Lessons Learnt From Another Burnout
By: Zsófia Vera
Tags: Vulnerability, Mental Health, Self-awareness, Personal Development, Self Improvement

Lessons Learnt From Another Burnout

How to distinguish fear from full on existential frenzy

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I started 2020 overtaken by a fit of despair that I can only categorise as total emotional and mental burnout.

It was the first Saturday of the year and I was feeling joyful, light, easy, unaware of the turmoil building up inside of me.

Granted, I’d spent the prescribed end of year holidays working on launching a new product, eager to share my message with the world.

In the midst of it all, I had carefully omitted to pay attention to the inherent solitude of spending this supposedly joyful holiday season mainly by myself, seeking connection in the vastness of the world wide web.

I’d filled my schedule with work, webinars, study, CrossFit, BMX and volunteering. I had put on a cheerful facade to friends and family. I didn’t want anyone’s pity — I’d rather spend this time taking care of my vast internal universe.

Due to reasons I am completely okay with, my launch tanked and I accepted it with grace. I was getting ready to inspect, dissect and finesse whatever it was that needed tending to when, out of the blue, it happened again.

I snapped.

A seemingly innocent conversation with a friend triggered the opening of the floodgates of insecurity and despair that seem to come hand in hand with any creative endeavour on my end.

I couldn’t stop crying and, the deeper it went, the less I understood.

Ever so much in personal development mode, I stepped outside of myself to discern what was wrong and how I could resolve it quickly. I wrote a well rounded essay in Evernote on how to handle triggers and I thought I was done with it. I had effectively handled the situation and was ready to move on.

Thing is, the lessons you need to learn are never as clear as when you are knee deep in them.

You can’t just dip your toe, capture the lesson and be on your way.

And if you happen to stumble into the storm, you can be sure that frantically battling the waves won’t do —you must learn to float and let it all unravel. The only way is through.

So, in spite of my cognitive reasoning, I didn’t move on. I was still triggered. The floodgates were still open and I was very much starting to feel as if I was drowning in my own despair. Fun stuff to happen on a Saturday in a busy shopping mall.

The choice I had to make was to either let myself sink or to be carried to gentler waters. Renewal means baptism after all.

I got home and I switched my phone off for a week. I let myself weep it all out until I was ready to listen to the calmness beneath the coaching precepts.

Know thyself, love thyself, be thyself.

That’s the gradual order of things.

We tend to stop at the first one.

We assume that love and identity will be provided for us in the process of knowing ourself but, unless the process of earning these is done in full conscience, we will always be seeking for them outside of ourselves.

We are seldom taught to love ourselves and even less to be ourselves. And that’s a good thing — philosophers would be out of a job otherwise. It’s up to us to create ourselves as George Bernard Shaw said, and each individual will have their own self prescribed menu to digest.

In the torment of trigger induced paranoia, we tend to forget our own value — only to realise it was never really there in the first place. Hence the vertigo of despair: we tumble down like Jimmy Stewart to the hypnotic sounds of Bernard Herrmann into the depths of our own illusion of self.

I had relinquished any sense of self to the reactions of my environment and thus had developed expectations of how I should be loved, seen, received and held.

When the results (provided by an external source over which I have no control) were not up to my satisfaction, I lashed out and I ended up facing the hollow space in which love was yearning to be had.

Connection is a two way street. Love always starts within.

You must be willing to wholeheartedly traverse the darkest paths of who you are in order to get to the realisation that you are indeed worthy and unarguably: loved.

It won’t just happen by saying I Am Worthy — although it’s a good start.

Harnessing the love within only comes by choosing to enter that cavernous space so devoid of distraction and drama.

The stillness confounds most of us, which is why we don’t usually stay long. It feels pretty dull compared to the paraphernalia of instant gratification our current world offers us.

Dwelling in that space of stillness is at first a tremendously uncomfortable state. Monstrous, in fact. It’s a painful process of rebirthing yourself to yourself.

It’s hard to create this self on your own terms and with what you have. It’s a process of discernment and—most excruciatingly— acceptance. The latter will ask that you to unconditionally forgive all the selves you have been up until this point, and release them.

Usually, we see ourselves in a certain way and we also hypothesise how others may perceive us. In order to cope, we take the average of these two perceptions to create a sort of identity that will allow us to exist approximately.

When the string that holds these two make-believe pieces snaps, we are left with nothing but a sketched out unfinished canvas.

A state of heightened despair is simply our highest self using a last resort call to attention.

It is a complete shutting down of all elements redirecting us into being as a response to our spending our days evading our authentic self.

We’ve been so deeply disconnected from ourselves that we have learnt to acquiesce to the accusations of being less than by the people who are simply responding to our own panicked aggression. We prove them right.

In that instance, it is an absolute blessing that a part of us rebels against these accusations. This merciful rebellion is from our highest self, calling us inwards, begging to prove to us our divine and rightful essence instead.

Onto the tricky part : a synthesis

So how do we tell the difference between restrictive fear — that fear which is simply holding us back from fulfilment— and something which I may categorise as “self care fear” aka the feeling of needing to get back to oneself as soon as possible, and reconnect with the love within?

Objectively, it’s simple.

Your ego based fear will manifest when you’re trying to move towards your authentic self. Your self care fear will occur when you’re attempting to sway from that same authentic self.

The ego based fear is afraid of you living your life to your fullest capacity because that usually endangers the safety of connection, shelter and community – even though that disruption is usually momentary.

The self care fear waits, it has oodles of faith in your choices and abilities but it will make itself heard loud and clear when you continuously abuse your inherent beauty, grace, and absolute validity of being here on this earth.

Be mindful that most people never really hear the second type of fear, but they live in religious obedience to the first.

So, until you express an interest in truly becoming yourself, you can never really tell the difference. It is therefore vital to nurture that connection, and burning out is simply a reminder of that.