the beautifully woven tales.

The little rays of sunshine

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I’ve felt a little more upbeat this week. It’s quite hard to say why.

But then, looking for the perfect answer is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. There’s something about the vagueries of life that no one can ever fully explain.

I do feel a bit better with my health compared to last week. My nausea has reduced somewhat, my sleep seems calmer and I feel more balanced and upright. But honestly, these are relatively minor. Nothing has particularly shifted otherwise. It’s why I must admit that a mood uplift has hit me slightly by surprise.

It’s also a pretty stark contrast to last week, where I was feeling particularly despondent. I felt a few things knocked me down. Somerset losing to Yorkshire, effectively ending hopes of a first County Championship title was pretty demoralising. But alas, that is just how sports goes.

Closer to home, I got a letter saying I needed to pay an additional 2700 euros tax by the end of November. I did know it was coming, but the amount was higher and the deadline stricter than I had hoped. Mentally I started bracing myself to a few months of being extra frugal. The confusing part is that I don’t even feel like I spend much anyway. My only real outings for the last month have been across the road to the supermarket.

But the real hammer blow last week was receiving my blood test results. Despite several months of targeted effort, my insulin resistance was actually a bit higher. I ended up feeling pretty despondent about it all. Probably for the first time, I started to contemplate that I may never really recover. My conclusion was to write off the rest of 2026. It wasn’t a particularly motivating way of looking at the next few months.

Yet weirdly, I think this mentality has actually done me some good. The less pressure I can put on recovery, the better things seem to go. My attempts at pushing my mind and body into improving has generally ended up rather unsuccessful. The times where I seem to see progress is when I let my body do its thing. Perhaps this is having its positive effect on me this week.

I’ve also reflected how much calmer I am compared to a year ago. Before, life felt like being hit constantly by new whirlwinds. My body was constantly throwing up new inexplicable issues, whilst my mind was struggling with understanding what was going on with my life.

Now, I do feel like some answers have been settled, though plenty still remain. For those that I can’t answer, I’m more at peace with. Or at the very least, I realise that fretting about them only makes things worse.

I do feel more in alignment with a rhythm of life that suits my personality. I’ve gotten used to a more solitary life. For a long time I found it very difficult as I would often feel very lonely. Now, I feel more at peace with it. The attempts to fit in and win at the career rat race was destroying my soul until I inevitably hit collapse.

Whilst there are obvious downsides to less social interactions, the upside is that I also get far less judgement and expectations put on me. In a strange way, this does give a feeling of freedom.

Perhaps peace makes such a difference, not because of magical happiness, but because it means that slow, boring change is far more bearable.

I’m no longer a cat on a hot tin roof searching desperately for a way out.

Writing with little to say

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I’m feeling particularly uninspired with my writing. It feels like I’m simply rewriting the same stories every time.

Granted, I probably feel that more than anyone actually reading. One article a week is but a drop in the ocean, considering how much information we are constantly consuming. It’s probably actually a good thing that I repeat myself, else any key message quickly gets lost.

Yet I’m also just fatigued about talking on the same subjects. I seem to either be giving live updates around my health, or talking about the accompanying mental difficulties.

Of course, no one is actually obliging me to write articles. I’ve been doing this for over five years now, and I’m not totally sure why I still do. It’s now become as much a routine as something that has a clear purpose.

I suppose it’s always been an outlet to whatever is going on in my mind. It that sense it brings some sense of peace. Yet what started with a lofty ambitions of informing and guiding people has dissipated. Before, I felt like I had something to say that people needed to hear. Now, I feel like I’m a whisper in the midst of a hurricane.

Partly this is because I feel less sure of my own wisdom. That happens when life hits hard, but it also comes with the realisation of how little I really know. But more crucially, I’ve become fatigued by people who have no desire to listen. Many people have no idea what I’m talking about, and even if they do, the topics are too scary to ever confront.

It’s hard to tell whether I’m genuinely wiser, or whether I’ve just become bitter. My previous articles were so heavy in interpretation and meaning making – I was constantly looking for an explanation. Now, I’ve stopped trying to make sense of everything. It makes life more peaceful. Perhaps this is a healthier, more stoic way at looking at life. Yet there was also an essence of magic that comes with the energy or reaction and interpretation.

