Today, my car wouldn’t start.
The battery was dead.
At first, I wasn’t particularly worried. Car batteries die all the time. I grabbed my booster cables, gave the car a jump, and took it for a drive. The plan was simple: recharge the battery and everything would be back to normal.
Except it wasn’t.
A few hours later, I tried starting the car again and got the same result. Nothing. The battery was dead once more. That’s when it became obvious that the problem wasn’t a lack of charge. The battery itself had reached the end of its life.
No amount of driving was going to fix it. No amount of boosting was going to bring it back. It needed to be replaced.
As I stood there thinking about the battery, I couldn’t help but think about my own journey through burnout.
The truth is, I didn’t know my battery was dying either.
Like many people, I assumed I was just tired. I thought I was working hard, pushing through, and doing what responsible adults do. If I felt exhausted, I figured I needed a vacation. If I felt stressed, I assumed I needed a few days off. If I felt disconnected, I told myself things would get better once work settled down.
Looking back now, I realize I spent years trying to recharge a battery that was no longer holding a charge.
I kept searching for small fixes to a much bigger problem. A long weekend. A holiday. A change of scenery. Each one helped temporarily, but eventually I found myself right back where I started; drained, exhausted, and wondering why nothing seemed to last.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that burnout wasn’t simply about being tired. It was about living a life that no longer fit who I was becoming.
When I finally stepped away and spent two years traveling, I thought I was giving myself time to recover. I thought I was recharging.
What I didn’t realize was that something much deeper was happening.
I wasn’t repairing the old version of myself.
I was replacing it.
The person who returned from those travels wasn’t the same person who left. Somewhere along the way, I rediscovered curiosity, creativity, joy, and a willingness to follow paths that didn’t necessarily make sense to anyone else. I stopped measuring my worth solely through productivity and achievement. I started giving myself permission to explore, to play, and to ask different questions about what I wanted from life.
In many ways, I didn’t need a recharge.
I needed a new battery.
And perhaps that’s the lesson my car reminded me of today.
Sometimes when something stops working, our instinct is to keep boosting it. We try harder. We push more. We search for temporary solutions and hope they’ll become permanent ones.
But occasionally the answer isn’t to keep recharging what no longer serves us.
Sometimes the answer is to let go, begin again, and trust that a new source of energy is waiting to be discovered.
It may not feel comfortable in the moment.
But neither does being stranded with a dead battery.