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PH's avatar

I too went through severe burn out, only I chose not to leave the remote working writing job, carried on despite barely being able to lift my arms to type, and ended up triggering full blow M.E./Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that left me bed bound for years. Like you, recovery was hard won. Like you, I now celebrate my achievements. Probably more so, because previously they were just another stepping stone along the road to some impossible perceived point of, as you say, 'flawlessness' that I believed was the real moment I would celebrate. You worked your damn ass off to get your own book out into the world - and the work didn't end pre-burnout I'm sure! Your recovery was part of your book's journey, the effort and sacrifices for its success will have continued since. You deserve to celebrate with abandon! It was a hard won thing. You can celebrate and share in the excitement any way you wish; you have been open about your journey with burnout, its implied that your book being published was not a shiny, smooth road.

Most patients of burnout and M.E. are high achievers who push themselves in all areas of their life, I don't think we wear our burnout as a badge of honour for this, I think we discuss the correlation openly to try to show justification for why we now have to say 'no' more and 'do less'. We feel judged for it. Perhaps because we've always felt our personal worth was wrapped up in our relentless striving and achieving? The responsibility of glamourising productivity does not fall on you, a victim of it.

Thanks for this newsletter, always nice to hear of other's continued fathoming out of living with a susceptibility to these conditions. Solidarity.

I hope you chose the noodles and Netflix.

Portia X

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Yvonne Radley's avatar

I resonate with so much that you are speaking about here Abigail.

The trauma is definitely a thing. I thought I had post-natal depression years ago when I had my second child, but in hindsight I was reacting to the trauma of the pregnancy and birth. I know this now because three years ago I thought I was going to die in a plane crash when we couldn't land in a storm. I was ecstatic for the first few days after getting home in one piece and then my body reacted in exactly the same way as it did before. I had a meltdown which took me a year to recover from.

I also struggle to just 'be' rather than 'do'. Doing is easy, especially when you build a world around you that gives you all the things you desire. Over the years I've learnt to check in with myself a lot more so I don't get overwhelmed. I've created what I call my Life Pie - just like the corporate wheel of life but with added (FUN) bits, like Passion Project - Adventure, and Time Out. Every week I draw my Pie and rate how each piece is doing by giving it a score from 0 to 10. When I wrote my book -the Business section and the Passion Project section were scoring 9 out of 10 for two years running but Relationship was coming in at a big zero, but I was okay with that as I was aware of it, I had to let some things go to get the job done rather than try to eat the whole pie and make myself sick.

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