Maybe I’m also just reading too much into it all. It’s natural that my writing has turned slow and somber when that’s what I’m currently living. My writing has always reflected what is going on with me, and the reality is that right now, very little is happening.

Frustratingly, I don’t think I will know the answer, until (or perhaps, if) my life situation changes. Either I will recover, and this will be the most formative period of my life, or it will be my new normal.

Relearning how I learn

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I’ve recently restarted my Dutch course. Half-way through a class, I started questioning whether I was actually any good at learning languages. I realised it was a somewhat farcical thought, considering I’ve been learning languages most of my life. Logically I am rather good at it, since I speak 3 languages fluently and have been learning three others.

To some extent everyone has doubts around their language abilities. That’s just part of the learners journey. Yet there is something about the course structure doesn’t particularly play to my strengths. It’s four hours of class twice a week. I don’t think such lengths of concentration are exactly my forte.

Not only that, the structure feels somewhat hard to follow. We seem to jump from one topic to another based upon a set syllabus. This week we reviewed how people introduce themselves (even though we did that last semester). Next week we are going to talk about volunteering. There doesn’t seem to be any particular logic to any of this, and I can’t help but somehow feel a little lost.

The difficult thing is knowing whether this is confusing for everyone or just for me. I’ve had flashbacks to when I was in primary school. I remember at one point that I was in the top set of Maths class, but my teacher felt I needed a kick of motivation. I was sent down to the second set. Then, wanting to compound the effect further, I was later put in the bottom set. Eventually, I was moved back into the top set but with the idea that this was a proverbial kick up the backside.

I can’t help but be gobsmacked at how I now realise that I had no idea what was happening. Nobody seemed to properly sit me down and explain what was happening and why. I simply followed what I was told. I seemed to have built this reputation of being smart but lazy, yet in reality I didn’t really understand what was going on.

Clearly, neurodivergence was at play. My brain works differently, that is pretty evident. I think I often would start thinking about something and then get caught up in it that I would miss the next part of the conversation.

Yet I’m also very cautious of having this all brushed under the ‘neurodivergent’ tag. I also remember that when I was unsure of something, I was too scared to ask. I remember this once meant that I ended up doing very little during the class, which very much annoyed my teacher.

I was cripplingly timid growing up. This, I think, stems far more from my family upbringing than anything else. Being the youngest in what was a pretty dysfunctional family environment, I generally grew up being scared to ask things. South Asian family culture is also far more strict compared to western ones around respect and deference. It meant that I was still shy and fearful around adults until well into my teens.

Disentangling all these things is pretty tricky. But I’m fairly confident that it was a mix of both things. My brain does work differently which has created additional challenges, but some of these things have been made more dramatic by cultural differences.

Fast forward to today, I’m far better at concentrating. I’ve done a whole lot of work in calming the mind and being more present. So much so that I am a much better listener than many people. But I’m left wondering whether I have become good at these things by heightened compensation of my weaknesses.

It’s why the point about me not being very good at learning languages does have some resonance behind it. I have found my own methods as a way of overcoming heightened difficulty. Much of my language learning I have done in private. I now usually use 1-1 teachers as I find that much more dynamic. I also much prefer spending time with natives rather than following a school curriculum.

In some senses, I know that it doesn’t really matter how I became good at something. Whatever method I use, the result is the same. Yet if I have constantly been using these additional compensatory measures, it helps explain why I’ve had such an implosion in my cognitive functioning in these last few years.

Another interesting point is that my Sanskrit classes feel very different. It is a slower, more thorough pace. I actually find it more rigorous and much easier to follow. Whereas western language learning seems to be rushing to up skill as quickly as possible, my Sanskrit teacher goes by slow, repetition of simpler topics and phrases.

I think our Western style of teaching has become so embedded in following a bloated curriculum that it ends up rushing around. This is rather ineffective for all of us, but I would say tends to be more difficult for neurodivergent and marginalised folk.

I do think we are also partly to blame for this. Most people are not willing to put in the time and effort to learn the more traditional way. Teaching has needed to become more about entertainment than education in order to survive. After all, a gamified language learning app lets people feel good about themselves without having to do the hard yards of grammar tests.

