Burnout: My Sacred Interruption

A writing on recognition-

For a long time, I thought burnout meant I was weak.
That something had gone wrong.

I believed I had failed to manage my life better.

That I hadn’t been disciplined enough.

That I needed to be stronger. More resilient.

That if I could just push harder, the way I always had, I could save all that was falling apart. 

For at least a year after the onset of my burnout, I lived inside a relentless loop:

I should have pushed harder.
I should have pushed harder.

But the truth was, I already was.

When my body finally stopped cooperating, I felt betrayed by it.

And the self-hatred I had learned so well only deepened.

I didn’t yet understand that burnout was not the problem.

It was a sacred and merciful interruption.

I burned out not because I was weak, but because I was living inside systems that extracted from me and in relationships that slowly drained and consumed my life force.

What matters just as much, though, is this:

For a long time, I did not recognize those systems as exploitative.I did not know those relationships were costing me my life. 

To understand how I could not know, we have to visit my childhood.

As a little girl, my body, my time, and my emotional world were not protected.

I was used. My needs were non-existent. My worth was based on what I could provide, absorb, or endure from the grown ups in my life.

My mother relied on me in ways that exceeded what a child should carry. 

My father exploited my mother’s labor, sacrifice, and silence.

And to understand why my mother created a life she had to endure,I had to look one generation further back.

Her mother had done the same to her. Used her, abused her, abandoned her. 

This is how survival patterns move through a lineage.
 

It’s not always through overt cruelty as it was for me, but through normalization.

When harm is familiar, it may not register as danger.
It may register as known. Sometimes even as love.

For me, exploitation did not always look obvious as I grew up.

As a child, it included abuse.
Clear violations. 

Moments where harm was unmistakable.

But as I grew older, the shape of exploitation changed.

It became quieter.
More socially sanctioned.
Wrapped in virtue and expectation.

It began to look like loyalty.
Like giving everything, and then a little more.
Like offering my very best without rest, protection, and certainly no reciprocity.

It looked like being underpaid and overlooked.
Like speaking and not being heard.
Like carrying responsibility without authority.
Like having my insight dismissed while my labor was readily accepted.

It looked like being praised for sacrifice
while being quietly excluded from decision-making, and care.

Because I am a woman, in this system, much of this was framed as humility, faithfulness, or devotion.

And that made it harder to name for me.

Because it no longer looked like harm.

It looked like goodness.
Like obedience.
Like calling. Like mission.

And when this is learned early, the nervous system does not protest.

It simply adapts to survive.

So later, when I entered systems that demanded everything from me, relationships that consumed my energy,
environments that erased my needs
and preyed on my longing to belong, to be useful, to be chosen,

my nervous system did not immediately sound an alarm.

It recognized home.

Burnout didn’t happen because I failed to push harder.
It happened because I had learned to give myself away
in exchange for belonging and purpose.

For most of my life, endurance was the skill that kept me alive.

Since childhood, I had known a kind of “love” that required self-erasure.
Being needed was the only way to feel worthy.
Rest was something I earned only after collapse.

No one ever taught me the dignity of self-restoration.
No one showed me what love looked like
when it did not cost the body its breath.

So when my system finally collapsed,
I naturally believed I had failed.

But burnout was not my failure.

It was the first moment my body refused to keep participating
in an unspoken, generational contract
that required my disappearance.

Burnout brought me to a breaking point.

And in that breaking point, I realized something both devastating and clarifying:

No one was coming. 

The people in my community of that time came with judgement, not compassion. 

I suddenly realized my children would not have a mother
if I did not learn how to restore myself. 

That realization forced a reckoning.

I had to learn how to hear what my body had been carrying for decades. To listen to my nervous system.
How to recognize when something felt familiar but was not safe.
How to stop confusing attachment with love.
How to stop calling self-sacrifice devotion.

I had to learn how to move through the world differently.

Not harder.
Slower.
More honestly.

And sometimes, painfully, alone.

But in that loneliness, I began turning toward the little girl
who had survived without protection.

What burnout ultimately taught me was this:

Healing does not come from enduring more.

It comes from ending generational agreements
that require your self-erasure.

Burnout became the doorway into learning how to reparent
the child who had been forced to survive without safety.

And that was only the beginning.

If your body is exhausted, it’s not because you failed.

It might be because it is asking for a different way of living.

You are not broken. Burnout may not be the end.

It may be your own sacred threshold.

This essay names burnout as the interruption.
A following piece moves deeper into the bargain my body finally refused.