Photo by Alain Pham on Unsplash
I’ll be starting a new role in September. It draws a line under a rather chaotic period in my life.
What started off getting signed off for a week of sick leave in February 2024 turned into an 18 month descent into executive dysfunction and existential crises. It wasn’t all bad, but it was pretty rough.
The more obvious downside of burnout is the descent of being able to do basic tasks. There were periods where I would struggle to get out of bed until the afternoon. I remember one time where a single trip to the supermarket for food wiped me out for the rest of the day.
Over time, these got better. Although I still had lower energy, I had enough to actually do things again.
Honestly, the toughest part was having nothing to do. The emptiness during the day has felt harrowing. People I know are working. Most social activities happen during the evening. So what do I do for the next 8 hours, sitting here, all alone?
It’s a real eye-opener to see how disjointed our way of living has become. Either you must be working, or you have nothing to do. There seems to be little space in between.
The easy answer is simply to say that we should simply just get more people into work.
But time out of the system makes you realise how overly simplistic an answer that really is. Outside of the mad rush, you actually get space to think, and to feel. Time for yourself isn’t some crazy luxury.
It also ignores how many people are marginalised in society. Some have health conditions that prevent them from working. Others have the audacity to care for others, whether the elderly or a new born child. The capitalist system seems to have ignored that these people also exist.
For me, I had pretty much lost hope in getting back into a meaningful job. I now rue the fact that I picked working around politics. I wish someone had told me when I was younger that the rhetoric about equality and that ‘you can be anything you want to be’ was a lie.
The jobs I’ve had thus far have been mired with messy (sometimes illegal) working practices. I’ve also faced my fair share of good old fashioned implicit racism. If only someone had told me that you’re allowed to be a minority, so long as you’re too junior for anyone to notice. I made the mistake of having career ambitions. I then compounded the error by holding on to my beliefs and values.
Sometimes, I wish I worked in something like IT. There, people are used to seeing faces like mine and having to take their advice. Perhaps there I might be able to just go about my job, and have a normal career in peace.
In contrast, I’ve lost a lot of faith in actually making change. Navigating something like the Brussels EU bubble oft means toning down your voice, following the old white guy in the suit’s (oft erroneous) opinion. Throw out all that training that you did to get the role in the first place. Oh, and all that work you did to become a better, more rounded, accountable and responsible person? Best throw that out of the window too – taking ownership often puts a target on your back.
Some people may feel that us minorities make too much about race. But what they don’t understand is that it is our upbringing that shapes us as people. Why is it that I worked in a place that can outcry Russian’s aggression in Ukraine, but at the same time only describes the Palestinian genocide taking place as ‘the situation in the Middle East’? Why am I the only one who seems to notice or care?
Such things only become clearer with the benefit of perspective. I think it’s why we need some level of hardship in our lives (even if I probably got more than my fair share of it). It helps us grow, and reconsider the way we do things.
I plan on using the experience of the last 18 months to grow, rather than to shrink.
I’ve seen more about the world than I ever would have if I simply stayed on the ‘straight and narrow’. And that can only make me a better person.