So where does that leave me with my Dutch class? Well, I follow it, and I actually am better at it than I give myself credit for. Whatever difficulty I may have is outweighed by the fact I turn up more consistently and take it more seriously compared to my classmates.

Yet the one thing I need to be careful of is pushing too hard on these compensatory mechanisms. After all, I’m pretty sure that’s what led to my burnout in the first place.

Between discipline and indulgence

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I often go through a period of wondering how to use my time more productively. Since I have time and relatively little responsibilities (aside from keeping myself alive), I sometimes get the impulse that I must do more.

Such thoughts are often a trap. The idea that I need to be constantly working on something is in of itself a toxic cycle. I have to remember that my focus is on improving my health right now, not padding my CV.

I remember some years ago how everyone was saying we should all learn to code. Coding was some sort of golden ticket to wealth and fame. There were lauded stories of people like Steve Jobs who managed it. All you had to do was dedicate night and day and eventually you will find success.

I’m glad I never really bought into this mythology. I think I quickly realised that dedicating your life to something you didn’t enjoy was a pointless misery. The success stories were based upon people who did it out of passion, not out of some sort of cost-benefit analysis. As I’ve grown older,

Even then, it is extremely tough. For every success story there’s hundreds of others who we don’t hear about. I’ve also scrutinised the stories a bit more. Turns out, people like Steve Jobs had far more winding and oft random paths to success than people realise. Times have also changed, and the golden ticket in the end hasn’t turned out to be as golden as we thought. We’ve now come to the point where programmers are being displaced by AI, meaning mass lay offs and genuine hardships.

I admit that I often feel despair towards our modern day situation. Any skill I might dedicate myself towards is due mass upheaval. Although I continue my language classes, jobs in the sector are being eaten away by AI. Likewise, writing and editing work has imploded. Even blogs like this one are being subsumed into proxy wars of social media algorithms, not to mention competing with instantly generated AI slop.

By the end, I realise it’s better not to think about it too much. It’s better to just enjoy doing things. Yet enjoyment is sometimes harder to define than we might think. There’s more to pleasure than a pure pursuit of hedonism. It is actually rather unfulfilling to constantly do things on a whim.

Learning a language for example, is hard. It’s often not fun. Like any skill, it takes as much discipline as it does pleasure. Having structure and a teacher help frame it for me. Looking at how much time it will take to ‘master’ is demotivating, yet learning and seeing my progress has its own particular fulfillment.

Then, there is following the whims of pleasure. Doing what I feel like, depending on my mood. Right now, my ‘pleasure’ time is going to my PlayStation. On paper, this sounds like a frivolous activity that extends to pure escapism. But in practice, I end up finding games that are engrossing either through sufficient challenge or a strong narrative arc.

I’m currently replaying Elden Ring, which is as far away from frivolity and escapism as you can get. Combat is challenging. You will often die to the same boss multiple times. Meanwhile, the world is extremely oppressive and depressing. Completing cryptic quests often leads to the quest giver dying. It’s not for the faint of heart.

In the end, games like this are ones that people like me return to because it manages to keep sustained engagement. If it was too easy, I would have become bored and stopped playing it many hours ago.

Finding such a balance has also put me off reading for the last few months. It’s tricky to find books that feel a good intermediate level. I’m tired of reading personal development books. They can end up being quite generic and superficial, not to mention often very white-washed. Yet my 1000 page book on the history of India feels like self-imposed study. I think I’m better off finding something that has some level of substance, but doesn’t read like a text book. Such a combination isn’t necessarily easy to find, but no doubt exist within the millions of books out there.

When I started writing this article, I thought of engagement as three different categories. The intense: formal education through my language lesson. The mixed level: reading semi-educative books. Then the pleasurable: playing video games without a ‘goal’.

Yet as I’ve thought it through, I feel like the three are actually far more closer than I thought. In the end, most of my pleasures come down to having sufficient (but not too much) challenge and stimulation.

Maybe that is the key to enjoying anything consistently.

A Regression to a Younger Age

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It’s been a strange August. I think it’s been a bit weird for everyone.

Perhaps I’m a nostalgic millennial, but I miss the simpler days of the school summer holidays. Admittedly, my family rarely went on holidays, but at least it felt like a seasonal pause from school work.

