For a long time, I avoided the word burnout.
Not intentionally I just didn’t know it belonged to me.
I had other words.
Better words.
Kinder words.
Fatigue.
Mental fatigue.
Overextended.
An unsustainable pace.
Functioning, not living.
Those felt accurate. Respectable, even.
They explained why I could still perform, still deliver, still show up —but felt strangely absent while doing it.
Then one day, I was talking to a friend.
He described a numbness I recognized instantly. Not sadness. Not depression. Just… flat. Disconnected. Like life was happening one pane of glass away. I wanted to help him, so I did what I always do —I researched.
Articles. Checklists. Personal stories.
And halfway through, something uncomfortable happened.
I stopped reading about him
and started reading about me.
The symptoms lined up too cleanly to ignore. The exhaustion that sleep didn’t fix. The irritability without a clear cause. The loss of joy in things that once mattered. The constant sense of responsibility paired with a growing emptiness underneath it.
And there it was.
A word.
Burnout.
Not as an accusation.
Not as a failure.
But as a shared human experience.
That was the eureka moment —not the diagnosis, but the relief.
If it had a name, it meant I wasn’t alone.
If others were going through it, it meant there were paths forward.
If it was studied, discussed, written about —then maybe it wasn’t something to power through in silence.
I didn’t suddenly feel better that day.
But for the first time, I felt seen —by strangers, by research, by language itself.
And that changed everything.
“Sometimes you don’t know what you’re feeling until you feel something different.”
—Lost in Translation (2003)