August no longer seems to have that feeling of being a real break. Everything seems to be in constant motion. The chase for productivity is winning out against periodic rest.

My life has seemingly regressed to a similar style of living as I had when I was young. Perhaps it’s my way of searching for creature comforts, even if the comforts weren’t all that comfortable. In my youthful summers, I spent most of my time playing video games feeling pretty isolated from the world. My current situation does feel remarkably similar.

I had few friends when I was young. I felt like I was not allowed to have them. My parents, particularly my mother, was perennially paranoid of me spending time with white people due to what she say as their dangerous influence. I grew up in a white majority town, so this ended up being a cut-off from most social contact. My childhood had regular occurrences of interrogation of where I was going, or who I was seeing. I remember that my parents at one point held an intervention because I was out of the house several days during the summer.

I noticed our wider family found kinship through fellow community members and extended family. But my father by my teenage years had become particularly prominent in the community, meaning family visits were really about homage or business. Our home regularly had people visiting. I had no idea who these people were. Aside from surface interactions, they also seemed to have no interest in me either. I learnt to hate family gatherings and functions. I’m not sure that feeling has shifted since.

I was undoubtedly very depressed when I was a teenager. I do not need the benefit of hindsight to realise this, I knew it at the time. I felt no motivation to do anything, and would often just blankly stare out in the distance. Alas, I do not know if the real tragedy was about how I felt or the fact that everyone was too busy to ever notice. The one dangled carrot that was moving away for university at 18. That was the only thing really kept me going.

For a long time, I’ve been wary of touching the subject of childhood traumas. Not out of shame, but because it has become an all too common refrain of Instagram therapy. It seems to be a trend that we blame all of our problems on our parents.

Yet blind obedience, particularly to our parents, is also a way in which such traumas are buried. In Asian cultures (and no doubt others), it is how we end up never really facing the truth. We laud authority figures as great people, turning a blind eye to the bad things they did.

I had managed to get to my thirties before the weight of these experiences forced a breakdown. I think I had gotten so used to these things in my past that I forgot how abnormal such experiences were. I’ve spent many years trying to figure out why everything felt this hard whilst forgetting the fact that most people aren’t carrying this level of baggage.

I think that if I am to genuinely recover from burnout, it means facing these things. It’s no coincidence that I’ve dreamt so much about my childhood over the last few months.

And now, I find myself reliving my teenage years. Time spent predominantly alone. An August withdrawn from the world whilst playing video games to pass the time.

Is the similarity a coincidence, a cruel irony or some sort of necessary spiritual healing? Honestly, I don’t really know.

Navigating The World of DIY Diagnosis

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I’ve been suffering from constant low-grade nausea. At first, I thought this was a post-heat illness. The recent heatwave hit hard, and I felt an illness coming the day it cooled. But now the symptoms have gone on for numerous days, and I’m starting to doubt my original prognosis.

The result is that it makes my life a misery for several days. I missed several events because I knew my body was not up for it, and managing my eating has been a nightmare. My solution has been to push eating whatever feels easy enough to digest. In that sense, my eating has been replaced to that of a toddler. Fish fingers and oven fries have been the easy, go-to meal.

It’s difficult to have new health issues come up that defy conventional explanation. Going to the doctor seems futile because there is little obvious that can be solved, and within a few weeks it passes anyway. But by that time, some other issue seems to arise.

One other factor has been that I’ve had a new period of intense dreaming. In Ayurveda, dreaming is a sign of processing. This has been happening in waves for the last six months. So whilst I know this is a sign of healing, it also takes out a lot physically. I often wake feeling tired with physical aches.

I remember that I had a dream where I was in my final year of university. Everything was focussed on me preparing for the year to come. I remember cleaning the lounge with my housemates and I recall psychologically gearing myself up for a year of study. When I woke up, I was confused to find myself in Brussels ten years later.

But I think the actual reason for my nausea is something else entirely. My body has been reorienting itself quite dramatically over the last few months. My pelvic tilt has improved quite substantively, even though I have not actively been working on it.

A few months ago I remember noting an improvement, but this was followed by me having dizzy episodes. I even had one moment where I was just on my computer and suddenly needed to throw up. I ended up lying in bed for the next 24 hours because my head was spinning so severely. I think the correction of standing taller actually caused a vestibular episode. My perception was thrown off between my brain’s perception and my eye’s reading of objects from this new height.

Today I recall that I noticed that my hips were naturally starting to engage more. It felt like I was holding myself up better in the glutes, and it meant I could slowly put less pressure on my lower back. It does mean that I felt more space for my spine to elongate.

So my latest hypothesis is that this shift has led to another vestibular episode, though less severe than the one in April. What supports this hypothesis is that going out for a walk does seem to make me feel sicker rather than better.

I’m aware that what I’m describing sounds a little insane. Whilst in an article such as this, I can take the time to explain my reasoning, in a casual conversation I have no such luxury. It is such an uncommon experience that it’s easier to suggest I’m imagining things. Yet there are real studies that exist around vestibular issues, and it is only through pointers from AI that I know that they even exist.

Either way, it doesn’t change the practical solution. Eventually my body will adjust, and the issue will solve itself.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to manage each day as it comes.

The fruits of a slow, consistent baseline

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I’ve been humbled by how much my physical capacities have nosedived. I’ve had to reel back many of my daily activities. This was from an already diminished level compared to my days pre-burnout. I’ve gone from being able to juggle a full time job, evening activities, writing, travel and exercise to having to pick a single activity per day.

What made it particularly tough was that about a year ago I had already hit the worst of it. I had found some level of consistency, and it seemed like I was slowly improving from that point on. But around last November, the ‘real’ burnout seemed to hit.

My sleep worsened. Dreams intensified. Body fatigue massively increased. It turns out that I had only hit the point where I had the energy to do the emotional processing.

The cost to my body has been one of deconditioning, weight gain and random physical pain. I went from doing three sets of romanian deadlifts lifting 50kg (exercises to strengthen the back) twelve months ago to having debilitating back pain from a ten minute walk.

For one reason or another, a positive has been that I’ve spent little time wallowing in self pity. I stopped going to the gym since it became evident that my body was no longer able to handle it. A few months later, I stopped going to dance classes as I started to find even holding a basic posture quite painful.

Over the last few months, my new goal has been to do 5000 steps in a day. The number was somewhat arbitrary, but it was what was already set up on my phone app. If I wanted to get scientific, then around 8000 is probably the most effective amount. But 8000 steps felt too much, and doing that every day just didn’t seem unreasonable.

Truth be told, I thought it would be more temporary. By the end of June, I started to regularly surpass my goal. I even did a hike which meant a day with around 23000 steps. Although I did have some physical pain, I have managed to slowly overcome it overtime.

Yet this last week has demonstrated why having such a low baseline goal was best. I’ve had another wave of fatigue stemming from emotional processing during sleep. My physical capacities were far lower then they were even a few weeks ago. These waves seem to come a little arbritrarily, so it’s not something I can plan for.

Having such a low baseline means that even on the rough days, I can do the minimum. It’s meant that even when I’m extremely tired, I’ve pushed myself a little to get my steps in. Critically, it’s only a little push, as anything further would actually do damage to my body right now. It’s also meant that I can keep up with my goals, even with the ridiculously hot weather we’ve had this summer.

One of the hardest parts has been navigating this all with professionals. My gym trainer would try and push my through fatigue, even when I said that it wasn’t what I wanted. More recently, a physical therapist kept trying to convince me that pains I had from exercises were just typical delayed muscle soreness. It seems that physical regression of my kind is so outside the typical clinical expectation that the assumption is that I must be doing something wrong.

A self created goal is one that I can manage. There is no overly-eager professional trying to push me beyond my limits, nor tell me my own bodily understanding is wrong. It also allows me to structure my day more flexibly, based upon how much energy I have, or commitments that might wipe me out. It also tackles an issue I had with my previous gym routine, where I would essentially push very hard on one day then have days of significantly lower activity. The boom and bust cycle isn’t so good for my current situation.

Whilst I do hope that most people benefit more from healthcare professionals than I have, there is something valuable in building our own independent goals that we control. When we outsource our health and wellbeing to someone else, we bypass the signals of what our body genuinely needs. This is as much the case for nutrition as it is for exercise.

And if we’re making a goal, we may as well make it realistic. A small goal done everyday is better than one large aspiration that never arrives.

The lack of logic in recovery

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I’ve often wondered whether I will ever get better again, or whether constant fatigue is my new reality.

Logic says that it will. There’s nothing identifiably chronic about my health. Yet logic also dictates that this should have been over by now too. In fact, if everything was dictated by logic, I don’t really think I should be sick anyway.

For every positive marker, there is a countersign which confuses everything. For every better night sleep and blood test score, there is an accompanying new debilitating pain and wave of fatigue. It can be practically impossible to really understand what’s going on. Yet spending more time worrying about it will also make me sicker.

There is something that feels particularly cruel about my situation. I see many people with more chaotic, unhealthy lives that are totally vivacious. They can live without a care in the world, and often can be the ones that love to give advice on how to stay healthy.

I also see people who have taken great liberties with their health and then collapsed as I have done. These folk can often fall into bitterness, disguising their regret for ignoring the warning signs.

After a few years of questioning myself, I’ve come to the conclusion that I didn’t actually do much ‘wrong’. My years preceding burnout was me doing an incredible amount of inner work. My health and fitness were areas I put a particularly high focus. There were no big issues that I was ignoring, or big emotional problems I was hiding in the closet.

Yet despite this, my burnout has taken me down a trek of emotional turmoil, whilst my body feels in its most broken condition ever. Looking back, I’m not sure there’s anything I would have particularly changed. On a sober assessment, I think most things were out of my control.

I’m aware that there are ways to rationalise this. The latest recovery wave is going harder and deeper to the core. Although it may be counterintuitive, this is a sign that my body has the capability to deal with things that earlier on it simply could not. Returning health and vivacity to my skin and nails somewhat back this up. So does literature on the pattern of burnout recovery.

Yet there is also a part of me that wonders whether this is more a fool’s hope, rather than rationalised thinking. Am I wisely putting my faith into the universal law of nature, or am I simply a gambler, constantly convincing one’s self that the pay off is coming soon?

It is one of those moments where the truth doesn’t actually matter a whole lot. Giving up would be dooming myself to a negative option either way, so there is little choice in continuing, come what may.

I am not sure if this stoicism is particularly hopeful. But at least it keeps me going.

On living life without a plan

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I’ve lived my life always planning ahead.

My whole generation had the idea of planning drilled into us. We needed to always know what we were doing next. Anything to the contrary was a failure. To be standing still was to be sinking in quicksand.

I actually rather liked planning. I ended up building career experience around it. A few years ago, I ended up crafting a GANTT chart with somewhat made-up dates on how to get a legislative bill through the UK Parliament in record time. It was planning that gave everyone a sense of reassurance despite the whole project being a terrible mess.

Yet here I sit without a plan. It’s the antithesis of what I’ve been taught and know.

Planning for planning’s sake is a creature comfort in delusion. The truth is that there is little point in planning too much right now, as I have little grasp of where my life is heading. Any time I’ve tried to plan anything, I’ve ended up trying to rush my recovery, and life has hit me hard.

So now my focus is simply taking it day by day. Sometimes there are too many moving parts to be able to actually plan our lives. That’s probably true for more of us than we would like to admit. Coming to terms with the fragility of our lives is too frightening to deal with.

Planning is good when we have a clear goal in mind. There is certainly a place for it in many aspects of our lives. But attempting to plan everything in our lives becomes impossible when we live in such a complex world. With the world changing as much as it is, it’s becoming practically impossible to predict what might be happening in five years time, let alone in twenty.

At its worst, creating delusional plans can end up being harmful. It often gives people a false sense of security, or creates blind allegiance to a truth that never was. Many people fail to see the warning signs that something might be wrong because the idea that their neatly crafted plan going off-track is too scary to contemplate.

In my last job, the idea of planning sounded nice, yet nobody had the discipline to follow it. When a plan got knocked off course, it was far easier to blame external circumstances for the problems, rather than taking a genuine look as to whether things were set up correctly in the first place.

I think there is a level of radical honest in saying that we simply do not know. It’s a statement people are absolutely frightened of, particularly in overly-educated, intellectual circles. We’ve spent so long learning how to sound convincing that we are scared of being ‘found out’ as not having all the answers.

But the truth is that nobody can really have the answers right now when so much is unclear. It’s okay to not have a plan when there is so much we do not know.